The author Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley was born in England as the daughter of the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the radical philosopher and author William Godwin. As a 19 year old she ran away with the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and for several years they lived in Italy in close company with Lord Byron. Mary Shelley's life was surrounded by several dramatic deaths. Her mother died in the sequel of her birth, three of her four children died at tender age, and her husband died in a drowning-accident in 1822. After the death of her husband Mary Shelley returned with her son to England. Biographical research holds that the early loss of her mother gave rise to a constant longing for a supporting parent and an idealization of the bourgeois family which in different ways are reflected in her work. Shelley's authorship was permeated by strong ties to her parents, and she carried on their social reformist ideas. Mary Wollstonecraft's most famous work is "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), and Shelley continued the philosophical and literary visions initiated by her mother. Shelley did not call herself a feminist but pointed out in a famous newspaper article that she "ever befriended women when oppressed".