200 years ago, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted sending weather around the world into a global clusterfuck.

The eruption was so extreme that it rocketed debris up into the stratosphere, creating an aerosol shield the size of Australia that blotted out the sun and choked the global climate down nearly 7 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The Year Without Summer” was a catastrophe by every stretch of the word:

Meanwhile, during this dark and depressing year, Mary Shelley, her husband Percy, their son Willmouse and some friends holed up in a villa outside of Geneva, Switzerland.

The small party stayed inside, weathering the year without summer by discussing philosophy, literature and the sort.

One of the individuals staying in the villa, an English poet named Lord Byron, challenged Shelley and company to recite their scariest ghost story.

In one of the evenings that followed, Shelley suffered a nightmare about a mad scientists who created a monster out of severed body parts and electricity.

In an author’s introduction to what would later become her first novel, Shelley wrote…

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I busied myself to think of a story…One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name.”When she shared her story, the other guests at the villa were horrified, which encouraged her to write and publish her very first novel, Frankenstein, at the age of twenty-one.

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In Hilde Østby’s wonderful book on creativity, she theorizes that Frankenstein was Shelley’s means of mourning the death of daughter who she had lost the previous year.

While Shelley would go on to become one of the most important writers of the 1800s, her life was haunted by tragedy.

Of the four children she would have with her beloved Percy, only one would survive. And, Percy himself would later die tragically at just thirty-years-old from drowning.

It’s rumored that after his death, Shelley kept Percy’s calcified heart on her writing desk (which is wildly romantic in an eery sort of way).

Shelley, today, is considered the godmother of science fiction and her legacy exists as a testament that while we can’t control the tragedies that befall us, we can control the art that rises from their ashes.

By Cole Schafer.

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