Mary Shelley, daughter of feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin, lived a life that seems lifted from the pages of the gothic romances that would someday make her immortal. Born during a violent storm, cast from British society at age sixteen, she was abandoned by her father for running away with the rebel poet Percy Bysse Shelley. When she was just nineteen, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein--the world"s first work of science fiction and a novel that would change the face of English literature.