made upon her character since her death have been too widely known to be ignored, but the Life which follows may serve for their refutation.
As a rule, the notices which were published after she was dead were harsher and more uncompromising than those written during her lifetime. There were happily one or two exceptions. The writer of her obituary in the Monthly Magazine for September, 1797, speaks of her in terms of unlimited admiration, but it is more than probable that it was written by a personal friend. A year later the same magazine, in its semi-annual retrospect of British literature, expressed somewhat altered opinions. The notice in the Gentleman's Magazine for October, 1797, the month after her death, was friendly, but guarded in its praise.
In 1798 Godwin published his Memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft, together with her posthumous writings. He hoped, no doubt, by a clear statement of the principal incidents of her life to moderate the popular feeling against her. But he was the last person to have undertaken the task. Outside the small circle of friends and sympathisers who really loved him, he was by no means popular. There were some who even seemed to think that the greatest hardship of Mary's life was to have been his wife. Thus Roscoe, after reading the Memoir, expressed the sentiments it aroused in him in the following lines:—
Hard was thy fate in all the scenes of life,
As daughter, sister, mother, friend, and wife;
But harder still thy fate in death we own,
Thus mourned by Godwin with a heart of stone.
Moreover, Godwin's views about marriage, as set forth in his Political Justice, were held in such abhorrence
