A carefree 19 years old Mary Godwin and a brooding 28 years old Lord Byron in a candlelit study, filled with stacks of gothic books, in 1816 summer

Lord Byron and Mary Godwin, future wife of Byron's friend, the poet Shelley, working on their writings: Byron -- a vampire horror story, Mary -- Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.

Vincent writes below that it was a secret meeting, but he is wrong. They vacationed together in a rented villa on the shores of Lake Geneva, Switzerland: Byron, Mary Godwin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron's friend and fellow poet, and Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, (with whom Byron had already had an affair in London, which resulted in the birth of their illegitimate child Allegra), and Doctor Polidori, Byron's physician. Polidori also began writing his vampire novel that summer. The world owes the birth of the Gothic genre to a rainy summer in Switzerland in 1816.