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 Mary Shelley (1797-1851) experienced the kind of childhood that sounds like a dark fairy-tale. Her mother, an early feminist, died giving birth to her; she was brought up by her remote father, the philosopher William Godwin, and a stepmother, who hated her. Her step-sister was a depressive, who would later commit suicide; and there were also a step-brother and a half-brother in the family. Young Mary escaped from her surroundings into reading, and would often read by the side of her mother's tomb.
In 1813, she met Percy Bysshe Shelley. He was only twenty-one years old, but already married - and unhappy in his marriage. And it was already clear that he was destined to be one of the geniuses of English poetry. The two fell in love and eloped, despite Mary's age. Godwin disowned her, but she and Shelley were married in 1816.
The young couple decide to live abroad and settled in Italy. Tragedy followed them: of their four children, only one lived very long. Then in 1822, aged just thirty, Shelley drowned. Before then, in 1817, a friend, the poet Lord George Gordon Byron, had suggested that they each write a horror story of some kind. The result, in Mary's case, was Frankenstein. Her husband was working on a poem at the time called Prometheus Unbound, perhaps this suggested the idea of updating the human tragedy of trying to transcend the limitations of being human.
A young girl of twenty had written the book whose name has become forever synonyomous with horror fiction. [edit]
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