Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) is William Godwin's biography of his wife Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Godwin felt it was his duty to edit and publish Wollstonecraft's unfinished works after her death. A week after her funeral, he started on this project and a memoir of her life. In order to prepare to write the biography, he reread all of her works, spoke with her friends, and ordered and numbered their correspondence. After four months of hard work, he had completed both projects. According to William St Clair, who has written a biography of the Godwins and the Shelleys, Wollstonecraft was so famous by this time that Godwin did not have to mention her name in the title of the memoir.

Published in January 1798, Godwin's account of Wollstonecraft's life is wracked with sorrow and, inspired by Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, unusually frank for its time. He did not shrink from presenting the parts of Wollstonecraft's life that late eighteenth-century British society would judge either immoral or in bad taste, such as her close friendship with a woman, her love affairs, her illegitimate child, her suicide attempts and her agonizing death. In the "Preface", Godwin explains:

I cannot easily prevail on myself to doubt, that the more fully we are presented with the picture and story of such persons as the subject of the following narrative, the more generally shall we feel in ourselves an attachment to their fate and a sympathy in their excellencies. There are not many individuals with whose character the public welfare and improvement are more intimately connected than the author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Godwin's openness was not always appreciated by the people he named or by Wollstonecraft's sisters. Everina and Eliza ran a school in Ireland and they lost students as a result of the Memoir.

Joseph Johnson, Wollstonecraft's life-long friend and the book's publisher, tried to dissuade Godwin from including explicit details regarding her life, but he refused. However, the book was heavily criticized and Godwin was forced to revise it for a second edition in August of the same year. Rarely published in the nineteenth century and sparingly even today, Memoirs is most often viewed as a source for information on Wollstonecraft. However, with the rise of interest in biography and autobiography as important genres in and of themselves, scholars are increasingly studying it for its own sake.

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