A ghost-story contest gave the world Frankenstein
In 1816 Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori spent a wet summer near Geneva telling ghost stories. There she conceived Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)—now read as early science fiction. She was eighteen, already living in scandal with a married poet.
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born 30 August 1797 in London to anarchist philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died eleven days after the birth. Godwin raised Mary and half-sister Fanny Imlay on radical talk, library access, and visitors such as Coleridge and Aaron Burr, though formal schooling was thin. A stepmother, Mary Jane Clairmont, made home bitter; spells with the Baxter family near Dundee let Mary’s imagination run on “woodless mountains.” She absorbed her mother’s books and Godwin’s shocking 1798 memoir of Wollstonecraft.
In 1814, at sixteen, she fell in love with twenty-one-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Godwin disciple already married. They met secretly at Wollstonecraft’s St Pancras grave, then eloped to France with stepsister Claire Clairmont on 28 July, crossing a war-scarred continent before debt forced them home. Ostracism, creditors, and a premature daughter’s death followed; they married in late 1816 after Harriet Shelley’s suicide. The Geneva summer that year catalyzed Frankenstein. Italy after 1818 brought the deaths of two more children before only Percy Florence survived; in 1822 Percy drowned near Viareggio when his boat sank. Mary returned to England to raise her son and write for pay.
Long typed as Percy’s widow-editor and as Frankenstein’s author alone, she also published Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), Falkner (1837), travelogue Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844), and Cabinet Cyclopaedia biographies. Scholars now stress a lasting political radicalism: her fiction favors cooperation and women’s familial sympathy as civic reform—pushing against Percy’s individualist Romanticism and Godwin’s Enlightenment theories.
Illness, likely a brain tumor, shadowed her final decade; she died 1 February 1851 at fifty-three. Frankenstein’s adaptations keep multiplying, but the fuller shelf shows a professional author who turned grief, philosophy, and that stormy lakeside dare into a career.
Source: Mary Shelley
