Godwin, to publish children's books under the imprint of the Juvenile Library. In 1805 she persuaded Godwin to found a publishing house in her name, M. Still, entering a literary household, she developed a literary pursuit of her own. Godwin's second wife was not of Mary Wollstonecraft's intellectual stature. A son, William, born in 1803, furthered the girl's sense of alienation, and she felt driven to compete, not only with the other children but also with the second Mrs. Godwin's second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, brought her own children, Charles and Jane, into the family, and young Mary felt displaced.

The only memories of her stepmother that Mary recorded are bad ones. In 1801, when little Mary was four, Godwin remarried. Complications from her birth resulted in her mother's death 10 September. On 30 August of that year Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born. When they did, in the summer of 1796, an immediate mutual attraction began, and they were married on 29 March 1797. The toast of radical social circles, the two were bound to meet. Her father, William Godwin, established his preeminence in radical British political thought with his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and won a permanent place in literary history with his novel Caleb Williams (1794), often considered the first English detective novel. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, published the classic manifesto of sexual equality, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). There is some warrant for seeing Mary Shelley as a reflection of her parents, for both mother and father were extraordinary. 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. 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. 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.

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