In July 1814, 16-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin departed her home in England and travelled to France with the already married poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two years later, during the summer of 1816, they took up residence in Geneva, Switzerland, where, housebound by abnormally low temperatures that earned 1816 the epithet, “the year without a summer,” their companion George Gordon (Lord) Byron, suggested that the group engage in writing ghost stories.
