Mary Shelley

At 18 years old, Mary Shelley, daughter of British intellectuals and wife of a famous author, wrote science fiction’s precursory novel.

One evening, while telling horror stories with Lord Byron and a group of friends, the author imagined the misadventures of a doctor determined to create life, and thus was born the period’s most popular aberration, Frankenstein. The novel was published in 1818. It was the first time in history that a monster had been created by man, and not as a result of a legend or myth.

There are few female authors in the world of science fiction even today, but the fact that her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a famous feminist, makes her incursion into a predominantly male-dominated genre a bit easier to understand.