first edition
1798 · London
by (WOLLSTONECRAFT) GODWIN, William
London: Johnson, 1798. First Edition. 8vo, pp. (ii), 199 + leaf of errata. Lacks the half-title but with the final leaf of advertising. Bound with the engraved frontispiece portrait by Heath after Opie. (some off-setting from the portrait on the title-page) Former owner: C. M. Smith, 1847 ownership signature on the title page, early magazine review tipped to the end paper (another laid in). Bound in modern morocco backed marble boards, untrimed. A very nice clean copy. St. Clair p. 521; Tinker 1081; CBEL II, 1250. Scarce. The only contemporary biographical notices of the author of The Vindication of the Rights of Women. After the death of Mary Wollstonecraft from complications of the birth of Mary Godwin Shelley, William Godwin was too stricken to even attend the funeral. Convinced that Wollstonecraft was the most important woman of her time, Godwin, within a week of the funeral, was back at work, editing Wollstonecraft's works and writing a memoir of her life. While the publication of her four volume posthumous works, won her adherents and converts, the more frank Memoirs ... created more shock than adulation. Boldly reversing the conventions of contemporary biography"which normally sought to demonstrate how admirable qualities lead to admirable achievements, the book is a vindication of Mary Wollstonecraft, a vindication of the principles of the Vindication, and an open celebration of the characteristics which writers on women usually mentioned only to deplore. Godwin omitted nothing which seemed relevant to an understanding ... The Memoirs ... marks an important step in the development of the art of biography. Published just before the turn of the century, it has more in common with the poets and novelists of the future than with the moral philosophers and classifiers of the past ... It is the most readable book that Godwin ever wrote. But it is the mark of pioneers to be misunderstood and their reward to be feared. The Memoirs shocked Godwin's contemporaries more than any of his other writings ... `Shameless' was the most charitable description; `lascivious' and `disgusting' were more common ... His careful, loving, and sympathetic passages of descriptions were coarsely summarized in the uncompromising language of sneer, innuendo, and moral indignation. A second `corrected' edition of the Memoirs, which altered the passages that attracted most criticism, was hurriedly prepared and put on sale in the summer of 1798 ... [However] like Lord Byron in 1816, Godwin suddenly found himself the astonished victim of one of the British public's ridiculous fits of morality. [St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, pp. 181-185]. (Inventory #: 56676)