Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797, in London, England. She was the daughter of William Godwin, political theorist, novelist and editor, and Mary Wollstonecraft, writer and early feminist thinker, who died of puerperal fever 10 days after her daughter's birth. As a child, Mary had little formal education. and was taught by her father, but nevertheless, Mary Godwin received an unusual and advanced education for a girl of the time. For six months in 1811 she also attended boarding school at Ramsgate and, soon after, was sent to live with the family of the radical William Baxter, near Dundee, Scotland, in June 1812. Mary Godwin embraced her spacious new surroundings of the house of Baxter and the company of her four daughters, and she returned n...