Mary Shelley: The Teenage Rebel Who Invented Science Fiction

Celebrating Women's History Month with a badass a day. Rudy Martinez

Let’s talk about Mary Shelley. Not the sanitized, “let’s-pretend-she-was-a-demure-lady-writer” version of her, but the real Mary—the one who ran off with a married poet at 16, wrote one of the most iconic novels in history at 18, and spent the rest of her life being a total icon.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Shelley) was born in 1797 to two of the m…