It is 1797 and Mary Wollstonecraft gives birth to a little girl on August 30. A little girl who would soon be known as Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley was a prominent literary figure of the Romantic era of English literature. She was the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. From her childhood, Marie was treated as a unique person. William Godwin believed that babies were born with potential waiting to be developed (Poetry for Students, 337). Therefore, Marie was surrounded by famous philosophers, writers and poets from a young age. At the age of sixteen, Mary ran away to live with twenty-one-year-old Percy Shelley (337). But there was only one problem: Percy was married. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein during the summer of 1816, while staying on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Mary was only nineteen at the time. She wrote the novel while overwhelmed by a series of difficulties in her life. The worst of these were the suicides of his half-sister, Fanny Imlay, and Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet (Student Handbook, 190). After these deaths, Mary and Percy married. Fierce public hostility towards the couple led them to Italy. Eventually they were happy in Italy, but their two children, William and Clara Shelley, died there. Mary never really got over their deaths. However, Percy gave Mary the power to live as she most desired. In 1822, Percy drowned in a boating accident, leaving Mary penniless. During her later years, she worked as a professional writer to support her father and son. She died in 1851 of a brain tumor. Mary Shelley combined the ethical concerns of her parents with the romantic sensibilities of Percy Shelley's poetic inclinations. His father's concern for the disadvantaged influenced his depiction of the poverty-stricken De Lacey family. Mary's choice of a Gothic novel made her unique in her family and assured her place as an author in the Romantic period. The Romantics believed that the creative imagination revealed nobler truths, feelings, and unique attitudes than could be discovered through logic or scientific examination. Mary Shelley showed this in her book Frankenstein. She expressed what she felt and everything she was going through in different parts of Frankenstein. Frankenstein reflected Mary Shelley's deepest fears and insecurities, such as her inability to prevent the deaths of her children, her distressed marriage to a man who showed no mercy for the deaths of his daughters. , and his feelings of inadequacy as a writer.