ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the private correspondence between Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays and William Godwin to demonstrate the extent to which both writers were attempting to publicise their personal understanding of this complex woman. Hays's representation of Wollstonecraft inspires her own distinctive brand of feminist philosophy, often subordinated under Godwin and Wollstonecraft's influence in modern criticism. The chapter traces Wollstonecraft's influence on Hays from her early Letters and Essays, which drew on her professional correspondence with Wollstonecraft to formulate a distinctive feminist stance on contemporary issues; to their fictionalisation in Memoirs of Emma Courtney; before intertwining Hays's memorialisation of Wollstonecraft with Godwin's biography of his wife, together with his own fictionalisation of her in St. Leon's Marguerite de Damville. Godwin's Memoirs act primarily as a work of mourning for Wollstonecraft. In St. Leon, Godwin transmutes this mourning into nostalgia for a lost revolutionary moment in his fictional (anti)hero's relationship with the idealised Wollstonecraftian figure in the novel, Marguerite de Damville.
