Mary Shelley
The life of Mary Shelley provides fascinating reading, especially to girls. Born to radical intellectuals. Mary grew up during Britain`s High Romantic Era. which was captured in the feverish visions of William Blake. the fire and brimstone epics of Milton, and the exquisite laudanum-laced poetics of Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The daughter of independent thinkers -- famed feminist and author Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher novelist William Godwin -- Mary was taught to embrace the original, the daring, and the unfamiliar, all of which inspired her ground-breaking debut novel, Frankenstein. Mary`s own life was the very stuff of gothic romance. Conceived in secrecy in a forbidden romance, she was born during a violent storm and, following her mother`s death, made daily visits to her grave and learned to read by tracing the inscription on the mossy gravestone. At just 16 Mary ran away with the rebel poet Shelley. Shockingly, they lived together out of wedlock: he was already married to a woman who committed suicide by drowning. Cast out of society, and abandoned by her once doting father, Mary followed her passions. At age 19 she attended a Fateful party hosted by Lord Byron where he challenged his guests -- the literary brat pack of the day -- to compose a ghost story. While the men quickly lost interest in the project, Mary created Frankenstein, a work that would change the face of English literature. To young adult readers of today, Mary Shelley provides equal doses of inspiration and bone-tingling entertainment. Mary lived a life of tragedy and triumph, and her brilliant literary imaginings foreshadowed contemporary issues raised by genetic engineering,computer advances, bioengineered plagues, and cloning.

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