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title, a rakehell and a revolutionary, Byron was the living embodiment of the contradictions of the time. He and Shelley hit it off well together, each influencing the other.
    It was a rainy May and they were forced to spend time indoors. For amusement, they turned to reading supernatural horror stories, stories that from Mary Shelley’s description sound closely related to The Castle of Otranto:

    Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. . . . I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday. 16

    It was Lord Byron who proposed to the party that each of them should write a ghost story. Byron and Shelley both set to the job confidently, though neither of them did more than turn out fragments. Byron’s physician, Dr. John Polidori, also set out to write a story, and in fact did complete one. It was entitled The Vampyre and was published in 1819 with a preface and afterword by Byron.
    Mary included herself in the competition. Shelley had been pressuring Mary to follow the example of her parents and write, and she had spent her childhood in composing fanciful stories for her own amusement. She volunteered that she, too, would write a story. At first, however, she could not think of one. As she remembered in 1831:

    I busied myself to think of a story —a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. . . . Have you thought of a story ? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative. 17

    What was the problem? If the problem was merely to think of a story and no more, then Mary Shelley might have whipped together some trifle about ghosts and kisses of death, and then either finished it like Dr. Polidori or set it aside like the others. The problem was to write a story that could be believed in. That was what baffled Byron and Shelley and what stymied Mary. How could these people, with their histories and their beliefs, write of inconstant lovers wrapped in the arms of the ghosts of the women they had deserted? That might be well enough for Polidori—“poor Polidori” 18 as Mary calls him, shaking her head over his story—but it would not do for a young modern.
    Mary only found the key to her story at last as a result of listening to a conversation between Byron and Shelley:

    Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin, (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him,) who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be reanimated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth. 19

    What a