After so much time spent in painful labour, to arrive at once at the summit of my desires, was the most gratifying consummation of my toils. But this discovery was so great and so overwhelming, that all the steps by which I had been progressively led to it were obliterated, and I beheld only the result.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, born this day in 1797, was the English Romantic novelist best known as the author of Frankenstein (1818), which recounts the consequences that arise after a scientist builds a human being.