Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel FRANKENSTEIN: OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
The first novel of the scientific revolution and, incidentally, the first novel of science fiction -- Brian Aldiss Frankenstein appeals to something very primal, but it's also about profound things, the very nature of life and death and birth -- Kenneth Branagh How many fictional characters have made the great leap from literature to mythology; how many creatures of sheer language have stepped from the rhythms of their author's idiosyncratic voices into what might be called a collective cultural consciousness? -- Joyce Carol Oates The greatest novel of the Romantic movement -- Michael Dirda Mary Shelley more than made a name for herself and thrived without a formal education, becoming a trailblazing female writer in a genre still dominated by men today * INDEPENDENT *