Mary Shelley

Mary Godwin was the daughter of two radical writers, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Her mother died of an infection eleven days after her birth, and she grew up in a house full of books and visitors, learning to read from her mother's gravestone in St Pancras churchyard, where she later went to think and read.

At sixteen she ran away to the Continent with the married poet Percy Shelley. Her father refused to speak to her. Their first baby, born prematurely in 1815, lived less than two weeks; Mary dreamed she had rubbed it by the fire and it had come back to life.

In the wet summer of 1816, staying with Byron on Lake Geneva, she was eighteen when the group challenged each other to write a ghost story. Hers, about a scientist who assembles a creature and then abandons it, became Frankenstein, published anonymously in 1818. Many readers assumed her husband had written it.

Two more children died in Italy. In 1822 Percy drowned when his boat went down in a storm. Mary was 24, with one surviving son and almost no money. She went home to England, refused offers to write only for money's sake, and produced novels, biographies, travel books and an edition of Percy's poems that established his reputation. She died of a brain tumour in 1851, aged 53.