Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was an English novelist, the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. She began Frankenstein at eighteen, during a wet summer at Lake Geneva with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron, and published it anonymously in 1818; it is now read as the founding work of science fiction. Widowed at twenty-four, she supported herself by writing, producing further novels including The Last Man and editing her husband's poetry.