Mary was born in 1797. Her mother died when she was eleven days old and when she turned four years old her father married Jane Clairmont., who had children of her own. In 1814 Mary started a relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley who was a poet-philosopher and they married in 1816. Mary conceived her idea for Frankenstein while on vacation in Geneva. In 1818 she returned to England after the death of her two children and her husband.
Frankenstein was published in 1818. The last years of Mary's life were plagued by illness and she died on February 1, 1851.