Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London in 1797 to two of the most radical minds of their generation: the philosopher William Godwin and the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after her daughter’s birth. She grew up among her father’s circle of poets and reformers, reading widely and, by her own account, being expected to think for herself. At sixteen she left England with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; the years that followed brought exile, poverty, the deaths of three of her children, and, in 1822, Percy’s drowning off the Italian coast. She was twenty-four when she was widowed, and she wrote and edited for the rest of her life to support herself and her surviving son.

Her lasting achievement began as a competition. In the summer of 1816 — the cold, sunless year that followed the eruption of Mount Tambora — she was staying near Lake Geneva with Percy and Lord Byron when the company agreed each would write a ghost story. Shelley, then eighteen, produced the one that outlived them all. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus appeared in 1818, and it did something no ghost story had done before: it located the horror not in the supernatural but in a laboratory, and not in the creature but in the man who made it and walked away.

That move invented a genre and set a question the following two centuries have never stopped asking. Shelley wrote other novels — the historical Valperga, the plague-haunted The Last Man — and a great deal of criticism, biography, and travel writing besides. But it is the abandoned creature, articulate and grieving, who keeps returning: the argument that what we make has a claim on us, and that genius without responsibility is simply another kind of ruin.

More on Shelley at Wikipedia.