About the Authors

Mary Shelley was born in London on 17 August 1797. Her mother, the celebrated feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, died a few days after her birth. In 1814, when she was sixteen, she fell in love with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and they eloped to France. In 1816 the couple travelled to Lake Geneva to spend the summer with the poet Byron. Mary was inspired to write Frankenstein after Byron arranged a ghost story competition during their stay. In the autumn of 1816 Shelley's pregnant wife drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park and Shelley immediately married Mary. The couple had four children together but only one son survived infancy. They lived in Italy until Percy's death in a boating accident in 1822. Mary continued to write until her death in London on 1 February 1851. She is buried in Bournemouth.

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up by strict Pentecostal Evangelist parents, which provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press. Her novels include The Powerbook, Art and Lies and Written on the Body and she has written two books for children: The King of Capri and Tanglewreck. She lives in Gloucestershire and London

Jeanette Winterson

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Mary Shelley

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