Mary Shelly: Frankenstein's Creator: The First Science Fiction Writer

Mary Shelley, daughter of feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and philosopher William Godwin, lived a life that seems lifted from the pages of the gothic romances that would someday make her immortal. Born during a violent storm, cast from British society at age sixteen, she was abandoned by her father for running away with the rebel poet Percy Bysse Shelley. When she was just nineteen, Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein--the world's first work of science fiction and a novel that would change the face of English literature.

Joan Kane Nichols writes biographies for young adults, specializing in historical figures and women in the arts. The New York Public Library named Mary Shelley: Frankenstein’s Creator a Notable Book for Teens. Last summer she was awarded a scholarship to Deborah Martinson’s biography workshop at the Norman Mailer Writers Colony in Provincetown. Nichols is also a fiction writer who last year won a Money for Women/Barbara Deming award.

A former New Yorker, she lives in Philadelphia and is working on a novel, Required Reading, and a YA biography of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. Other YA projects in the pipeline include Jenny Lind’s whirlwind American tour with P. T. Barnum, a teenage Revolutionary War soldier imprisoned by the British, women artists and their self-portraits, and the life of H. D. Thoreau.