Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at eighteen and invented science fiction. Born in London in 1797, she was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, who died of infection eleven days after the birth. She was educated at home in an intellectual household and read on her mother's grave, where she also met Percy Bysshe Shelley. She eloped with him in 1814 at sixteen, while he was married, taking her stepsister Claire Clairmont with them. Her first child was born prematurely and died within two weeks; she recorded a dream of rubbing it before the fire and finding it alive. In the summer of 1816, at Lake Geneva with Byron, Percy, Claire and John Polidori — a year without summer caused by the Tambora eruption, which kept them indoors — Byron proposed that each write a ghost story. Mary's became Frankenstein, published anonymously in 1818. It is the first novel in which the horror comes from science rather than the supernatural: a student assembles a creature from corpses, animates it, and abandons it. The creature is articulate, reads Paradise Lost, and turns murderous only after being rejected everywhere. The moral weight falls on the creator's refusal of responsibility. Three more of her children died, and Percy drowned off Livorno in 1822 when she was twenty-four. She kept his heart, or a fragment of his remains, in her desk. She supported herself and her surviving son by writing — novels including The Last Man, biographies, travel books — and edited Percy's poetry with extensive notes, which established his reputation. She died in 1851.

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