Pamela Clemit, "Writing a Revolutionary Life: Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft"

¹ William Roscoe, quoted in Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1974; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 288.
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² Godwin, diary, Abinger MSS, Dep. e. 203. (I am grateful to Lord Abinger for permission, granted through the Bodleian Library, to consult and quote materials from the Abinger Collection.) The friend was James Marshall; on Carlisle's tending of Wollstonecraft, see William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2001), 117-20.
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³ Godwin to Carlisle, 15 Sept. 1797, Memoirs, 161-62.
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⁴ Godwin, diary, Abinger MSS, Dep. e. 203.
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⁵ For a fuller statement of the arguments developed in this essay, see my portion of Clemit and Walker, "Introduction," Memoirs, 11-24. (I am grateful to Broadview Press for permission to reprint a version.)
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⁶ For details, see Memoirs, 169-84.
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⁷ Robert Southey to William Taylor, 1 July 1804, A Memoir of the Life and Writings of William Taylor of Norwich, ed. J. W. Robberds, 2 vols. (London: John Murrary, 1824), I, 507.
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⁸ For details, see Alice Wexler, "Afterword [Emma Goldman, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Ruth Benedict]," Feminist Studies, 7:1 (1981), 113-33, rpt. in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Carol H. Poston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975, 2nd edn., 1988), 257-67.
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⁹ Ruth Benedict, "Mary Wollstonecraft," An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict, ed. Margaret Mead (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), 491, 495.
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¹⁰ Virginia Woolf, "Four Figures," rpt. in The English Common Reader, 2nd series (London: Hogarth Press, 1932), 163.
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¹¹ Godwin, "Essay of History and Romance," Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, gen. ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1993), V, 292-95. (Hereafter PPWG.)
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¹² From 1789 to 1804 Godwin worked intermittently on a translation of Rousseau's Confessions (never completed or published); in 1797 and 1798 he re-read Confessions and Reveries of the Solitary Walker (Godwin's diary, Abinger MSS, Dep. e. 197, Dep. e. 200, Dep. e. 205, Dep. e. 207, Dep. e. 203).
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¹³ Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols. (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1989), I, 96 (hereafter WMW); Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 118-38.
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¹⁴ Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1986), 27-132.
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¹⁵ Ronald Grimsley, Rousseau and the Religious Quest (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 40-45; Dart, 48-59.
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¹⁶ See I. B. Johnson to Godwin, 13 Nov. 1797, Memoirs, 165-67, and Tomalin, 156-82.
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¹⁷ For details, see Blum, 139-43, and Dart, 127-30. According to his diary, Godwin read An Appeal to Impartial Posterity, by Citizenness Roland, 2 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1795), and Narrative of the Dangers to which I have been Exposed, since the 31st of May, 1793 [. . .] By John Baptiste Louvet (London: J. Johnson, 1795), in Sept. 1795 and Aug. 1795 respectively (Abinger MSS, Dep. e. 202).
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¹⁸ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 21.
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¹⁹ Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 803-04. For a different view, see Janet Todd, "Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Death," Gender, Art and Death (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 102-19.
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²⁰ Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, WMW I, 116; see also Mitzi Myers, "Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft: The Shaping of Self and Subject," Studies in Romanticism 20 (Fall 1981), 313-16.
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²¹ See Memoirs, 208; cf. Godwin, Thoughts: Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr Parr's Spital Sermon, PPWG II, 179.
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