Since Joseph Johnson published Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” in January 1798, just a few months after Wollstonecraft’s untimely demise, arguably she became one of the most controversial figures in all literary history. To many readers at the end of that century and decades that would follow, the Christian piety apparent in Rights of Woman was nullified by the revelation of her “non-Christian” lifestyle. “Reviewers and commentators were increasingly unable to separate the writer from her texts,” Harriet Jump noted (2003, 1:5). Wollstonecraft’s texts were reconsidered, deemed dangerous and capable of spreading moral contagion, and then buried for nearly 50 years (5). However, there have been those who questioned Godwin’s rendition of his wife. To Anna Seward, Romantic poet and author of Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin (1804), Godwin’s Memoirs was a “needless display of his own infidelity.” Godwin’s writing implicated his wife in his own skepticism and offered no proof that Wollstonecraft gave up on religion. Indeed, Seward questioned Godwin’s motives for “expos[ing his wife] to the censure of irreligion from the mass of mankind” (1811, 5:74).

As I theorized in my Betwixt and Between the Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft,

Even though Godwin’s critics and most scholars have agreed that Memoirs is biased and unreliable, his “account” of Wollstonecraft’s religious beliefs has continued to be accepted as gospel truth and repeated by some of the very same scholars that have disparaged his reliability. In 1981 Mitzi Myers observed that despite the profusion of discredit imputed to Memoirs, even after two centuries his biography “remains the substratum on which even the newest live erects their varying portrayals” of Wollstonecraft (299). In Margaret Kirkham’s words,