Best known as the author of the most famous English horror novel, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was the daughter of British philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (who died giving birth to her). Mary wed the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816 ΓÇö two years after they had eloped to the Continent and after his first wife had committed suicide.
Challenged to write a ghost story in competition against her husband and Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, who was still in her teens, created "Frankenstein", or the "Modern Prometheus" (1818). In this tale, a young Swiss scientist named
