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Frankenstein inspired by suicide of Mary Shelley's half-sister, book reveals
New collection of author’s diary entries provides tragic insight
The inspiration came as volcanic ash clouds unexpectedly blocked out the sun that summer of 1816 and she and her friends, including the infamous, “bad boy” poets Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, competed to tell scary stories. Shelley’s journals, letters and short stories from this period, published together for the first time, reveal that the dark shadow that hangs over the plot of Frankenstein is the mysterious suicide of her elder half-sister, Fanny Imlay. “When you decode her diary, which was clearly written for public consumption because of her own literary ambition and her mother’s fame, she says specifically that she and Percy took a walk to South Parade for a drawing lesson, the kind of thing she never usually mentions.”
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