This Day in History: 1797-08-30

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley,  author of the famous gothic novel Frankenstein,  is born on this day in 1797.  She was married to renowned romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and wrote Frankenstein while on vacation in Italy in 1816. Challenged by her husband’s friend Lord Byron to write a tale of the supernatural, Mary Shelly had a dream in which: “I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”