ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with the events that took place immediately after Mary Wollstonecraft's demise. The full extent of Godwin’s anguish following the death of Wollstonecraft, his wife of only six months, can be deduced from what he did not say. His diary contains simply a date and time, followed by three lines of dashes. Three days after her funeral, he began sorting out her letters and papers, having established himself in her study with Opie’s portrait of her hanging over the fireplace. Within two weeks of her death he had begun writing the story of her life, evidently the only way he could handle his grief. Public reaction to the Memoirs, and to the four volumes of Wollstonecraft’s Posthumous Works which Godwin edited and brought out at the same time, was harsh. Surprised and shocked by the violence of the reactions, Godwin revised the Memoirs.
