Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.
She became
famous thanks to Frankenstein the
novel that she started to write in Switzerland.
In May 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and their son travelled to Geneva with
Claire Clairmont. They planned to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire
had left her pregnant. The party arrived at Geneva on 14 May 1816, where Mary
called herself "Mrs Shelley". Byron joined them on 25 May, with his
young physician, John William Polidori,
and rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny;
Percy Shelley rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront
nearby. They spent their time writing, boating on the lake, and talking late
into the night. 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.
She began
writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's
encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. She later described that
summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood
into life". The story has been fictionalised several times and formed the
basis for a number of films.
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" 16 June 1816, several days after the initial
idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story.
Invention, it must be humbly admitted,
does not consist in creating out
of void, but out of chaos.
Mary Shelley
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