Mary Shelley

1797–1851

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in London in 1797, the daughter of two famous writers; her mother died days after her birth. At sixteen she ran away to Europe with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and married him two years later.

In the wet summer of 1816, at a villa by Lake Geneva, Lord Byron challenged his guests to each write a ghost story. Hers became Frankenstein, published in 1818 when she was twenty. She outlived her husband and most of her children, and died in 1851.

Mary Shelley on the site

Frankenstein; or, The Modern PrometheusPublished in 1818 About 5 hours read An explorer whose ship is trapped in the Arctic ice takes aboard a dying man who has been chasing something across the frozen sea. The man is Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist from Geneva who learned how to give life to dead matter, and built a creature, and ran from what he had made. Mary Shelley began the story at nineteen, on a stormy night by Lake Geneva, and published it in 1818.

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