Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley's mother, the feminist philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, died of complications from her birth; her father, William Godwin, raised her on radical politics and let the poet Percy Shelley court his sixteen-year-old daughter, who eloped with him to the Continent. Three of their four children died in infancy before Percy drowned off the Italian coast in 1822, leaving her a widow at twenty-four.

Frankenstein, begun during that famous wet summer at Lake Geneva and published anonymously in 1818, was read at first as her husband's work. She spent her widowhood editing his poems and supporting their surviving son by writing more fiction, including The Last Man (1826), which imagines humanity wiped out by plague: grief turned, again, into prophecy.