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Posthumous, Godwin's Memoirs

In January 1798 Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Although Godwin felt that he was portraying his wife with love, compassion, and sincerity, many readers were shocked that he would reveal Wollstonecraft's illegitimate children, love affairs, and suicide attempts. The Romantic poet Robert Southey accused him of "the want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked" and vicious satires such as The Unsex'd Females were published. Godwin's Memoirs portrays Wollstonecraft as a woman deeply invested in feeling who was balanced by his reason and as more of a religious sceptic than her own writings suggest. Godwin's views of Wollstonecraft were perpetuated throughout the nineteenth century and resulted in poems such as "Wollstonecraft and Fuseli" by British poet Robert Browning and that by William Roscoe which includes the 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 mourn'd by Godwin with a heart of stone.

In 1851, Wollstonecraft's remains were moved by her grandson Sir Percy Shelley, 3rd Baronet, to his family tomb in St Peter's Church, Bournemouth.