[Rarebooks] fa: WILLIAM GODWIN - MEMOIRS OF THE AUTHOR OF A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN 1798 First Ed. (re. Mary Wollstonecraft)

[Ardwight Chamberlain]

Listed now, auction ending Sunday, June 12. More details and images can be found at the URL below or by searching for the seller name arch_in_la. 

http://tinyurl.com/j6efela

Thanks,
Ardwight Chamberlain
Ann Arbor, MI, USA


William Godwin: Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: Printed for J. Johnson; and G. G. and J. Robinson, 1798. FIRST EDITION. Small 8vo (18 cm), untrimmed, in modern 1/4 crimson goatskin and marbled boards; [2], 199, [4] pp.; bound without the half-title page but with the two final leaves of advertisements and errata; portrait frontispiece. ESTC T94267; CBEL II 1250.

William Godwin's famously ill-advised biography of his wife, the writer and pioneering advocate of women's rights, Mary Wollstonecraft, who had died only months before while giving birth to their daughter, the future Mary Shelley. By candidly revealing Wollstonecraft's love affairs, illegitimate child, suicide attempts, and religious unorthodoxy, Godwin was, in the poet Robert Southey's words, "stripping his dead wife naked," and the result was to shatter her reputation beyond repair for almost a century. A fascinating work that reveals as much about its author as it does its subject.

Offsetting and foxing to the frontispiece and title-page, early owner's signature to the title, toning to the untrimmed edges of the text block, otherwise very clean and fresh. A very good copy of a scarce and important title, in a fresh and attractive modern binding. Front endpapers with tipped in clippings from an old bookseller's catalog and the European Magazine of May, 1812; loosely laid in is a later (1866) clipping re. the disappearance of Old St. Pancras churchyard, and the graves of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, to make way for the Midland Railway.