Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley was born to two of the boldest minds of her age — the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after her birth, and the radical philosopher William Godwin — and she grew up reading voraciously beside her mother's grave. At sixteen she ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, into a life of brilliance, scandal, travel, and almost unrelenting loss.

It was during a cold, storm-bound summer by a Swiss lake, when she was just eighteen, that a ghost-story contest among friends sparked the dream that became Frankenstein. In it she asked a question no one had quite framed before: if we gain the power to create life, what do we owe what we make? Her tragic creature — abandoned, despised, and turned cruel by rejection — became one of the most enduring myths of the modern world, and her novel is often called the first true work of science fiction.

She outlived her husband, who drowned young, and buried all but one of her children, carrying her grief with a quiet, stubborn strength while she kept writing and kept his work, and her own, alive. We honor her as the teenage author who dreamed the modern conscience of science — the woman who warned, two centuries early, that creation without compassion makes monsters, and that even the most fearsome of them only ever wanted to be loved.