The life and work of William Godwin (1756-1836)
1. William Godwin was connected with all sorts of radical writers and thinkers of the time. His first wife was Mary Wollstonecraft, the author of the proto-feminist tract A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; his daughter with Wollstonecraft, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, became Frankenstein author Mary Shelley; and therefore Godwin became the father-in-law of the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Godwin was also a friend and associate of other radical writers of the day, such as Rights of Man author Thomas Paine. Indeed, it was Paine’s Rights of Man that inspired Godwin to start thinking about the idea of government, thinking which led to his important book Political Justice (1793).