She lost her mother at 11 days old, eloped at 16, buried three children — and somehow found time to invent science fiction.
Mary Shelley was born on August 30, 1797, to two of England's most radical thinkers: political philosopher William Godwin and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Her mother died of puerperal fever just eleven days after giving birth, leaving Mary to grow up in the shadow of a legend she never got to meet.
At 16, she eloped to France with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, her stepsister in tow, crossing a continent still scarred by the Napoleonic Wars. The scandal destroyed her social standing overnight — her own father refused to speak to her for years.
Frankenstein was born on a stormy night in June 1816 during the Year Without a Summer, when cold and rain trapped Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, and his doctor indoors near Lake Geneva. Byron challenged the group to a ghost story contest; the others gave up, but Mary's 'waking dream' of a pale student kneeling over a creature he had brought to life became the novel published in 1818.
Frankenstein was published anonymously, and most readers assumed Percy Shelley wrote it — a reasonable assumption given the era, less reasonable given Mary's insistence: 'I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband.' She was 20 years old when it was published.
The years in Italy were devastating. Mary lost her daughter Clara in Venice in 1818 and her son William to malaria in Rome in 1819 — two children, in two cities, in under a year. She was 21. She survived largely by writing, channeling grief into novels and plays while Percy grew increasingly distant.
Percy Shelley drowned in a sailing accident in 1822 at age 29, leaving Mary a widow at 24 with one surviving child and no income. Her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, refused to ever meet her in person and threatened to cut off her small allowance if she published a biography of his son — so she spent decades promoting Percy's work quietly, through annotations and edited collections.
Despite being remembered mostly for Frankenstein, Mary Shelley was a prolific writer across her entire life — publishing six more novels, travel writing, plays, biographical essays, and short stories. Her 1826 novel The Last Man imagined a plague wiping out humanity, with characters modeled on Byron and Percy. She was one of the first writers to seriously explore apocalyptic fiction.
She died on February 1, 1851, at 53, likely from a brain tumor. When her son Percy and daughter-in-law opened her desk after her death, they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy, and his poem Adonaïs — with Percy's preserved heart pressed inside its pages.