 A second edition of Godwin’s Political Justice, in which some of the more rationalist and utopian statements of the first edition were modified, was published at the end of 1795. Shortly thereafter he became reacquainted with Mary Wollstonecraft, whom he had first met briefly in 1791 at a dinner in honour of Paine at which neither was much impressed by the other. Wollstonecraft had subsequently lived in revolutionary France and had had a child in a fraught relationship with Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American merchant. Their second introduction was more successful. As a young man Godwin had been very much the philosopher—austere in dress, with an angular figure, an intense manner and piercing glance. While approachable he was not socially adept: he both took offence easily and gave it by his zealous commitment to the virtue of candour among friends. Only with his increasing success did he come to meet a wide range of clever women with political, literary and philosophical interests—such as Helen Maria Williams, Elizabeth Inchbald, Amelia Alderson, Maria Reveley, Mary Hays and Mary Robinson. This contact had its effect. He cut his hair short in 1791 and adopted a less ministerial style of dress; he also enjoyed an increasingly extensive social life (albeit without any indication of self-indulgence); and he even experimented in 1796 with holding a dinner party (which included Parr’s daughters, Wollstonecraft, and Inchbald). He also developed a basic competence in flirtation. In the last months of 1795 and first half of 1796, Reveley, Samuel Parr’s daughter Sarah, Alderson and Inchbald were all candidates for his attention. Following their re-acquaintance in January 1796, Wollstonecraft subsequently called on Godwin, unconventionally, in April 1796; thereafter they met and corresponded regularly, and by July they were much closer, becoming lovers in August 1796. Their letters and notes provide a touching record of a philosophical relationship gradually subverted by feelings which Godwin found hard to accommodate intellectually and Wollstonecraft found hard to trust. Wollstonecraft became pregnant in December and after much deliberation over how to reconcile their actions to their principles, they married in March 1797. Wollstonecraft’s death following childbirth in September 1797 left Godwin distraught and burdened with the care of both the baby Mary (later Mary Shelley) and Fanny Imlay (Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate child )—and with a growing burden of debt. He threw himself into work: he revised Political Justice for a third, and final time, wrote a hurried memoir of Wollstonecraft, prepared a collection of her works, and embarked on his second major novel, St Leon (1799). Wollstonecraft’s influence on Godwin’s thinking has been detected by critics in his volume of essays, The Enquirer (1798), and in the revisions made for the third edition of Political Justice, published at the end of 1797. A rather different sense of their relationship was recorded by him in his Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Women (1798), and in his depiction of marriage in St. Leon (1799). The Memoirs provoked a storm of controversy by their revelations of Wollstonecraft’s unconventional sexual mores. Several of Godwin’s past acquaintances spurned him, he found himself increasingly the subject of attack by loyalist newspapers, and his philosophical opinions were parodied and ridiculed in novels, reviews and pamphlets. Godwin reacted with dignity. His Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon (1801), sought dispassionately to answer his critics and to confess errors which he now recognized—and which had already been acknowledged both in the revisions to the later editions of his Enquiry, and in his comments in St. Leon. But the reply did little to rescue him from the now overwhelming tide of reaction, and incautious remarks in his discussion of Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) about exposing children and abortion, were seized upon with glee by the reviewers. Godwin’s Political Justice was a product of the enthusiasm connected with the French Revolution but by the end of the decade the author and his works were being exuberantly denounced by loyalism and the forces of reaction that increasingly dominated the British political and literary scene. Hereafter, for most of the rest of his life, Godwinism became a term of opprobrium. In the new, intolerant political climate Godwin turned to literature and history. He tried his hand at drama with two plays, Antonio (1800) and Faulkener (1807), but with no success; in 1803 he wrote a two volume Life of Chaucer; and two years later he produced a further novel, Fleetwood: or The New Man of Feeling (1805). To cope with his domestic responsibilities he looked for a new wife, approaching Harriet Lee who found him too pressing, Maria Reveley too soon after the death of her husband, and Sarah Elwes, a woman separated from her husband, who was unable to marry. When a widow with two children, Mary Jane Clairmont, leaned over her balcony in 1801 and asked “Is it possible that I behold the immortal Godwin”, his fate was sealed.