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Michael Rossington, "Sacred Monuments: Mary Shelley's Lives of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft"

1 Mary Shelley's Literary Lives and Other Writings, 4 vols. general editor Nora Crook, consulting editor Pamela Clemit, editors Clarissa Campbell-Orr, Tilar Mazzeo, Arnold Markley and Lisa Vargo (Pickering & Chatto, forthcoming). Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols. (Pickering & Chatto, 1993), v. Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, 292.
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2 Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, ed. Mark Philp, 7 vols. (Pickering & Chatto, 1993), v. Educational and Literary Writings, ed. Pamela Clemit, 292 (hereafter PPWG).
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3 PPWG, 295.
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4 She read Stewarton's anonymously published The Female Revolutionary Plutarch, 3 vols. (John Murray, 1806) on 20 and 21 Nov. 1814. See The Journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert (1987; Johns Hopkins UP, 1995), 46 (hereafter MWSJ).
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5 Godwin read Louvet's Narrative of the Dangers to which I have been Exposed, since the 31st of May, 1793 (Joseph Johnson, 1795) in August 1795 (see Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker, 'Introduction', William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman' [Broadview, 2001] 21 n.1). For Wollstonecraft's part in its publication, see Gregory Dart, Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (Cambridge UP, 1999), 123.
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6 MWSJ, 479.
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7 Emily W. Sunstein states that Godwin "taught Mary to read and spell her name by having her trace her mother's inscription on the stone." Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (1989; Johns Hopkins UP, 1991) 26.
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8 See Godwin, Memoirs, 120.
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9 Lives of the Great Romantics III, vol. 1 William Godwin, ed. Pamela Clemit (Pickering & Chatto, 1999), 89.
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10 I am grateful to Pamela Clemit and Arnold Markley for permitting me to cite from their transcription of Bod. MS. Abinger Dep. c. 532/8, two unnumbered leaves and fol. 2 (c). Their edition of the Life will be published in Mary Shelley's Literary Lives and Writings (see note 1).
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11 Paradise Lost, vii 25-6.
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12 William Godwin, ed., Posthumous Works of the Author of 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,' 4 vols. (Joseph Johnson, 1798), iii 90.
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13 Posthumous Works, iii 128-9.
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14 "The Shelleys continued to read Wollstonecraft as they travelled, perhaps to affirm Mary Shelley's Wollstonecraftian choice of partner." The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, ed. Nora Crook with Pamela Clemit, consulting editor Betty T. Bennett, 8 vols. (Pickering & Chatto, 1996), viii Travel Writing, ed. Jeanne Moskal, 25 n.c.
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15 Godwin comments that in the summer of 1796 Wollstonecraft "had meditated a tour to Italy or Switzerland, and knew not how soon she should set out with that view," Memoirs, 104.
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16 Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France, 2 vols. (Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, and John Taylor, 1838-9), ii 277.
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17 Lodore, ed. Lisa Vargo (Broadview, 1997), 316 n.2.
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18 Anne K. Mellor puts it thus: "Mary Shelley cannot tell us Fanny's story because in her experience, that story has not yet been lived. Fanny Derham embodies a female potentiality that Mary Wollstonecraft had described, and her presence in the novel is Mary Shelley's homage to her mother's radical feminist convictions." Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (Routledge, 1988), 208.
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19 Lodore, 448.
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20 Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal, 3 vols. (Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longmans, and John Taylor, 1835), ii 206.
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21 LIii 333.
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22 LIi 134.
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23 LFii 165.
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24 LIi 256.
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25 Lives of the Great Romantics III, vol. 1 William Godwin, 85.
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26 Ibid., 96.
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27 Ibid., 97.
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28 MWSJ, 554.
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29 Ibid., 444-5.
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30 Ibid., 543.
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31 The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, xxii, Part II, ed. Alan M. Weinberg (Garland, 1997) 280-1.
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32 The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols. (Johns Hopkins UP, 1980-8), iii 241.
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