Mary Shelley, The OG Goth Girlie Who Wrote 'Frankenstein"

“My baby is dead. I awoke in the night to give it suck. It appeared to be sleeping so quietly it was dead then, for I am no longer a mother now.” Mary Shelley was 17 when she wrote that to a friend. By the time she died at 53, she had lost three of her four children, her husband, her half-sister, and her mother before she ever knew her. And somewhere in between, at age 18, she invented science fiction.

Born Into a Ghost Story

Mary Shelley entered the world on August 30, 1797, in London, as the daughter of two radical intellectuals. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had just published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman five years earlier, arguing that women were not naturally inferior to men—they were simply denied education. She died 11 days after giving birth to Mary, from complications. Mary grew up in the shadow of a mother she never met but could never escape. Her father, William Godwin, was a political philosopher and radical thinker who believed strongly in educating his daughter, even if the family had little money. She was raised around dinner-table debates with writers and philosophers, learning that her opinions mattered. But when Mary was four, Godwin remarried a woman named Mary Jane Clairmont, whom Mary hated. The household had constant money troubles, and at 14, Mary was sent to Scotland to stay with family friends. There, wandering through dramatic lands