Mary Shelley

The world kept her as the girl who wrote a monster. She had no intention of dying as one. Daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, widow of a drowned poet, she had bills, one surviving child, and a profession. After Frankenstein: a plague that empties the earth, Italian tyrants, a pretender to the English throne, travel books, lives of scientists, and the edition of Percy’s poems that made him canonical. Reviews. Cyclopaedia entries. Thirty years of keeping a household and a reputation. Read her for the spark at eighteen if you like. Stay for the woman who outlived the myth and kept writing.