Happy Birthday Mary Shelley!

      Mary Shelley was born August 30, 1797; she was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein.
      She began writing what she assumed would be a short story while summering in Switzerland with her family. Shelley expanded this tale into her first novel, Frankenstein, published in 1818 at the age of 20. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life".
      In her own lifetime, Mary Shelley was taken seriously as a writer, though reviewers often missed her writings' political edge. After her death, however, she was chiefly remembered as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as the author of Frankenstein.Scholars now consider Mary Shelley to be a major figure in the Romantic movement, significant for her literary achievement and her political voice as a woman and a liberal.