Like the real-life heroine of Shelley's Mary, Margaret Carver Leighton grew up in a learned family where history-making ideas were frequently discussed by important scholars. Leighton was bom on December 20, 1896, in Oberlin, Ohio, to Dr. Nixon Carver, a college professor, and his wife, Flora Kirkendall Carver. Early in Leighton's life, her father obtained a position at Harvard University, and Leighton's earliest memories are of the tree-lined streets of Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Like Mary Shelley, Leighton took great pleasure as a young girl in reading, writing, drawing, and attending the theater.

During her father's sabbaticals, Leighton attended schools in France and Switzerland, countries she would revisit when writing Shelley's Mary. Leighton graduated from Radcliffe College in 1918 and served as an army nurse just before World War I ended. While living in Westfield, New Jersey, in the 1930s, she served on the local board of education and...