initially, the couple's life together was idyllic. wollstonecraft playfully wrote to one friend: "my little girl begins to suck so "manfully" that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the r[igh]ts of woman" [emphasis in original]. imlay soon tired of wollstonecraft and domestic life and left her for long periods of time. her letters to him are full of needy expostulations, explained by most critics as the expressions of a deeply depressed woman but by some as a result of her circumstances—alone with an infant in the middle of the french revolution.