Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died of puerperal fever days after her birth. She eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814 and began Frankenstein at nineteen during the summer of 1816 near Geneva. She later wrote The Last Man (1826) and edited Percy Shelley's poetry after his death in 1822.
“Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow”
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.