Frankenstein

About Mary Shelley

Jeanette Winterson (Afterword by) Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. Adopted by Pentecostal parents she was raised to be a missionary. This did and didn't work out. Discovering early the power of books she left home at sixteen to live in a Mini and get on with her education. After graduating from Oxford University she worked for a while in the theatre and published her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and two previous collections of short stories as well as children's books non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields London.Mary Shelley (Author) Mary Shelley was born in London on 30 August 1797. Her mother the celebrated feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft died a few days after her birth.Her father William Godwin a well-known anarchist and atheist writer tutored Mary. In 1814 when she was sixteen she fell in love with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and they eloped to France. In 1816 the couple travelled to Lake Geneva to spend the summer with the poet Byron. Mary was inspired to write Frankenstein after Byron arranged a ghost story competition during their stay. In the autumn of 1816 Shelley's pregnant wife drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park and Shelley immediately married Mary. The couple had four children together but only one son survived infancy. They lived in Italy until Percy's death in a boating accident in 1822. Mary continued to write until her death in London on 1 February 1851. She is buried in Bournemouth.