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The most eloquent summary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's position in English letters is still Leigh Hunt's much-quoted couplet from "The Blue-Stocking Revels": "And Shelley, fourfam'd,--for her parents, her lord, / And the poor lone impossible monster abhorr'd." Though recent studies have shown some appreciation of Mary Shelley by her own lights, the four "fames" Hunt mentioned have tended to outshine them. When not known as the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she is recognized as the daughter of the celebrated radical writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the equally well-known novelist and political philosopher William Godwin. Even the sole recognition won by her own efforts, the "monster abhorr'd" of her great novel Frankenstein (1818), is tainted by popular associations with stage and cinema versions of the monster which have little to do with her "Modern Prometheus." Yet this "four-famed" woman was also a skilled editor and critic, an influential travel writer, a literary historian, a devoted mother, and a dabbler in verse as well as in the new genre of the short story.
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