Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (UK: /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/ WUUL-stən-krahft, US: /-kræft/ -⁠kraft;[2] née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction.

[6] In 1816, the couple and Mary's stepsister famously spent a summer with Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein.

Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846), support the growing view that Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life.

He often took the children on educational outings, and they had access to his library and to the many intellectuals who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States Aaron Burr.

[35] After convincing Mary Jane Godwin, who had pursued them to Calais, that they did not wish to return, the trio travelled to Paris, and then, by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot, through a France recently ravaged by war, to Switzerland.

At Bishopsgate, Percy wrote his poem Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude; and on 24 January 1816, Mary gave birth to a second child, William, named after her father, and soon nicknamed "Willmouse".

[65] It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her "waking dream", her ghost story:[66] I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together.

In September 2011, the astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year, and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her waking dream took place "between 2am and 3am" on 16 June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story.

The threat of a debtor's prison, combined with their ill health and fears of losing custody of their children, contributed to the couple's decision to leave England for Italy on 12 March 1818, taking Claire Clairmont and Alba with them.

[105] After leaving Naples, the Shelleys settled in Rome, the city where her husband wrote "the meanest streets were strewed with truncated columns, broken capitals...and sparkling fragments of granite or porphyry...The voice of dead time, in still vibrations, is breathed from these dumb things, animated and glorified as they were by man".

[109] In the summer of 1822, a pregnant Mary moved with Percy, Claire, and Edward and Jane Williams to the isolated Villa Magni, at the sea's edge near the hamlet of San Terenzo in the Bay of Lerici.

A letter arrived at Villa Magni from Hunt to Percy Shelley, dated 8 July, saying, "pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed Monday & we are anxious".

[123] She managed instead to wring out of Sir Timothy a limited annual allowance (which she had to repay when Percy Florence inherited the estate), but to the end of his days, he refused to meet her in person and dealt with her only through lawyers.

[141] For instance, Shelley extended financial aid to Mary Diana Dods, a single mother and illegitimate herself, who appears to have been a lesbian, and gave her the new identity of Walter Sholto Douglas, husband of her lover Isabel Robinson.

Inside they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his poem Adonaïs with one page folded round a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart.

[184] Shelley scholar Anne K. Mellor suggests that, from a feminist viewpoint, it is a story "about what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman ... [Frankenstein] is profoundly concerned with natural as opposed to unnatural modes of production and reproduction".

[186] Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in their seminal book The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) that in Frankenstein in particular, Shelley responded to the masculine literary tradition represented by John Milton's Paradise Lost.

In their interpretation, Shelley reaffirms this masculine tradition, including the misogyny inherent in it, but at the same time "conceal[s] fantasies of equality that occasionally erupt in monstrous images of rage".

[193] According to Poovey and Mellor, Shelley did not want to promote her own authorial persona and felt deeply inadequate as a writer, and "this shame contributed to the generation of her fictional images of abnormality, perversion, and destruction".

"[209] Specifically, Mary Shelley's allusions to what radicals believed was a failed revolution in France and the Godwinian, Wollstonecraftian, and Burkean responses to it, challenge "Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress through collective efforts".

[223] In the 1820s and 1830s, Mary Shelley frequently wrote short stories for gift books or annuals, including sixteen for The Keepsake, which was aimed at middle-class women and bound in silk, with gilt-edged pages.

[226] However, critic Charlotte Sussman points out that other leading writers of the day, such as the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also took advantage of this profitable market.

[234] Mary Shelley's last full-length book, written in the form of letters and published in 1844, was Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843, which recorded her travels with her son Percy Florence and his university friends.

In Rambles, Shelley follows the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and her own A History of a Six Weeks' Tour in mapping her personal and political landscape through the discourse of sensibility and sympathy.

[236] Between observations on scenery, culture, and "the people, especially in a political point of view",[237] she uses the travelogue form to explore her roles as a widow and mother and to reflect on revolutionary nationalism in Italy.

[239] According to critic Clarissa Orr, Mary Shelley's adoption of a persona of philosophical motherhood gives Rambles the unity of a prose poem, with "death and memory as central themes".

[243][note 17] In the view of literary scholar Greg Kucich, they reveal Mary Shelley's "prodigious research across several centuries and in multiple languages", her gift for biographical narrative, and her interest in the "emerging forms of feminist historiography".

[244] Shelley wrote in a biographical style popularised by the 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779–1781), combining secondary sources, memoir and anecdote, and authorial evaluation.

[254] The following year, Mary Shelley edited a volume of her husband's essays, letters, translations, and fragments, and throughout the 1830s, she introduced his poetry to a wider audience by publishing assorted works in the annual The Keepsake.

[265] She was forced, however, into several compromises, and, as Blumberg notes, "modern critics have found fault with the edition and claim variously that she miscopied, misinterpreted, purposely obscured, and attempted to turn the poet into something he was not".