ABSTRACT
In his own Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of The Rights of Woman, William Godwin writes as if reading her lightly fictionalized, semiautobiographical travel book had been enough to make him fall romantically in love with her—although this was not, in fact, the case. But Godwin would certainly have been familiar with the story of Mary Wollstonecraft’s desertion by her American lover, Gilbert Imlay, at the time he read them. Godwin was not alone in responding to Letters Written during a Short Residence with the language of love; contemporary reviewers similarly regarded her sorrows as those of a sentimental heroine in distress. The young Robert Southey, for instance, wrote enthusiastically that “She has made me in love with a cold climate, and frost and snow, with a northern moonlight.” Wollstonecraft’s letters seem written as much to keep her own love alive as to make their recipient fall in love.
