Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was the daughter of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, eloped with Percy Shelley at sixteen, and wrote Frankenstein at eighteen on Lake Geneva in the wet summer of 1816, when Byron challenged the party to write ghost stories. The novel, of a student who makes a living creature and abandons it, was published anonymously in 1818, and the creature’s own account of his education and rejection is its centre. Shelley drowned in 1822; she lost three of four children, edited his poems, wrote five more novels, and supported herself and her son by her pen. The Last Man imagines the end of the human race.