Without a Summer: An Anthology

The Contexts Collection puts moments from literary history into amber. Without a Summer is a time capsule of a moment in 1816, when Mary Shelley wrote her masterpiece, Frankenstein or: The Modern Prometheus. Western Europe was in a volcanic winter caused by successive eruptions in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) that had lowered the global temperature 1 degree Fahrenheit--enough to cause the Year Without a Summer. Crops died, food riots rivaled the French Revolutio...