Mary Shelley

1797–1851

English novelist (1797–1851), daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the writer Mary Wollstonecraft. She wrote Frankenstein at eighteen and nineteen, during the famous 1816 ghost-story summer at Lake Geneva with Lord Byron and her future husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Often credited with writing the first true work of science fiction, she continued publishing novels, stories and travel writing for decades after.