Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London. Her mother, the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died days after her birth. Her father, the philosopher William Godwin, educated her at home among radical thinkers. At sixteen she left England with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. They married in 1816, after his first wife's death.

That summer, at a villa near Geneva, Lord Byron challenged his guests to write ghost stories. Mary began Frankenstein there, and it was published without her name in 1818. Victor Frankenstein builds a living creature, then abandons it in disgust. The creature turns violent only after every person rejects it. The book asks what a creator owes to what he makes. It is often called an early work of science fiction.

Percy drowned in 1822. Only one of her four children lived to adulthood. She supported herself and her son by writing novels, including The Last Man (1826), and by editing her husband's poems. She died in London in 1851, aged 53.