Mary Shelley

Born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797, in London, she entered the world under the shadow of death: her mother, the pioneering feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, died of puerperal fever eleven days after giving birth. Her father was the radical political philosopher William Godwin, who raised her in a household frequented by Coleridge, Lamb, and the leading intellectuals of the age. At sixteen she eloped to France with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, beginning a turbulent partnership marked by constant debt, social ostracism, and devastating loss , three of their four children died in infancy. During the famous summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, where Lord Byron challenged his guests to each write a ghost story, the eighteen-year-old Mary conceived Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), a novel that invented science fiction, interrogated the ethics of creation, and gave the modern world one of its most enduring myths. She published it anonymously at twenty; many reviewers assumed a woman could not have written it. After Percy drowned in a sailing accident in the Gulf of La Spezia in 1822, she returned to England as a widow at twenty-four with an infant son and devoted herself to a prolific literary career, producing the novels Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826) , an apocalyptic vision of plague destroying civilization , and Lodore (1835), as well as editing and annotating her late husband’s poems for posterity, ensuring his reputation. She died of a brain tumor on February 1, 1851, in London, at the age of fifty-three.