On this day: Literary History
June 16, 1816, was a rather important day in literary history. At the Villa Diodati in Switzerland, Lord Byron and his guests were forced to stay inside by “incessant rain”, so he read his story Fantasmagoriana, and then issued a challenge to the others to write similarly fantastical stories. Mary Shelley started work on what would become Frankenstein, and John Polidori The Vampyre.