This article is about how the context of Geneva may have influenced Mary Shelley when she first conceived her novel. The focus is on the dialogue established through Frankenstein with Rousseau and with her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, who had been severely criticized by the European periodical based in Geneva, the Bibliothèque britannique. An analysis of the female characters of her novel then suggests how the points made in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman are indeed key to Frankenstein.