Why Geneva?

Historians with the benefit of hindsight call 1816 the Year Without Summer, a little ice age precipitated by the eruption of a volcano in Indonesia the year before. Crops failed, rivers froze, populations died, sunsets went wild (see JMW Turner's paintings), and the storms over Lake Geneva broke with particular violence, inspiring Mary Shelley to dream her dark dreams. Imagine her, sitting in a chilly villa with depressed hypochondriac poets, watching lighting carve up the sky, caught by a preternatural impulse to investigate man's connection to the primal forces of the earth, and she's right. She anticipates, presciently, the longings of her readership and the forward momentum of science in society. Full of awe and dread, there's Mary, soothsayer, knowing nothing of plate tectonics, channeling the frisson of Mount Tambora into her “story” as she called it in her journal. “Write my story,” she wrote to herself, in the shadow of the greatest poets of her day. Then she wrote Frankenstein. She was 19.