Mary Shelley

Mary Shelley shines through a Sun in Virgo, the sign that expresses itself not through the limelight but through the patient, intricate labour of the intellect and the hand. Virgo is the marriage of Sun and Mercury, the meticulous craftswoman who masters her material, and she poured that principled diligence into Frankenstein, one of the founding works of science fiction, then into novels, histories, travel writing and the devoted editing of her husband's poetry. Set in the fourth house, her solar light glowed at the family hearth: home, lineage and inheritance were the ground she stood on, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Her Moon in Sagittarius reveals a psyche that found peace only in freedom, ideas and the open road, the born philosopher forever expanding her horizons; placed in the sixth house of service and health, that restless mind was also a worried, exacting one. Her Cancer Ascendant gave the tender, lunar, guarded mask of the nurturer.

An English novelist born in 1797, she conceived Frankenstein one storm-lashed summer near Geneva, survived the loss of husband and children, and died of a brain tumour in 1851, aged fifty-three.