This is the only single-volume edition containing all Wollstonecraft's known correspondence.

The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley reveal a remarkable woman living in a remarkable age. They date from October 1814 - shortly after her elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley - through September 1850, five months before her death. Her correspondents' names are familiar - Shelley himself, Byron, Bulwer-Lytton, Disraeli, General Lafayette, Sir Walter Scott - and the letters abound with anecdotes about such eminent figures as her parents (William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft), Keats, Washington Irving, and Charles and Mary Lamb. Publication of the widely acclaimed three-volume edition of Mary Shelley's letters was completed in 1988, containing all 1,276 of her known extant letters. Now Betty T. Bennett has selected 230 of those letters to give an overview of Mary Shelley's life as she was seeing it, living it, and recording it. Bennett also includes an introductory essay that sketches a portrait of Mary Shelley, her world, and her place in the history of literature and letters.

The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin mirror the relationship of a remarkable literary couple. The correspondence collected here covers the period from July 13, 1796, to August 30, 1797, when "their friendship turned to romance, their romance to passion, their passion to consummation, their affair to a highly unconventional marriage during which they lived far enough apart to permit the continuing exchange of letters. Wardle, a superb editor, provides just enough annotation to allow the relationship to unfold by itself through the correspondence of these two doctrinaire rationalists, who both came late to love. . . . [Godwin & Mary] is the easiest, certainly the most delightful introduction to the life and prose of Mary Wollstonecraft."--Ellen Moers, New York Review of Books :Taken together, these letters help us to trace out the personal and domestic relations of Mary and Godwin at first hand, and they also throw a good deal of light on the contrasting characters of the pair. Professor Wardle's annotations are most helpful; always brief and concise, but never superfluous."--English Studies Ralph M. Wardle is the author of Oliver Goldsmith (1957), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (1951) and Halzlitt (1971).