ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the daughter of Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, shared her parents’ progressive beliefs and values. She was brought up to emulate her father’s career as a public intellectual, in which he exploited different literary genres in order to promote reform through the gradualist means of education and private discussion. In 1823, following the death of her husband, Mary Shelley returned to England to earn her living as a writer. At this time she became personally and professionally closer to Godwin, and their relationship developed into a creative literary partnership, based on shared reformist aims. This chapter presents a passage, the first of two from Mary Shelley’s biographical writings concerning Godwin. The passage shows Mary Shelley’s first attempt to revaluate Godwin as an intellectual whose views are as relevant to the 1830s as to the 1790s.
