Today in literary history: June 16

Here's what happened on June 16 in literary history.

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Just a little bit before 2 a.m. June 16, 1816, the idea for the novel Frankenstein came to Mary Shelley.

Shelley, then not quite nineteen years old, was staying in a rented house near Lake Geneva, Switzerland, with her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, that summer; Lord Byron and Dr. John Polidori were also renting nearby.

Shelley recorded neither the date that Byron issued his famous challenge to the group to write a supernatural story nor the night that she lay awake in bed only to have the vision of a monster come to her.

But centuries later, modern astronomers would use the location of Byron's rental villa, the phase of the moon, and Shelley's recollection of "the moonlight struggling to get through" to solve backwards for June 16 as the fateful day.

Source: The Marginalian

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Author James Joyce went on his first date with his future wife, Nora Barnacle, on June 16, 1904.

The pair had seen each other on a Dublin street, and Joyce had asked Barnacle out on a date. They agreed upon a time and place to meet a few days later — June 14 — and when Barnacle was a no-show, Joyce left a note at the rooming house where she worked expressing hope that they would still be able to meet.

Barnacle did show up for the next meeting — June 16 — and by October they had run off to Zurich, Switzerland, together (they wouldn't actually marry until 1931).

Their love affair became first famous through Joyce's published fiction and later through their sexually graphic letters to one another.

Sources: The Morgan Library & Museum, The Paris Review

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Oona O'Neill, daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill, married Hollywood star Charlie Chaplin on June 16, 1943.

O'Neill was just eighteen and fresh out of high school when she married Chaplin, who at fifty-four was the same age as her father.

The playwright, who only sporadically saw his daughter in the years since he'd left her mother, was so angry that he disinherited her.

(Maybe he would have preferred she marry a writer — she actually dated J.D. Salinger during her high school years.)

To the surprise of most people, though, the marriage endured until Chaplin's death at age eighty-eight and resulted in eight children.

Source: History.com