Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851)

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born in London, the daughter of two major English intellectuals and writers, Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband William Godwin. She fell in love with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a married man and father, and scandalized society by eloping with him in 1814. Two years later, they were married and in 1818, she published her most famous work, her first novel: Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus. She also wrote several other novels, including Valperga (1823) and The Last Man (1826), as well as numerous novellas, short stories, poems, plays, essays, and articles for periodicals of the day, travel books, and a biography of her husband. At the time of Shelley's death in 1822, she was regarded as a major novelist married to a minor poet, but she spent 30 years promoting his work to help him achieve lasting fame.