Mary Shelley (MAIR-ee SHEL-ee)

Born into literary legend, Mary Shelley was the daughter of philosopher William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Her mother died shortly after childbirth, casting a long shadow of both sorrow and expectation over Mary’s early life. She grew up surrounded by intellectuals, poets, and political radicals—a crucible of radical thought that would shape her worldview and ignite her creative fire. By the time she was a teenager, she had already begun writing, observing, and asking the questions most never dared.   At just sixteen, she began a relationship with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a union as passionate as it was tumultuous. They eloped and traveled through Europe, often living on the margins of society. During a famous stay at Lake Geneva with Lord Byron, a storm-bound night of ghost stories led Mary to conceive what would become *Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus*—a novel that not only birthed the science fiction genre but laid bare her haunting questions about life, death, creation, and the moral limits of human ambition.   Her life was marked by great tragedy: she lost three of her four children, her husband drowned at sea, and she was frequently isolated both socially and financially. Yet despite all this, Mary Shelley never stopped writing. Her later works, including *The Last Man*, explore themes of plague, loss, and resilience in deeply human terms. She also worked tirelessly to preserve Percy Shelley’s poetic legacy, editing and publishing his work with care even when doing so damaged her own literary prospects.   In life, she was often dismissed as simply Percy’s widow or a one-hit wonder. But history has proven otherwise. Mary Shelley remains a towering figure—bold, imaginative, and unflinching in her pursuit of meaning amid chaos. Her Frankenstein’s creature still walks among us, a mirror for our ambition and loneliness. And Mary, always slightly ahead of her time, continues to speak to generations who feel both the wonder and the weight of invention.