Proserpine and Midas

Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was the daughter of two radical writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, who died days after her birth, and the philosopher William Godwin. At sixteen she ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and at eighteen, during a rainy summer by Lake Geneva with Lord Byron, she began the story that became Frankenstein.

Her life was marked by loss: three of her four children died young and Percy drowned in 1822. She supported herself by writing, edited her husband's poems and wrote The Last Man, an early novel of a worldwide plague. Her mother's Vindication of the Rights of Woman is also in the library.