While for generations critics considered the fact that she was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley to be the most interesting thing about her, and most modern readers only meet her best-known work, Mary Shelley's Gothic short stories and novellas are ripe for revisiting. One of the finest in her oeuvre, The Mortal Immortal is every inch as powerful and chilling as when it was written.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) was an English novelist, remembered for her 1818 Gothic novel Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She was the daughter of writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and her name is inextricably linked to that of her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whose works she was involved with editing. In large part due to writing Frankenstein, but also for the novellas and short stories, including Transformation and The Mortal Immortal, she left behind, Shelley is considered one of the founders of the science-fiction genre.