Mary Shelley was an English writer. Born in London, the daughter of the women’s rights thinker Mary Wollstonecraft and the philosopher William Godwin, she later married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
In 1816, at 18, she began writing the novel Frankenstein after a ghost-story contest held at Byron‘s villa in Switzerland, and published it in 1818. Her story of creating life through science is called the first work of science fiction. Her other works include The Last Man, which depicts a future in which humanity dies out in a plague.
