Mary Shelley

Full name: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.
Nationality: British; English
Birth Date: August 30, 1797
Death Date: February 1, 1851
Genre(s): Novels; Novellas; Essays; Travel

English Romantic novelist, biographer and editor, best know as the writer of Frankenstein, or, the modern Prometheus (1818).
Mary Shelley was 21 when the book was published; she started to write it when she was 18. The story deals with an ambitious young scientist. He creates life but then rejects his creation, a monster.

Mary Shelley's father was the writer and political journalist William Godwin, who became famous with his work An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Godwin had revolutionary attitudes to most social institutions, including marriage. In feminism he found an "amazonian" element. Among his other books is Things as they are, or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794).

In her childhood Mary Shelley was left to educate herself amongst her father's intellectual circle, the critic Hazlet, the essayist Lamb, the poet Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who came into Godwin's circle in 1812. Godwin took a second in 1801, but Mary never learned to like her. In 1812 Godwin sent her to live in Dundee. Mary published her first poem at the age of ten. At the age of 16 she ran away to France and Switzerland with Shelley; they had met at the end of 1812. Percy and Mary married in 1816 - Shelley's wife Harriet had committed suicide by drowning. Their first child, a daughter, died in Venice, Italy, a few years later. In HISTORY OF SIX WEEKS TOUR (1817) the Shelley’s jointly recorded their life. There after they returned to England and Mary gave birth to a son, William
The story of Frankenstein started on summer in 1816, when Mary joined with Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont near Geneva Lord Byron. She took a challenge, set by Lord Byron, to write a ghost story. With her husband's encouragement, she completed the novel within a year. At the Villa Diodati she had been a "silent listener" of her husband and Byron, who discussed about galvanism. At Eton College Shelley had become interested in Luigi Calvani's experiments with electric shocks to make dead frogs' muscles twitch. It is possible that his teacher, James Lind, had demonstrated the technique to Shelley. Byron and Shelley talked Dr Darwin's experiments with a piece of vermicelli. In her 'Introduction' to the 1831 edition Mary revealed that she got the story from a dream, in which she saw "the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with a uneasy, half vital motion."
She won also prizes for her books:
British Short-Fiction Writers, 1800-1880
British Romantic Prose Writers, 1789-1832
British Fantasy and Science-Fiction Writers Before World War I