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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
1 book in the library
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was an English novelist and the author of Frankenstein, which she began at eighteen. The idea came from a ghost-story competition among friends during the cold, sunless summer of 1816 at Lake Geneva, and the novel she made of it — a creature abandoned by the man who made it — is often called the first work of science fiction. She was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after her birth. After her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned she supported herself by writing, publishing The Last Man and editing his poetry into the form it is read in today.