In the summer of 1816 a group of poets, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, found themselves isolated due to bad weather in the Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva. Lord Byron proposed that everyone compose a story as terrifying as possible. The rain did not last very long so that only the nineteen year old poet Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who would later marry Percy Shelley, taking his last name, did not want to abandon the story she had started. Struck by the scientific hypothesis that electricity could restore life to corpses, the young woman came to conceive the agonizing story of a creator of monsters, destined to see his life and loved ones destroyed because of his creature. A powerful and terrible fable, which, published in 1818, soon spread all over the world, reaching universal fame.