The year is 1797 and Mary Wollstonecraft gives birth to a baby girl on August 30th. A little girl who will soon be known as Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley was a prominent literary figure during the Romantic era of English literature. She was the only daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. From childhood Maria was treated as a unique individual. William Godwin believed that children were born with potential waiting to be developed (Poetry for Students, 337). Therefore, he surrounded Mary with famous philosophers, writers and poets, from an early age. At the age of sixteen Mary ran away to live with twenty-one-year-old Percy Shelley (337). There was only one problem though, Percy was married. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in the summer of 1816, while staying on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Mary was only nineteen at the time. She wrote the novel while overwhelmed by a series of difficulties in her life. The worst were the suicides of his half-sister, Fanny Imlay, and Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet (Student Manual, 190). After these deaths Mary and Percy married. Fierce public hostility towards the couple pushed them to flee to Italy. They were eventually happy in Italy, but their two children William and Clara Shelley died there. Mary never truly recovered from their deaths. However, Percy gave Mary the power to live as she most desired. In 1822 Percy drowned in a boating accident, leaving Mary penniless. For the remaining years she worked as a professional writer to support her father and son. He died in 1851 of a brain tumor. Mary Shelley combined the ethical concerns of her parents with the romantic sensibility of Percy Shelley's poetic inclinations. Her father's concern for the less privileged influenced his description of the poverty-stricken De Lacey family. Mary's choice of a Gothic novel made her unique in her family and secured her place as an author in the Romantic period. Romantics believed that the creative imagination revealed nobler truths, feelings, and unique attitudes than could be discovered by logic or scientific examination. Mary Shelley demonstrated this in her book Frankenstein. He expressed how he felt and everything he was going through in different parts of Frankenstein. Frankenstein reflected Mary Shelley's deepest fears and insecurities, such as her inability to prevent the deaths of her children, her troubled marriage to a man who showed no mercy for the deaths of his daughters. and her feelings of inadequacy as a writer.