Summary

The first chapter of Frankissstein: A Love Story opens a vacation house on Lake Geneva in 1816, where Mary Shelley, and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, have retreated to work. Shelley’s stepsister, Claire Clarimont, is staying with Lord Byron, the poet, and his physician in a larger house up the hill. Young Mary Shelley narrates this section as she is trying to come up with an idea for a story. Winterson depicts the weather, and Shelley’s house, as soggy with rain. Mary Shelley gets up early in the morning and takes a walk naked. She muses about what human beings must have been like before language: “I reflected that without language, or before language, the mind cannot comfort itself. And yet it is the language of our thoughts that tortures us more than any excess or deprivation of nature” (2). Shelley wishes she...