 Thus it seemed that from the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the next, she, who had endeavoured to place marriage on a solid foundation by providing an account of the education that would prepare spouses for it, would be thought of as someone who had sought to pass as married when she wasn’t and as the mother of an illegitimate child. Much of this reputation was owed to Godwin’s frank, arguably unnecessarily frank, account of Wollstonecraft’s life, in Memoirs of the Author of a ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman’ (1798). It revealed, amongst other personal details, her relationship with Imlay and thereby cast a deep shadow over her reputation. In any event, John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women (1869) was to eclipse most other contributions to feminist debates of the period.