Short answers, pulled from the story.
Mary Shelley wrote the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and the novels Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). She also wrote the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and contributed multiple volumes of biographical essays to Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia between 1829 and 1846.
Mary Shelley conceived the idea for Frankenstein during a summer stay near Lake Geneva in 1816. After a late-night conversation at Lord Byron's Villa Diodati about whether a corpse could be reanimated, she experienced a vivid waking dream that she later described as the genesis of the novel. Astronomer Donald Olson concluded in 2011 that the dream occurred between two and three in the morning on the 16th of June 1816.
Mary Shelley stated that she owed Percy "not the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling", though she credited his encouragement as essential. Percy wrote the preface to the 1818 first edition and made corrections to the manuscript. Fiona Sampson, after examining the Frankenstein notebooks at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, concluded in her 2018 book In Search of Mary Shelley that Percy did less than a line editor working today would do.
Mary Shelley's father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher and women's rights advocate who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever eleven days after Mary was born.
Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio, Italy. He had departed Livorno on the 8th of July 1822 with Edward Ellerker Williams and an eighteen-year-old boat boy named Charles Vivian. Three bodies washed ashore ten days after the storm, and Percy's body was cremated on the beach at Viareggio by Trelawny, Byron, and Leigh Hunt.
Mary Shelley died on the 1st of February 1851 at Chester Square, London, at the age of fifty-three. Her physician suspected a brain tumour; she had suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis from 1839 onward, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing. She was buried at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth.