A Ghost Story by the Lake
The idea: a book begun as a ghost-story dare by an eighteen-year-old, about what we owe the things we make.
Read it
Who is in this book
- Tara a child of the Green Listens longest, speaks last
Every recurring character has a short tune, so you can tell who is on stage before a word is said. The tunes play only when you tap, and the Reading Access sound switch turns them off.
The Honest Page
Which parts of this story are on record, which are legend — and what does nobody know?
Record
- Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, later Mary Shelley, was born on 30 August 1797. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died eleven days later. Source
- In June 1816 Lord Byron proposed that each of his guests near Lake Geneva write a ghost story. Mary began the story that became Frankenstein. She was eighteen. Source
- 1816 was the 'year without a summer' in Europe and North America, after the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. Source
- Frankenstein was first published anonymously on 1 January 1818, in an edition of five hundred copies. Her name appeared on the second edition in 1823. Source
- The words 'I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together' are from her introduction to the 1831 edition. Source
Legend
- That Mary learned to read and spell by tracing the letters on her mother's gravestone. It is told in many biographies; it comes from family memory, not a document from the time. Source
Nobody knows
- Whether the waking dream happened exactly as she told it. She wrote it down fifteen years later, and the journals from that summer do not record it. Source
Tara’s sentence
The case stops where Tara speaks. Write the sentence you would have said. It stays on this device.
Kept.
Your sentence lives on this device. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Ring the hammer for someone
Pick this book for someone younger. The link carries only the book, and it will wait for them on the Green.