Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft died in September 1797 of an infection contracted giving birth to her second daughter. By the end of January her husband had written her life and put it into print, refusing to soften any of it. Godwin traces her childhood under a violent, failing father, her friendship with Fanny Blood, the school she ran at Newington Green, her work for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, and her years in France during the Revolution. He also states plainly what polite readers were not meant to hear: her attachment to the married painter Henry Fuseli, her unmarried union with Gilbert Imlay and the daughter it produced, and her two attempts on her own life after he abandoned her. That candour, modelled partly on Rousseau’s Confessions, damaged her reputation for generations. Godwin issued a revised second edition later that year.