Mary Shelley: The Woman Who Created a Monster and Defined an Era

21 October 2025

Paul Francis

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Few writers have left a mark on culture as deep as Mary Shelley. Her name has become inseparable from one of literature’s most enduring creations: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Written before her twenty-first birthday, it changed not just Gothic fiction but the way we think about science, ambition and the boundaries of creation.

Portrait of Mary Shelley with dark hair, wearing an off-shoulder dress, set against a dark background. Her expression is calm and serene.

Yet Shelley’s legacy reaches far beyond her famous novel. She was a thinker shaped by revolution, love, loss and intellectual curiosity. Her life reads like a story of its own: a tale of genius, tragedy and quiet resilience in an age when women writers were rarely taken seriously.

A Legacy That Still Lives

More than two hundred years after Frankenstein was first published in 1818, its questions still feel modern. What does it mean to create life? When does progress become hubris? The story’s blend of science, morality and human emotion continues to inspire countless adaptations in film, theatre and art.

Shelley’s influence extends far beyond horror. Many scholars credit her as one of the founding figures of modern science fiction, a writer who understood that new technologies would not only change the world but challenge the human heart.

Her creation has become part of the collective imagination, but behind it stood a young woman navigating grief, love, scandal and the expectations of a society that never quite knew what to make of her.

Early Life: Born Into Ideas

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in London in 1797 to remarkable parents. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a pioneering feminist thinker and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Her father, William Godwin, was a radical philosopher known for his ideas on justice and liberty.

Her mother died shortly after giving birth, leaving Mary to be raised by Godwin, who encouraged her education and allowed her access to his vast library. She grew up surrounded by the leading intellectuals of the day, absorbing ideas about politics, philosophy and art from an early age.

By the time she was a teenager, Mary was already drawn to writing. Her father’s home became a gathering place for poets and radicals, and it was there that she met the young Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Their meeting would alter both of their lives.

A Scandalous Romance and a Restless Mind

In 1814, when Mary was sixteen, she and Percy began a relationship that shocked London’s literary circles. He was already married, and their elopement to Europe caused a public scandal. They lived as outcasts for years, moving between England, France, Switzerland and Italy, always chasing inspiration and fleeing judgement.

The couple endured extraordinary hardship. Several of their children died in infancy, leaving Mary consumed by grief. Yet she continued to write, often in the margins of their turbulent lives. Her journals from this period show both her emotional depth and her growing intellectual independence.

The Birth of Frankenstein

A somber person with facial stitches and bolts in a dim lab with candles and a sparking machine, wearing a distressed black outfit.

The summer of 1816 would change everything. Staying at a villa near Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and others, the group found themselves trapped indoors by stormy weather. To pass the time, Byron proposed that everyone write a ghost story.

For days, Mary wrestled with ideas. One night, after a conversation about electricity and reanimation, she had a vivid waking dream of a scientist who created life and recoiled in horror at what he had made. That image became the seed of Frankenstein.

She began writing soon after, and by 1818, the novel was published anonymously in London. Many assumed the author was Percy Shelley. When Mary’s name was added to the second edition, readers were stunned to discover that one of the darkest and most profound novels of the age had been written by a young woman.

The book’s success was immediate, but controversial. Some praised its imagination and philosophical depth; others dismissed it as morbid. Over time, it would come to define an entire genre.

Life After Frankenstein

Tragedy continued to shape Mary’s life. Her half-sister and close friend both died by suicide, and in 1822, Percy Shelley drowned in a boating accident off the coast of Italy. Mary was twenty-four and left alone with their only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley.

In the years after her husband’s death, she turned to writing both to support herself and to process her grief. Although Frankenstein remained her most famous work, she produced a series of thoughtful novels that explored love, loss, and resilience.

Her 1826 novel The Last Man imagined a future world devastated by plague and isolation. It was one of the earliest works of post-apocalyptic fiction, though it was not widely appreciated at the time. Critics found it bleak and strange, but modern readers see it as visionary.

Other novels, such as Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837), examined family relationships, morality and the struggles of women in a society that constrained them. These works never achieved the fame of Frankenstein, but they showed Mary’s range as a writer and her commitment to moral and emotional truth.

She also wrote essays, short stories, and travel books such as Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844), which revealed her sharp observation and political awareness.

A Quiet Strength

Mary Shelley lived through loss that would have broken many. She buried her mother, children, husband and several close friends before reaching middle age. Yet she continued to write, edit and advocate for the preservation of her husband’s poetry.

She was respected but not wealthy, admired by some but underestimated by many. Victorian society still viewed her through the lens of Frankenstein and her association with Percy Shelley. She worked tirelessly to establish her own reputation, even as she battled poor health.

Illness and Final Years

In her later years, Mary suffered from severe headaches and episodes of paralysis, possibly caused by a brain tumour. These conditions made writing increasingly difficult. Despite this, she continued to correspond with friends and literary figures, and remained devoted to her son.

She died in London in 1851, aged fifty-three. Her son and daughter-in-law buried her in St Peter’s Church, Bournemouth, near the remains of her parents.

Among her belongings, they found a small parcel wrapped in silk containing her late husband’s heart.

The Enduring Influence of Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley’s life was extraordinary: part love story, part tragedy, part revolution in thought. She gave the world one of its most haunting stories, written at a time when women were rarely allowed to speak, let alone create monsters.

Her work bridged the Romantic and modern eras, asking what it means to be human in a world reshaped by science. More than two centuries later, Frankenstein still feels alive, a story that refuses to die, just like the creature she imagined on that stormy night by the lake.

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The Insatiable Greed of the Ultra-Rich: When Billions Aren’t Enough

Connor Banks
Feb 17
2 min read

In today’s world, the sheer amount of wealth concentrated in the hands of a small group of billionaires is beyond comprehension. Figures like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg command fortunes that stretch well into the hundreds of billions, an amount so vast that even losing 99.999% of their wealth would still leave them among the world’s financial elite. Yet, despite this unimaginable level of prosperity, their hunger for more remains insatiable.

Unfathomable Wealth

To put their wealth into perspective, let’s consider the case of Elon Musk, who currently holds a net worth of approximately $394 billion. If he were to lose 99.999% of his fortune, he would still have $3.94 million, a sum that places him in the top 0.2% of global wealth holders. Similarly, Steve Ballmer, the tenth richest billionaire, would retain $1.45 million if subjected to the same hypothetical loss. These figures highlight the extent to which the world’s billionaires operate in an entirely different financial reality than the rest of us.

For the majority of the global population, accumulating even $1 million is an unattainable dream. Roughly 50% of the world lives with less than $10,000 to their name, while nearly 90% have less than $100,000. This disparity makes it clear that the elite’s definition of financial loss is vastly different from what the average person experiences.

The Greed for More

Despite their astronomical wealth, billionaires continue to chase more profits, tax breaks, and financial leverage. Musk, for example, has aggressively expanded his businesses, cutting costs wherever possible, often at the expense of employees. Jeff Bezos, despite owning Amazon, a trillion-dollar empire, has fought against worker unionisation efforts and resisted wage increases. Even Warren Buffett, a so-called "humble billionaire," actively lobbies against higher corporate taxes. Their actions beg the question: How much wealth is enough?

The Ethics of Hoarding Billions

At what point does wealth accumulation become morally indefensible? If one individual possesses more money than entire nations, yet refuses to pay workers a living wage or contribute fairly to social programmes, should they be celebrated as "self-made success stories" or criticised for unchecked greed?

The argument that billionaires have "earned" their fortunes ignores the fact that their wealth is largely built on the labour of others. Without factory workers, warehouse staff, engineers, and countless others, these billionaires would have nothing. Yet, they often do everything in their power to minimise their financial obligations to those same workers, ensuring that the rich stay rich and the poor remain struggling.

The Bottom Line

The world’s billionaires do not just have wealth, they have too much wealth. And the fact that even losing nearly all of it would still leave them in a financial position stronger than 99% of the population shows just how broken the system is. Yet, their pursuit of even greater riches remains relentless. Whether it’s through tax loopholes, stock manipulations, or labour exploitation, the ultra-rich are never satisfied.

At some point, society must ask: Why do we allow so few people to hoard so much, while so many struggle to survive? Until this question is seriously addressed, the wealth gap will continue to grow, at the expense of billions of people who will never even come close to the wealth these individuals could lose overnight without consequence.