William Godwin

As Lissa Paul has pointed out, she wrote not long after the appearance in earlier 1794 of the Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy, a progress report on government snooping into private affairs...

Charlotte Smith knew of this work-in-progress on 26 July 1800, when she told Mary Hays how she wished she could help EF with money or moral support. On 31 October 1801 Hays noted that Thomas Underwood

EF , still writing and publishing little books for children, also ran the Juvenile Library (a bookshop) for William and Mary Jane Godwin .

Hamilton, herself a conservative, set about de-demonizing EF 's political reputation. She had good success in persuading her friends that Mrs Fletcher was not the ferocious Democrat she had been represented, and that she neither...

EF 's arrangement is chronological, with original documents printed as they occur or are relevant. Her recall is excellent, her observations and analysis acute, her character-drawing perceptive, and her style pithy. She freely and candidly...

The Critical Review gave the second volume five words: Very good in their way.William Godwin set his difficult stepson Charles Clairmont, aged eleven, to learn ATG 's My Mother...

The novel itself has elements of a spoof on the gothic, a didactic courtship plot, a social satire of the dialogue kind associated with Elizabeth Hamilton and Thomas Love Peacock , a sentimental melodrama, a...

Alexander Hamilton in the Monthly Review felt it necessary to warn its readers that these letters were really a novel. It also judged the Indian sections far less well done than the English ones.

This was her most formative and most famous friendship. She had approached Wollstonecraft after the latter published Vindication of the Rights of Woman early that same year. Wollstonecraft proved a valuable professional mentor. Another relationship...

MH 's preface explains her intention of examining the power of the passions in action, on the model of Godwin 's Caleb Williams. She also compliments Ann Radcliffe . She defends the worth of...

Charles Lamb 's report that MH composed a piece of poetry for the tomb of her former mentor William Godwin was a fantasy, part of a letter written in 1815 which presents events in a...

The title-page quotes Johnson 's Rambler. This novel opens with fashionable and effective abruptness: What can I do? These words, spoken in a low tone, and followed by a heart rending sigh, broke on...

During FH 's early childhood, William Godwin 's diary records almost daily meetings between himself and Thomas Holcroft, often at the Holcrofts' house.

Lady Mountcashel as a girl had had Mary Wollstonecraft as her governess; Wollstonecraft too had been dismissed from this post, though she had preserved her friendship with her pupil Margaret, later Lady Mountcashel. FH 's...

TH knew most of the English radicals of the day. For years before this he had been a particularly close friend of William Godwin , who regarded him as a mentor. The two men saw...