Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797. Her father was the radical political philosopher William Godwin; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, died ten days after her birth. She grew up in her father's study, hearing writers such as Coleridge recite poetry. At sixteen she eloped with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she later married. In the summer of 1816, kept indoors by rain on the shores of Lake Geneva with Byron and others, she heard Byron propose that each of them write a ghost story, and the eighteen-year-old Mary conceived Frankenstein. Her life was full of misfortune: several of her children died young, and when she was twenty-four Shelley drowned off the Italian coast. Thereafter she supported herself and her one surviving son by writing, edited Shelley's poems and posthumous works, and died at fifty-three.