Wow. The legendary English novelist Mary Shelley led an extremely badass goth life. Not only did she write the Gothic novel Frankenstein, which is considered the first example of sci-fi, but there’s so much more. Here are some extremely goth moments from the life of Mary Shelley:
Source: College Humor
(via: Geek Girls)
Frankenstein is also regarded as a Gothic novel. So perhaps Mary Shelley should be regarded as the inventor of that genre.
The Gothic novel originated with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto a little over 50 years earlier in 1764. It was made most famous in the 1790s by the novels of Ann Radcliffe, which Shelley was definitely familiar with. Jane Austen wrote a Gothic pastiche, Northanger Abbey, around the same time that Shelley wrote Frankenstein due to the ubiquity of Gothic fiction at that time.
Johann Valentin Andreae’s 1616 work The Chemical Wedding is the 1st science fiction novel.