Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Her mother, the philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, died eleven days after her birth. She grew up learning to read partly from the letters on that gravestone, in the household of her father William Godwin, among the most radical thinkers in England.

At sixteen she ran away with the married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Two years later, in the wet summer of 1816 beside Lake Geneva, Byron proposed that the company each write a ghost story. She was eighteen, and could think of nothing for days, until she woke with the image of a student kneeling beside the thing he had assembled. Frankenstein was published anonymously in 1818, and reviewers assumed a man had written it.

The years that followed were relentless. Three of her four children died. Percy drowned off the Italian coast in 1822, when she was twenty-four. She refused to remarry, supported herself and her surviving son by writing novels, stories and biography, and did the work that secured her husband's reputation by editing and annotating his poems.

After her death a desk of hers was opened. Inside, wrapped in a copy of his elegy for Keats, was Percy's heart.