Mary Shelley’s Preface recounts her early love of writing, her family background, and the 1816 summer in Switzerland with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley. She describes the challenge to write a ghost story, the conversations about galvanism and reanimation, and the vivid dream of a pale student animating a corpse that sparked the idea for Frankenstein. Shelley credits Percy Shelley for urging her to expand the sketch into a full novel and notes that only minor stylistic revisions were made for publication.