Description:
A Dark and Stormy Night gathers the four principal works born from one of the most consequential literary gatherings of the nineteenth century. In the storm-haunted summer of 1816, Lord Byron, Mary Godwin-soon to become Mary Shelley-Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John William Polidori found themselves at Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, passing the time with ghost stories while bad weather kept them indoors. Byron proposed that each member of the party attempt a supernatural tale of their own. From that challenge came a remarkable chain of literary consequences: the beginnings of modern science fiction, the modern vampire story, and some of the most enduring Gothic fiction in English.
Collected here for the first time in a single volume are the four principal works produced from that contest: Percy Bysshe Shelley's "Fragment of a Ghost Story," John William Polidori's "The Vampyre," Lord Byron's "Fragment of a Novel," and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Read together, these works restore the Villa Diodati episode as a single extraordinary literary moment rather than a loose cluster of famous anecdotes and separate texts. The result is not merely a Gothic collection, but a documentary record of the night when Romantic imagination helped give lasting form to the creature, the vampire, and the modern literature of terror and speculative possibility.
With a foreword by Julian T. Reid and Berl A. Boykin, this Rediscovered Books edition presents A Dark and Stormy Night as an essential volume for readers of Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John William Polidori, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gothic literature, Romantic-era fiction, classic horror, vampire literature, and the origins of science fiction.
Brief description: Mary Shelley was an English novelist, editor, and literary figure whose Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus became one of the foundational works of Gothic fiction and modern science fiction. Born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1797, she was the daughter of the political philosopher William Godwin and the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Her intellectual inheritance, her life among the Romantic poets, and her own formidable imagination helped produce a novel that has remained central to discussions of creation, ambition, science, responsibility, isolation, and the moral consequences of human invention.Shelley's career extended beyond Frankenstein to include novels, short fiction, travel writing, biography, and editorial work, including her important role in preserving and presenting the writings of Percy Bysshe Shelley after his death. Yet Frankenstein, conceived in the aftermath of the Villa Diodati ghost-story challenge of 1816 and first published in 1818, remains her defining achievement. It continues to speak to readers of Gothic literature, science fiction, Romantic-era writing, women's literary history, horror fiction, and the ethical imagination of the modern world.