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A.J Day
Although the gathering which ultimately resulted in Mary Shelley’s writing of Frankenstein took place on the shores of Lake Geneva, miles from British soil, it must still qualify as one of the maddest British tea parties of all time.
Stephen King
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Fantasmagoriana (Tales of The Dead)
It was on a ‘dark and stormy night’, during the summer of 1816 that an eccentic group of English literati gathered at the Villa Diodati. The atmosphere at the Villa was charged by the violent streaks of lightening that licked at the mountain tops and split a black sky.
As the wind outside whipped up the surface of lake Leman into a cauldron of waves the occupants of the Villa; Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, Dr John Polidori, Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont, whipped themselves into a gothic frenzy with recitals of haunting poetry and ghost stories.
The stories that they read came from a book, originally written in German, that had recently been translated into French. The book that they read from was called Fantasmagoriana. Fantasmagoriana has a unique place in literary history. This is the first full translation of the stories that inspired Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Dr John Polidori's The Vampyre.
Print: $19.95
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