Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) wrote, at nineteen, what many regard as the first science-fiction novel: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which turned the anxieties of the new scientific age into enduring myth. She also wrote The Last Man, an early pandemic-apocalypse novel. Daughter of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and wife of the poet Shelley, she gave the genre its first and most durable cautionary figure.