📍Abbey Churchyard, Bath BA1 1LY, UK
1816 – 1817“My mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, died days after I was born, and I grew up in my father William Godwin's house in Somers Town, London, surrounded by books and visiting writers, and often reading beside her grave in St Pancras churchyard. At sixteen I ran away with Percy Shelley. In the summer of 1816, by Lake Geneva, Lord Byron challenged us all to write a ghost story, and the idea of Frankenstein came to me in a waking dream. That September, at nineteen, I took lodgings at 5 Abbey Churchyard in Bath, beside the Abbey and the Pump Room, partly to keep my stepsister Claire's pregnancy quiet. In those rooms I worked on my novel nearly every day, walking the city between chapters, and nearby I went to scientific lectures where it was suggested that electricity might one day bring lifeless matter to life. Grief arrived by letter that winter, more than once, and Percy and I married before we left. By the time I left Bath in early 1817, much of Frankenstein was written.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today