In the spring of 1815, MountTambora in modern-day Indonesia detonated like an angry bomb.

Insane amounts of gases were spewed into the atmosphere, a sulfur veil that enveloped the planet lowering the temperature of the northern hemisphere by around 4 degrees.

This was such a sharp drop that 1816 would become the year without summer.

That year rivers froze in August, floods swept Europe.

There was record rainfall in Geneva that meant Shelley, Percy, Byron and Clement spent their spare time not boating and hiking and thinking sublime thoughts but stuck inside staring out at the rain try not to go mad.

From the moment, the trio had hooked up with Byron and his personal physician John Polidori.

They'd gotten along like an Indonesian volcano on fire moving into neighboring homes,

but as the weather turned and they began spending more time cooped up in Byron's Villa Diodati.

That friendship had curdled into unbearable tension

Polidori was trying to get into Mary Shelley's pants, while Claremon was trying to get into Byron's, while Byron was doing his utmost to stop that from happening.

As the tension grew, it became clear that the group was on the verge of everybody either shooting one another or starting a gigantic and insanely regrettable orgy.

So Lord Byron decided to occupy them with a bit of a challenge.

Everyone at his villa would have to write a ghost story.

For some, this was easy.

John Polidori got right to work on the tale of a seductive aristocratic vampire that was essentially an extended satire on Byron himself, but Mary Shelley had hit a brick wall.

For days, she was forced to confess each morning that her muse had evidently carried on to Italy without her.

With each day, her frustration and embarrassment grew.

Then one evening, it happened Shelley was lying awake in bed listening to the Tambora caused storms howling over the lake.

Her mind was filled with thoughts of a discussion.

Byron and Percy had been drawn into a few nights earlier on the then red-hot science of galvanism.

This was the theory that human corpses could be reanimated with electricity.

This is where we first met Mary Shelley in our introduction today.

Waiting on the gods of writing to send her a spark.

Instead they sent her an inferno.

The vision Shelley saw of an engine bringing a dead man to life set her mind racing.

Come mourning, she had the germ of something, a story about a hubristic scientist who creates new life only to abandon it, driving it to murder.

A story that would go down in history as Frankenstein.

One of the English language's earliest works of science fiction Frankenstein is at once both a deceptively simple fable and a deeply laid work.

Within its gothic pages, people have seen an allegory of the French revolution.

And the forces it unleashed a meditation on the advances of the industrial age, even a veiled commentary on slavery.

The fight for abolition in Britain's colonies being one of Shelly's passions.

Perhaps more importantly, though it's simply a cracking read,

over 200 years later, Shelley's story still holds up as well as the day.

It was written on publication in 1818. It was a sensation.

One friend wrote Percy that the novel seemed to be universally known and read,

while critics were divided between those who thought it powerful and those who thought it unseemly, readers just couldn't get enough of it.

The only annoying thing must have been the assumptions that some of them made.

Since Shelley had published the book anonymously and since Percy had written the forward, and since this was the good old sexist past,

everyone was like let's just assume that Percy Shelley wrote this.

I mean there's no way anyone with a vagina could have created Frankenstein, am I right?

It wasn't until the second edition in 1823 that Mary Shelley would finally get the public credit she deserved.

By then though her young life would have been consumed by loss.

It was the 29th of august 1816 when Shelley Percy and Claire returned to England.

Mary carrying the idea for Frankenstein, Claire carrying Byron's baby but rather than a triumphant homecoming.

It was the beginning of a series of misfortunes that would soon come to plague.

Shelley the first took place that autumn.

On October the 9th, Shelley lost her half-sister Fanny to suicide.

Exactly one month later, Percy's wife Harriet Threw herself into the Thames while pregnant with his child.

Her body was only found on December 10th.

But while Percy may have felt some dark sense of guilt.

He also didn't look a gift horse in the mouth.

Marry and Percy Shelley were officially wed just 20 days after Harriet's waterlogged remains were pulled from the river.

A real too soon moment if there ever was one.

Still the marriage started well enough now her relationship with Percy was official William Godwin reconnected with his daughter.

Just five months later, Shelley finished Frankenstein.

That same year 1817, her daughter Clara was born giving the Shelley's hope that their first lost baby had been an unhappy one-off,

but no this is the life of Mary Shelley, remember?

One we've already warned you is filled with endless agonizing sadness, even as the publication of Frankenstein approached.

She was going to have to deal with more misery.

In spring of 1818, the couple returned with claire to Europe hoping to reconnect with Byron in Italy and introduce him to his new child.

At first, things were great, the group found it liberating to be out of stuffy old England back in Europe where they felt they could be free.

But the trip quickly soured in venice that September baby Clara caught dysentery and died having just turned one year old.

The Shelley's grief was vast unnameable.

It was also only the beginning.

The following year in Rome, their son William was carried away by malaria aged just three.

The deaths of her two surviving children in such quick succession broke Mary Shelley.

She withdrew into herself her relationship with Percy crumbling.

In her diary, she wrote the despairing phrase, "this is the journal book of misfortunes" .

Honestly, that was an understatement.

Mary Shelley may have only been 22 and already the mother of three dead kids.

But her future was filled with yet more tragedy.

Still there was the odd ray of light when William died, Shelley was already pregnant again.

In November 1819, she gave birth to Percy Florence Shelly.

His middle name taken from the Italian city where he was staying,

and just to stop you from worrying fear not unlike his siblings Percy Florence actually survives into adulthood.

In fact, the boy's birth heralded a brief period of calm.

As Frankenstein became a sensation back home, Mary and Percy settled with their son in Pisa.

There they made international friends and briefly lived the lives that they'd always dreamed of ordinary lives, not haunted by the specter of death watching their child grow.

In the life of Mary Shelley ,this time was an oasis.

A little pool of happiness amid a dark desert of grief.

So let's just give her a moment to enjoy it.

Shall we before we get back to all of the horrid stuff?

A short break between chapters where for the briefest of seconds.

We can let our heroine be happy, because when we come back things are only going to get worse.