Fragment of a Novel

The story was the result of the meeting that Byron had in the summer of 1816 with Percy Bysshe Shelley where a "ghost writing" contest was proposed.

[2] The short story first appeared under the title "A Fragment" in the 1819 collection Mazeppa: A Poem, published by John Murray in London.

Polidori's account of Byron's story in a letter to his publisher in 1819 indicates it "depended for interest upon the circumstances of two friends leaving England, and one dying in Greece, the other finding him alive upon his return, and making love to his sister."

[3] On 20 March 1820, Byron wrote to Murray: "I shall not allow you to play the tricks you did last year with the prose you post-scribed to 'Mazeppa,' which I sent to you not to be published, if not in a periodical paper, – and there you tacked it, without a word of explanation, and be damned to you.

The stories told in Hungary and Greece of these foul feeders are singular, and some of them most incredibly attested.A vampire who returns to destroy his family is described in The Giaour, lines 757–768:[6] In a 27 April 1819 letter, however, Byron disclaimed any interest in vampires: "I have besides a personal dislike to 'Vampires,' and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their secrets.

[8][9] The vampire fragment was a product of the ghost story contest that occurred in Geneva on 17 June 1816, when Byron stayed at the Villa Diodati with author and physician John William Polidori.

The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa.In the 1818 preface to Frankenstein, Percy Bysshe Shelley described the contest with Lord Byron and John Polidori: Two other friends (a tale from the pen of one of whom would be far more acceptable to the public than anything I can ever hope to produce) and myself agreed to write each a story, founded on some supernatural occurrence.Byron began writing the fragment in an old account book of Lady Byron's, which he had kept as it contained the only sample he had of her writing other than their deed of separation.