Mary Shelley evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted, "galvanism had given token of such things". It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the "grim terrors" of her "waking dream", her ghost story: She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus", published in 1818. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I
Prometheus Unbound (Shelley) Este, requesting "The sheets of 'Prometheus Unbound,' which you will find numbered from one to twenty-six on the table of the pavilion." There is little other evidence as to when Shelley began "Prometheus Unbound" while he was living in Italy, but Shelley first mentions his progress in a letter to Thomas Love Peacock on 8 October 1818: "I have been writing – and indeed have just finished the first act of a lyrical and classical drama, to be called 'Prometheus Unbound'." Shelley stopped working on the poem following the death of his daughter Clara Everina Shelley on 24 September 1818.