Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in 1797 to two philosophers; her mother, the women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft, died eleven days later. Raised by her father William Godwin in a house soaked in anarchist theory, she ran off to Europe at sixteen with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a married disciple of her father's, and returned pregnant and broke. After their prematurely born daughter died and Percy's wife Harriet took her own life, they married in late 1816. That same year, holed up near Geneva with Lord Byron and John Polidori, she conceived Frankenstein - published in 1818 when she was twenty. The Shelleys moved to Italy, where two more children died; only Percy Florence survived. In 1822 her husband drowned in a storm off Viareggio. She came back to England, raised her son, and wrote steadily: historical novels, an apocalyptic epic, travel writing, biographical essays. She died at fifty-three, likely of a brain tumor, her later work mostly unread until the 1970s, when it surfaced as a quiet rebellion against the Romantic gospel of the solitary genius.