There is no more dramatic scene in literary history than the stormy night by Lake Geneva when Byron, Claire Clairmont, Polidori and the Shelleys met to talk of horror and the unexplained. From that night emerged in Frankenstein a monster who has haunted imaginations for nearly two hundred years. His creator was an eighteen-year-old girl who, in love with the married Shelley, had followed her principles and run away with him. The Mary Shelley we meet here, brilliantly brought to life from previously unexplored sources, is a woman who belongs as much to our own times as to the Romantic Age in which her life began. Her world, so rich in its cast of characters, seems at times drawn from a novel, and at its centre is a writer whose dark and brilliant imagination gave us a myth which seems ever more potent in our own era. 'the most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade' - "Financial Times".