Arts & Literature
A legendary life
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
1797 – 1851
Novelist whose Frankenstein became a foundational work of modern science fiction.
Her story
A life that changed history
Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818 and widely considered an early work of science fiction. She also wrote novels, essays, biographies, and travel literature and preserved the work of Percy Bysshe Shelley.
“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself.”
Introduction to the revised edition of Frankenstein, 1831