August 30

In literary history

• 1797Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born, her mother Mary Wollstonecraft dying eleven days later of childbed fever. The girl grew up without her famous mother, ran away with a married poet at sixteen, and by nineteen had written Frankenstein.

Writers born on August 30

• Mary Shelley (1797)

The Daily Canon for August 30

One Art by Elizabeth Bishop (1976).