Mary Shelley's Birthday
Next: August 30, 2027
One stormy night, a new kind of story.
The story
Where it comes from
Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, on 30 August 1797, and this Story marks her birthday. Her parents were two famous thinkers: the philosopher William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, the defender of women's rights, who died days after her birth. She grew up in a lively, bookish household. On a stormy June night in 1816, a ghost-story contest among friends gave her the idea for Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, often called the first true work of science fiction.
How it's celebrated
There is no formal observance. Readers mark the day by opening Frankenstein, a short novel that is quite different from the films it inspired, or by telling their own ghost stories on a dark evening, as she and her friends once did. It is also a good day to think about how much of science fiction began with one young writer's question about what science should and should not do.
Did you know
- At eleven she published a rhymed children's tale, Mounseer Nongtongpaw, in a series from her family's publishing house.
- She finished the first edition of Frankenstein at 19, and it was published anonymously in January 1818.
- The novel was influenced by the electrical experiments of the Italian scientist Luigi Galvani.
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