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 Bound the abyss. The treatment of the myth of Prometheus in "Prometheus Bound" is a radical departure from the earlier accounts found in Hesiod's "Theogony" (511–616) and "Works and Days" (42–105). Hesiod essentially portrays the Titan as a lowly trickster and semi-comic foil to Zeus's authority. Zeus's anger toward Prometheus is in turn responsible for mortal man's having to provide for himself; before, all of man's needs had been provided by the gods. Prometheus' theft of fire also prompts the arrival of the first woman, Pandora, and her jar of evils. Pandora is entirely absent from "Prometheus Bound", and Prometheus becomes