Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797?1851) was born in London, to
her father the writer William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, an
influential social campaigner who died 11 days after the birth of her
daughter. Mary's early life was unconventional and by the age of 16 she
eloped with the then-married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Amongst their friends
were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron, the latter of whom offered
the challenge to Mary to write a ghost story which later became Frankenstein.
