Mary Shelley was born in London in 1797, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, famous radical writers of the day. In 1814 she met and soon fell in love with the then-unknown Percy Bysshe Shelley. In December 1816, after Shelley's first wife committed suicide, Mary and Percy married. They lived in Italy from 1818 until 1822, when Shelley drowned, whereupon Mary returned to London to live as a professional writer of novels, stories, and essays until her death in 1851.
Daniel Cook (editor, introduction) is a professor of English at the University of Dundee. He is the author of five books, including, most recently, Gulliver's Afterlives (Bloomsbury, 2026), Frankenstein Retold (Bloomsbury, 2025) and Walter Scott and Short Fiction (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). He has also edited or co-edited multiple essay collections and critical editions, such as Austen After 200, The Cambridge Companion to Gulliver's Travels and The Afterlives of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. Along with Sharon Ruston he is a general editor of the forthcoming Oxford Complete Works of Mary Shelley.
