end of August, and she awaited that event with no misgivings. She had been perfectly strong and well when Fanny was born. She considered women's illness on such occasions due much more to imaginative than to physical causes, and her health through the past few months had been, save for one or two trifling ailments, uncommonly good. There was really no reason for her to fear the consequences. Both she and Godwin looked forward with pleasure to the arrival of their first son, as they hoped the child would prove to be.
She was taken ill early on Wednesday morning, the 30th of August, and sent at once for Mrs. Blenkinsop, matron and midwife to the Westminster Lying-in Hospital. Godwin says that, "influenced by ideas of decorum, which certainly ought to have no place, at least in cases of danger, she determined to have a woman to attend her in the capacity of midwife." But it seems much more in keeping with her character that the engagement of Mrs. Blenkinsop was due, not so much to motives of decorum as to her desire to uphold women in a sphere of action for which she believed them eminently fitted. Godwin went, as usual, to his rooms in the Evesham Buildings. Mary specially desired that he should not remain in the house, and, to reassure him that all was well, she wrote him several notes during the course of the morning.
Finally, in the night of August 30th, 1797, at twenty minutes after eleven, the child—not the William talked of for months, but a daughter, afterwards to be Mrs. Shelley—was born. Godwin was now sitting in the parlour below, waiting the, as he never doubted, happy
