Historical voices
1797–1851
Author of Frankenstein, and an early voice of science fiction.
A reference author. Valice Press has no connection with Mary Shelley, their publishers or their estate. Mary Shelley appears here as part of the reading context around the shelf.
Biography
Mary Shelley was the daughter of two writers, the philosopher William Godwin and the women's-rights pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died eleven days after her birth. She grew up in her father's house among his radical circle, and at sixteen she left England with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
She wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus after a wet summer by Lake Geneva in 1816, in company with Byron and Polidori, when the party set themselves to write ghost stories. It was published when she was twenty. She went on to write novels, travel books and biographical lives, and spent much of her later career editing and publishing her husband's poems.
Works
Timeline
1814
Left England for France with Percy Shelley and her stepsister Claire Clairmont.
1816
Spent a summer near Geneva with Lord Byron and John William Polidori, where she conceived the idea of Frankenstein; married Percy Shelley at the end of the year.
1818
Frankenstein was published.
1822
Percy Shelley drowned in Italy; she resolved to live by her pen and for her son.
1823
Saw Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, the first stage adaptation of her novel, at the English Opera House.
1824
Published Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, the first of her editions of his work.
1831
Revised Frankenstein for a new edition and wrote the introduction describing how it began.
1851
Died in London, aged 53.
Why they are here
Frankenstein is a founding Gothic novel and is usually counted as an early work of science fiction. It gave the horror tradition its most durable creature, and a question that every later monster story still answers: who is responsible for what is made.
Frankenstein has been adapted for stage and screen since 1823 and remains widely read. Her editions did as much as any to keep Percy Shelley's poetry in print.
Related authors
Sources
Everything on this page about Mary Shelley is written from these sources, not from memory. Their dates and key claims were checked against the sources on 8 October 2026.The life dates are compared across Wikidata and the Library of Congress’s authority records.
