Mary Shelley

""Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of the void but out of chaos.""

MARY SHELLEY (1797-1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction and one of her best-known works, and Mathilda (1819). She wrote several other novels, including Valperga (1823), The Last Man (1826), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837), and a travel book, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817). Shelley also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.