The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay

In 1793, in Paris at the height of the Terror, Mary Wollstonecraft began a love affair with the American adventurer and businessman Gilbert Imlay; when the French began arresting British subjects, his declaration that she was his wife kept her free. These are the letters she wrote him over the next two years, through the birth of their daughter Fanny at Le Havre, through his retreat to London and the visible cooling of his letters, and through a business journey she undertook alone to Scandinavia on his behalf, still writing to a man who had already moved on.

Wollstonecraft never intended the letters for publication. After her death in 1797, her husband William Godwin included them in the four-volume Posthumous Works he edited in 1798.

Bibliomancer restores the 1798 text exactly as Wollstonecraft wrote it.