Mary Shelley — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-08

She wrote Frankenstein at nineteen, during a ghost-story contest on a rainy Swiss summer. The book became the template for science fiction, but for a century she was filed away as the widow who preserved Percy Shelley's poems—until scholars looked again and found a dozen novels arguing that women, family, and cooperation could reform the world her father and

Biography

About

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 tw…

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley

said27 Jan 1837

One thing I will add: if I have ever found kindness, it has not been from Liberals; to disengage myself from them was the first act of my freedom.

— Letter to Edward Trelawny (27 January 1837). Google Books

Mary Shelley

said15 May 1824

At the age of twenty six I am in the condition of an aged person — all my old friends are gone ... & my heart fails when I think by how few ties I hold to the world....

— Journal (15 May 1824)

Mary Shelley

said14 May 1824

The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me...

— Journal entry on the writing of her science-fiction novel The Last Man (14 May 1824)

Mary Shelley

said1818