Miranda Seymour is a novelist and biographer. Her fiction includes Carrying On and The Reluctant Devil. She has written acclaimed lives of Henry James, Ottoline Morrell and Robert Graves, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Visiting Professor in English Studies at the University of Nottingham Trent. This extract is taken from her biography, Mary Shelley (John Murray, £25 in UK), published last month.
The daughter of 18th-century radicals, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley fell in love with the 21-year-old Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley when she was 16 years old, and ran away with him to France. The pair spent time on the continent with kindred spirits such as Lord Byron. Mary Shelley's enduring Gothic creation, Frankenstein, was published in 1818, when she was 21. Mary had one surviving child with Shelley: Percy Florence.