Mary Shelley was a prominent English author of gothic fiction and horror novels, who lived during the 18th and 19th centuries. She was born as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in 1797 and was the daughter of two well-known figures, the political philosopher William Godwin and writer, philosopher, and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary was taken seriously as a writer in her own lifetime, though reviewers often missed the political edge to her novels. However, after her death, she was chiefly remembered only as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as the author of Frankenstein. It was not until 1989 that a full-length scholarly biography analyzing all of Shelley's letters, journals, and works within their historical context was published.
Mary Shelley had a tragic life, despite her success as a writer. She was reared by her father after her mother's death when she was just eleven days old. Her mother was the famous feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Mary's father, William Godwin, was a political philosopher who provided his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his liberal political theories. In 1814, Mary began a romantic relationship with one of her father’s political followers, the married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Together with Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, they left for France and traveled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816 after the suicide of Percy Shelley’s first wife, Harriet.
In 1816, the couple famously spent a summer with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, and Claire Clairmont near Geneva, Switzerland, where Mary conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Mary Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Mary Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, probably caused by the brain tumor that was to kill her at the age of 53.
Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin. Recent scholarship has shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46) support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life.