Who wrote Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley, who began it at eighteen during the wet summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, when Byron proposed that the party each write a ghost story. The weather that kept them indoors was the aftermath of the Tambora eruption in Indonesia the previous year - the year without a summer - so the novel is a direct product of a volcano on the other side of the world.

It was published anonymously in 1818 with a preface by her husband, and many early readers assumed he had written it. Reviewers who suspected a woman were harsher. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and died days after giving birth to her, and of William Godwin, and had eloped at sixteen with a married man.

It is usually called the first science fiction novel, and the case rests on something specific: the creature is made by a named contemporary method rather than by magic. Galvani's experiments making dead frogs' legs twitch with electricity were current and widely discussed, and Shelley's monster is animated by a technique the reader could believe was nearly possible. The other thing everyone gets wrong is the name - Frankenstein is the man who makes it, and the creature is never given one, which is arguably the point of the book.