Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was an English novelist, best known for Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), conceived when she was eighteen during the summer of 1816 near Geneva. The daughter of philosopher William Godwin and writer Mary Wollstonecraft, she eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she married in 1816. She lived in Scotland, Switzerland, and Italy before returning to England after Percy drowned in the Gulf of La Spezia in 1822. Beyond Frankenstein she wrote further novels, including The Last Man, along with short fiction, travel narratives, biographies, and essays, and edited and promoted her husband's poetry. She died in London in 1851.