Geneva plays a significant role in Mary Shelley's life and travels as does it with her characters. Again, in The Swiss Peasant it takes precedence in the story, making several mentions to the lake and the city. Geneva was the birthplace of Shelley's Frankenstein.
"As the days plodded on, conflicts between the vacationers began to simmer. Byron was annoyed by Claire’s attempts to enchant him. Mary had to fight off sexual advances from Polidori, who had become obsessed with her. Percy was depressed. By the time three days of rain trapped them inside the villa, tensions had reached a boiling point.
They coped by reading horror stories and morbid poems. One night, as they sat the candlelit darkness, Byron gave them all a challenge: write a ghost story that was better than the ones they had just read. Inspired by a tale of Byron’s, Polidori immediately complied. His novella “The Vampyre,” published in 1819, is the first work of fiction to include a blood-sucking hero—which many think was modeled on Byron himself.
Mary wanted to write a story, too, but she couldn’t land on a subject. “I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative,” she later wrote. But one sleepless night, as thunder and lightning echoed off the lake, she had a vision. “I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out,” she wrote, “and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life.”
