1. Mary Shelley (1797-1851)

2. 08/30/1797 Mary is born in London, to well-known parents: author and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and philosopher William Godwin. Mary Wollstonecraft dies soon after giving birth to her daughter. William Godwin Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

3. 1801 William Godwin marries Mary Jane Clairmont, who had two children of her own. Godwin also had Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate older daughter to take care of. Mary Shelley grew up without her actual mother and alienated from a stepmother who was partial to her own children. 1814 When Mary is sixteen she meets the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a devotee of her father’s teachings. Shelley was already married to Harriet Westbrook, who had one child and was about to give birth to another. Percy Bysshe Shelley

4. 1814 Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Shelley fall in love and elope to France with Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont. Mary was already expecting a child.

5. 1815 When they return to England, they are rejected by Shelley’s family and their first child, a premature daughter dies two weeks after birth. 1816 Both Shelley’s wife and Mary’s other half sister Fanny commit suicide. They marry, but are tormented with the suicides and the law court’s denial of custody to Shelley’s two children with Harriet. 1816 Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley go to Geneva accompanied again by Claire Clairmont and also by their six- month old son William.

6. 1816 in Geneva, Byron suggests that they should all write a ghost story. After a discussion between Byron and Shelley about creating life in a scientific laboratory, Mary has a nightmare about an obsessive scientist who, in attempting to create man, creates a monster. Mary writes Frankenstein.

7. 1818 Frankenstein is published. 1818 The Shelleys left England for Italy. Their infant daughter, Clara dies. 1819 Their two year-old son, William dies; Mary suffers a nervous breakdown. 1819 Birth of Percy Florence Shelly; only child of Mary’s to survive childhood. 1819 Mary begins work on Mathilde which draws on her relations with Godwin and Percy Shelley. This work is not published until long after her death (1959).

8. 1822 Percy drowns during a sailing trip in the Bay of Spezia near Livorno. 1822 Mary has a dangerous miscarriage and almost bleeds to death. 1823 Mary returns to England, determined not to-re-marry. 1823 Valperga, which is a romance set in the 14th-century. 1826 The Last Man, depicts the end of human civilization, set in the 21st century. 02/01/1851 Mary Shelley died in London on February 1, 1851, possibly of a brain tumor. She is buried in Saint Peter's Churchyard/Bournemouth Cemetery in Bournemouth, England.