Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was born in London, to her father the writer William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, an influential social campaigner who died 11 days after the birth of her daughter. Mary's early life was unconventional and by the age of 16 she eloped with the then-married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Amongst their friends were Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Lord Byron, the latter of whom offered the challenge to Mary to write a ghost story which later became Frankenstein.

Dr. Sarah Faulkner (Introduction) is a lecturer in English at the University of Washington in Seattle. She researches how nineteenth-century print culture and authorship practices shaped women’s novels and public personas. She has organized multiple public humanities events celebrating Romantic women writers, including Jane Austen and Mary Shelley – in 2018 she coordinated Frankenreads at UW, an interdisciplinary event celebrating the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein.