Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Published in January 1798, Godwin's account of Wollstonecraft's life is wracked with sorrow and, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, unusually frank for its time.

[5] He did not shrink from presenting the parts of Wollstonecraft's life that late eighteenth-century British society would judge either immoral or in bad taste, such as her close friendship with a woman, her love affairs, her illegitimate child, her suicide attempts and her agonizing death.

[6][7] In the "Preface", Godwin explains: I cannot easily prevail on myself to doubt, that the more fully we are presented with the picture and story of such persons as the subject of the following narrative, the more generally shall we feel in ourselves an attachment to their fate and a sympathy in their excellencies.

[7]Joseph Johnson, the publisher to both Wollstonecraft and Godwin (and through whom the couple met), tried to dissuade the memoirist from including explicit details regarding her life, but he refused.

[9] Godwin's openness was not always appreciated by the people he named; Wollstonecraft's sisters, Everina and Eliza, lost students at the school they ran in Ireland as a result of the Memoir.

"[11] The review surveys Wollstonecraft's entire life and indicts almost every element of it, from her efforts to care for Fanny Blood, her close friend, to her writings.