The year is 1797 and Mary Wollstonecraft gives birth to a baby girl on August 30. A baby girl soon to be known as Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley was a prominent literary figure during the Romantic Era of English Literature. She was the only child of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. From infancy Mary was treated as a unique individual. William Godwin believed that babies were born with potential waiting to be developed (Poetry for Students, 337). Therefore, surrounded Mary with famous philosophers, writers, and poets, from an early age. At the age of sixteen Mary ran away to live with the twenty-one year old Percy She