Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley was born on 30 August 1797 and died on 1 February 1851. She was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein. She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. When Mary was four, her father married a neighbour, with whom, as her stepmother, Mary came to have an uneasy relationship.
Frankenstein tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a gruesome, creature in an unconventional scientific experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first edition of the novel was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818, when she was 20. Her name first appeared on the second edition, published in 1823.
The effect of the choice of frozen landscapes such as the North Pole and the Swiss Alps as settings in Frankenstein is that :
It reminds readers of the loneliness and absolute desolation of the characters.