Both had moved to France during the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft to practise the principles laid out in her seminal work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Imlay to engage in speculative business ventures. 1797) įanny Wollstonecraft was the daughter of the British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the American entrepreneur Gilbert Imlay. She became increasingly isolated from her family and died by suicide in 1816. Fanny, left behind, bore the brunt of her stepmother's anger. The teenage Mary and Claire escaped by running off to the Continent with Shelley in 1814. The Godwin household became an increasingly uncomfortable place to live as tensions rose and debts mounted.

Wollstonecraft's daughters resented the new Mrs Godwin and the attention she paid to her own daughter. After falling in love with and marrying Godwin, Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth in 1797, leaving the three-year-old Fanny in the hands of Godwin, along with their newborn daughter Mary.įour years later, Godwin remarried and his new wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, brought two children of her own into the marriage, most significantly Claire Clairmont. In an attempt to revive their relationship, Wollstonecraft travelled to Scandinavia on business for him, taking the one-year-old Fanny with her, but the affair never rekindled. Fanny's half-sister Mary grew up to write Frankenstein and married Percy Bysshe Shelley, a leading Romantic poet, who composed a poem on Fanny's death.Īlthough Gilbert Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft lived together happily for brief periods before and after the birth of Fanny, he left Wollstonecraft in France in the midst of the Revolution. Fanny grew up in the household of anarchist political philosopher William Godwin, the widower of her mother, with his second wife Mary Jane Clairmont and their combined family of five children. Wollstonecraft wrote about her frequently in her later works. Frances Imlay ( – 9 October 1816), also known as Fanny Godwin and Frances Wollstonecraft, was the illegitimate daughter of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the American commercial speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay.

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