Mary Shelley, Author of Frankenstein, Is Born

On 30 August 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in London to two of the era’s boldest thinkers: the political philosopher William Godwin and the pioneering feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after the birth. Raised among radical ideas and her father’s literary circle, the young Mary read voraciously and began writing early.

In the storm-bound summer of 1816, while staying near Geneva with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, she conceived the tale that became Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Published in 1818, when she was only twenty, the novel imagined a scientist who assembles and animates a living creature, then abandons it.

A teenager’s ghost story grew into one of literature’s most enduring myths about ambition and its consequences.

Widely regarded as a foundational work of science fiction, Frankenstein fused Gothic horror with anxieties about scientific overreach. Mary Shelley wrote further novels, stories, and travel works before her death in 1851, but her monster never stopped haunting the cultural imagination.