The Madeleine Cemetery was one of four cemeteries in Paris used to get rid of carcasses during the French Revolution. It was notable for housing the bulk of the dead from the September Massacres of 1792 and the decapitated corpse of Charlotte Corday, the Girondin assassin of Jean-Paul Marat. Guillotine victims of the era were housed in the trenches of the Madeleine Cemetery and Corday was no exception. Other notable figures who were guillotined and buried in the cemetery were Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Monarchs of France, who were found of high treason by the National Convention and sentenced to death.

In the summer of 1816, George Byron (or Lord Byron) rented the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Mary Shelley (Mary Godwin at the time) and Percy Bysshe Shelley also travelled to Geneva at the time. Shortly after both groups arrived, they met each other for the first time. Thanks to a summer full of poor weather, the three spent a lot of time together in Villa Diodati. With a particularly bad storm keeping them inside for a number of days, the group found themselves looking for things to discuss. Byron's physician, John Polidori, provided information on anatomy as Shelley and Byron speculated about the possibility of animation. Mary, who described herself as "a devout but nearly silent listener" during these conversations, no doubt took information from this to craft Frankenstein's monster. The chance for this group of writers to take the desolate attitude of the weather outside and create something out of it came when Byron suggested a contest on who could write...