Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was an English novelist, the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after her birth. At sixteen she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and at nineteen, during a wet summer with Byron at Geneva, she began Frankenstein (1818), the story of a scientist and his creature that founded a genre. After Shelley drowned in 1822 she supported herself and her son by writing: the historical novel Valperga, the apocalyptic The Last Man (1826), Lodore, Falkner, travel books and biographies, and she edited her husband's poems with notes that shaped his reputation.