Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin)

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1797–1851) was the daughter of two pioneering philosophical titans: feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, who died days after Mary's birth) and political philosopher William Godwin. In 1814, she fell passionately in love with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, eloping across Europe.

During the volcanic 'Year Without a Summer' of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, trapped indoors by torrential rains with Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori, Byron proposed a ghost story competition. Awakened by a waking nightmare of a pale student kneeling beside the creature he had assembled, eighteen-year-old Mary conceived Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Blending galvanism, gothic horror, and deep philosophical empathy for the abandoned monster, Mary single-handedly invented the science fiction genre. Her post-apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) pioneered pandemic science fiction.