Mary Shelley

Played by Lili Miller

"You didn't want to be this way. They hurt you, this modern Prometheus. You loved once. And were loved in return. You do not wish to kill"

First Regular Appearance

The Haunting of Villa Diodati

A pioneer of science fiction, Mary Shelley was a writer and political radical born in the 18th century. She was married to the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The idea for her most well-known novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, came to her during a stay with friends at the Villa Diodati in Geneva, Switzerland.

The Thirteenth Doctor and her friends arrived at the Villa Diodati during a thunderstorm. There they met Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, John Polidori and Claire Clairemont, but found that Percy Shelley was missing. A lone, dishevelled Cyberman was revealed to be the cause of this, along with the Cyberium – a terrible device which caused Percy to disappear and the villa itself to shapeshift. 

Brave and exceptionally intelligent, Mary Shelley was an excellent ally to the Doctor – so much so that she also travelled extensively with the Eighth Doctor in an alternate timeline. In recent years, her other works (Valperga and The Last Man, among others) have been celebrated alongside the ever-enduring Frankenstein.