Mary Shelley (né. Wollstonecraft), Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, Claire Claremont, John Polidori, and the freewheelin’ summer of 1816, or, the “Year Without a Summer”

In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia violently erupted, leading to global crop failures, low temps, and famine. The catastrophic environmental impacts however, also led to the birth of such Romantic and Gothic masterworks as The Vampyre by Lord Byron and John Polidori, Mont Blanc and Hymn to Intellectual Beauty by Percy Shelley, and most famously, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus by Mary Shelley (né. Wollstoncraft). During this haunted summer in Geneva, Mary was 18 with a young infant by P...