ABSTRACT
In the opening of his poem, Richard Polwhele, a literary clergyman struggling to maintain his growing family on the low income from several small Cornish parishes, invites his readers to share his conservative, anti-feminist, ideology. The poem begins by deploring the condition into which its author sees young women as having descended. The phrase used by Godwin to describe Mary's relationship with Imlay – ‘that species of connection for which her heart secretly panted’ – was unfortunate, to say the least. Even worse than Wollstonecraft’s ‘licentious love’, the poet implies, were her suicide attempts. These are viewed as indications that she had ‘broken through all religious restraints’.
