Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was born in London, to her father the writer William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. 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.