Mary Shelley, born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, is a British novelist. She’s mainly known for her masterpiece Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, a gothic novel considered an early example of the science fiction genre. Her father, William Godwin, was a political philosopher and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a philosopher, and a feminist activist. In 1814, she met the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, with whom she got married a few years later. The summer of 1816, the couple, along with Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, went to visit the poet Lord Byron and his physicist Polidori in the Villa Diodati near Geneva. Mary Shelley, who was only 17 at the time, got the idea for her novel Frankenstein this very summer.