Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was an English novelist, the daughter of the political philosopher William Godwin and the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. She began Frankenstein at eighteen during a ghost-story competition at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, in the company of Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. Published in 1818, it is simultaneously a founding text of science fiction, a Gothic novel, and a sustained meditation on the ethics of creation. She continued to write prolifically after Percy Shelley's death in 1822.