The movie gets most things right, though. Shelley was born to two of England's most prominent philosophers , each imbued with a revolutionary streak they passed on to their daughter. William Godwin, her father, founded philosophical anarchism; Mary Wollstonecraft, her mother, was an early feminist who wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Women . Shelley never got to know her mother — she died 11 days after childbirth, leaving Shelley and her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay (who's not in the movie at all), to William. For her dreaminess, Shelley was never quite accepted by her father's second wife. She was, from a young age, a writer like her parents. In the introduction to Frankenstein , Shelley wrote, "As a child, I scribbled; and my favorite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to 'write stories.'"