It’s the birthday of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851), best known as the author of Frankenstein, though some feel that her best writing was her nonfiction and at least one source claims that her novel The Last Man (1826) was her best work.

Shelley was born in London, England, to two famous people: Mary Wollstonecraft, a radical writer who propounded women’s rights, and William Godwin, a writer and philosopher. Wollstonecraft died shortly after giving birth to their daughter, and several years later Godwin remarried to provide Shelley with an evil stepmother. (Okay, maybe not his motive, but that’s how it worked out.) Shelley and her stepmother both competed for Godwin’s love and attention, and the stepmother eventually shipped the teenaged Shelley off to Scotland.

Shelley first met the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1812 (she was about fifteen; he was married) and when they met again two years later, they ran off to France after just a couple of months’ courtship. They spent six weeks touring the Continent, which resulted in Shelley’s cleverly entitled book, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (1817). In 1816, Percy’s wife committed suicide, leaving the happy couple free to marry at last. (Percy may have also had an affair with Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. He believed in free love which means this doesn’t count as cheating.)

Backing up: a few months earlier in 1816, the Shelleys were hanging out in Geneva with Lord Byron and a couple others (Claire Clairmont, who had a doomed affair with Byron, and Dr. John William Polidori), and according to Shelley’s own account, Lord Byron suggested everyone write a ghost story. Shelley wrote a short story that eventually became the novel Frankenstein, which was published in 1818 and revised in 1831.

On July 8, 1822, Percy Shelley drowned in a sudden storm in the Gulf of Spezia (near Lerici, Italy), and Shelley was plunged into grief. She now wrote as much to support herself and their one surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley, as for literary reasons. (I’m sorry: Florence? Really?) Shelley received some limited support from her father-in-law, Sir Timothy, but things weren’t cozy between them, as Sir Timothy had never approved of his son’s shenanigans (a bohemian lifestyle, free love, and like that). Eventually Shelley’s son by his first wife died and that left Percy Florence Shelley as his sole heir.

In her life, Shelley wrote six novels, highly regarded biographical sketches included in a Cyclopedia series, essays, travel books, and more. She lived to see her son happily married to a woman she got along with and lived with them for several years before she died of brain cancer at the age of 53.

Have a pleasant if muted Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.