Mary Shelley is one of the most significant female British authors in the nineteenth century. Today, she is famous for being the author of Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, but she also published eight more books after Frankenstein and more than 50 short stories and essays. She wrote biographical sketches and edited and introduced the work of her husband, Percy Shelley, to the reading public. Stylistically, she broke conventions and stretched Romantic literary genres to accommodate new themes and ideas. She wrote novels set in her own time, historical novels, and a dystopian futuristic novel that predicted many of the tragedies we face today. She also published short biographies that explored the lives of women, even though she was ostensibly writing the lives of famous literary men. Taken as a whole, her work represents a remarkable commitment to social reform and women’s independence. The daughter of the radical political philosopher, Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she was dedicated to living and writing according to her mother’s ideals. Like Wollstonecraft, she fought to overcome the prejudices of the time, breaking with convention by running away with the already married Percy and bearing children out of wedlock. She carved out a life for herself as a writer, supporting herself and her family as a writer during a time when middle-class white women were supposed to be wives and mothers, not independent authors.