Mary Shelley is one of the most recognized writers in history. She has written many pieces, however, her novel Frankenstein is what she is most known for. She was a wife and mother who had to endure many hardships throughout her life.
On August 30, 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born to two great rebels of the 1790s (¨Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft¨ 2). Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an early feminist and author of Vindication of the Rights of Women (¨Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft¨2). Her father, William Godwin, was a novelist and political philosopher (¨Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft¨ 2). Her mother died ten days after due to birth complications, leaving her father to care for her and her half-sister (¨Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft¨ 2). Godwin remarried Mary Jane Clairmont and gained three more children, who Clairmont heavily favored more than Godwin´s other two daughters (. This lead to an unhappy childhood for Mary and her sister.
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Percy was also a writer and his work was heavily influenced by that of her father´s (Miller 26). He also was married to a woman who was pregnant at the time and had already had a daughter with her (Miller 26). A month before Shelley´s seventeenth birthday, she and Percy Shelley eloped (¨Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft¨2). Mary had her first child on February 22, 1815. However, the child was born prematurely and died two weeks later (Miller 43). On January 24, 1816, Mary gives birth to her second baby, William (Miller 45). The shelley family spent most of the summer in Geneva with a poet, Lord Byron, and a writer and physician, John Polidori (“Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft” 3). During a snowstorm, Byron challenged the others to write ghost stories. Inspired by a nightmare, Shelley began writing Frankenstein (“Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft” 3). In September of 1817 Mary gives birth to her third child, Clara (Miller