Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in London in 1797 to two of the most notorious radicals of the age: Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and William Godwin, the philosopher of Political Justice (1793). Her mother died of puerperal fever eleven days after the birth. She was raised by her father and a stepmother she disliked, in a household where Coleridge would read "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" aloud in the parlour. She made a habit from childhood of writing in the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church, where her mother was buried.

In 1814, at sixteen, she eloped to the Continent with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married to someone else. Her stepsister Claire Clairmont went with them. They lived a hand-to-mouth literary existence in a series of rented rooms; their first child, a daughter, was born prematurely in 1815 and died at twelve days old. Mary recorded the dream that followed in her journal: "Dream that my little baby came to life again — that it had only been cold and that we rubbed it before the fire and it lived." She was seventeen.

In the summer of 1816 — the famous "year without a summer," cooled globally by the eruption of Mount Tambora — Mary, Percy, and Claire travelled to Lake Geneva and rented the Villa Diodati near Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori. Trapped indoors by relentless rain, Byron proposed a ghost-story competition. Mary, after several false starts, conceived the image of a "pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." The novel that grew from it, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), was published anonymously when she was twenty. It is the founding text of science fiction: a story not about a monster but about a creator who refuses responsibility for what he has made, and a creature who learns language and tenderness and is met with horror. Polidori's contribution to the same competition, The Vampyre, became the first English-language vampire novel.

The decade that followed was relentless. Two more of her children — Clara and William — died in Italy in 1818 and 1819. Percy drowned off the coast of Lerici in July 1822 when his boat the Don Juan went down in a squall. She was twenty-four, widowed, with a single surviving son. She returned to England and supported herself and her child for the rest of her life by writing: Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826) — an underrated late-future plague novel — Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), Falkner (1837), plus the patient editorial work that established her dead husband's reputation. She died of a brain tumour in 1851 at fifty-three.

Read Frankenstein — the 1818 text, not the more conservative 1831 revision — and then The Last Man, which is stranger and sadder and tells you what she lived through.