Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein at eighteen — in the company of Byron and Shelley, on the shore of Lake Geneva, during the rain-soaked summerless year that followed the eruption of Tambora. It was Byron who proposed that each of them write a tale of horror.
She was born in London in 1797, daughter of the philosopher Godwin and of Mary Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to her. Percy Bysshe Shelley was a married man; she ran away with him at sixteen. He drowned in 1822.
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818): a scientist creates a being and then abandons it. The monster is not a villain but an outcast who wants to be loved. He is terrifying because he is alone.
She died in London in 1851. Hers is one of the first science-fiction novels in history.