Mary Shelley says she imagined this story, as she lay in bed one night.
The origin of Frankenstein is almost as mysterious and exciting as the novel itself. It all began back in the summer of 1816 at the famed Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary Shelley spent most of that summer together with her future husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, her stepsister Claire Clairmont, Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori, Byron's physician. Inspired by a reading of the Fantasmagoriana, a collection of German ghost stories, on June 16 they decided to try their hands on supernatural stories themselves.
The first one to come up with a story was Polidori, who began his now famous tale The Vampyre. Its main protagonist Lord Ruthven was supposedly modeled on Lord Byron. However, Mary Shelley was not that quick in creating her first piece of literature. Initially, she suffered from some kind of writer's block and produced nothing so far until one day she had (or claimed to have) a sort of vision that finally inspired her to write Frankenstein. She described this vision in the preface of the novel:
If you want more detail, Google `The Origin of Frankenstein`.
