 In her own lifetime , Mary Shelley was taken seriously as a writer , though reviewers often missed her writings ' political edge . After her death , however , she was chiefly remembered as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as the author of Frankenstein . In fact , in the introduction to her letters published in 1945 , editor Frederick Jones wrote , " a collection of the present size could not be justified by the general quality of the letters or by Mary Shelley 's importance as a writer . It is as the wife of [ Percy Bysshe Shelley ] that she excites our interest . " This attitude had not disappeared by 1980 when Betty T. Bennett published the first volume of Mary Shelley 's complete letters . As she explains , " the fact is that until recent years scholars have generally regarded Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as a result : William Godwin 's and Mary Wollstonecraft 's daughter who became Shelley 's Pygmalion . " It was not until Emily Sunstein 's Mary Shelley : Romance and Reality in 1989 that a full @-@ length scholarly biography was published . 
