Born in London in 1797 - Died in 1851.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792). Shelley's mother died in childbirth and she was raised by her father. At age 18 Shelley ran off with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a leading British Romantic poet, who she married in 1816. The couple had a son, but after her husband died in a shipwreck in 1822, Mary Shelley fell into poverty. She continued to write fiction to support herself. Frankenstein (1818) was her first and by far her most successful work of fiction.