Telling Ghost Stories with Emily Franklin

As the story goes, four people were trapped at Lake Geneva during the summer of 1816: Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Byron’s personal physician. When writing about that season, Mary Shelley described it as “wet and ungenial,” referencing one dark night in particular, when Byron proposed that they each “write a ghost story.” That was the night that inspired the idea that would become Frankenstein. From there, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley would all move securely into the literary canon.

But in reality, there was one more person there, on the shores of Lake Geneva, and Mary Shelley wrote her out of the story. She was Mary’s stepsister, Lord Byron’s lover, and she was the person who helped bring the group together in the first place! She was seventeen years old, and her name was Claire Clairmont. Despite her erasure, traces of Claire’s perspective still survive through her journals. However, one journal was never found: the one from the summer of 1816.

“This is a novel that is really the untold origin story of Frankenstein.”     

—Emily Franklin

In Love & Other Monsters, Emily Franklin imagines the missing journal and uses it to recount one of literature’s most mythologized summers from Claire’s point of view. After reading the novel, Claire isn’t lingering at the edge of Mary’s story. She stands at its center, and now takes her place there in our literary memory.

See the Full Interview on Substack