Without a Summer

The Contexts Collection puts moments from literary history into amber. Without a Summer is a time capsule of a moment in 1816, when Mary Shelley wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein or: The Modern Prometheus. Western Europe was in a volcanic winter caused by successive eruptions in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) that had lowered the global temperature 1 degree Fahrenheit--enough to cause the Year Without a Summer. Crops died, food riots rivaled the French Revolution, and an ice dam formed in Switzerland that created a lake that never before existed. It is this atmosphere that Lord Byron, his friend Percy Shelley, and his mistress, Mary Godwin, would abscond to the lake house in Geneva where Frankenstein was born. Occupying themselves in the dark, damp, and cold, they competed to tell the best ghost story. Byron began a vampire novel called The Burial, but only completed a fragment. When his friend, John Polidori, fleshed it out--using Byron as a model for the vampire--he would invent the modern idea of the monster as a metaphor for a rakish ladykiller, setting the stage for Bram Stoker's Dracula. But it was eighteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, daughter of two writers, would outdo them all. Upon returning, a series of tragic suicides would set the stage for Mary to become Mary Shelley as we know her today.

Here, collected for the first time in one volume, are the stories and poems from that fateful trip, from that grim year. They include:

• Mary Shelley's Frankenstein or: The Modern Prometheus
• Dr. John Polidori's The Vampyre
• Percy Shelley's Hymn to Intellectual Curiosity & Mont Blanc
• Lord Byron's Darkness and the fragment of The Burial
• The letters published detailing the trip to Geneva