Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was an English novelist, the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after her birth. At sixteen she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and at eighteen, during a rainy summer near Geneva with Byron, she began Frankenstein, published anonymously in 1818. Widowed at twenty-four, she supported herself and her one surviving child by writing: the novels Valperga, The Last Man, an early story of a global pandemic, and Lodore, as well as biographies, travel books and an edition of her husband's poems. Frankenstein overshadows everything else she wrote, but her range was considerable.