Fanny Imlay

Who was Fanny Imlay?

Frances "Fanny" Imlay, also known as Fanny Godwin and Frances Wollstonecraft, was the illegitimate daughter of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the American commercial speculator Gilbert Imlay. Fanny's mother wrote about her frequently in her later works, and Percy Bysshe Shelley composed a poem on her death. Fanny grew up in the household of Radical philosopher William Godwin, and her half-sister Mary later wrote Frankenstein and married Shelley, a leading Romantic poet. The Godwin and Shelley families have been the subject of intense academic and popular interest, which includes Fanny; although by the time of her suicide at the age of 22 she had not achieved anything of note.

Although Gilbert Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft lived together happily for brief periods before and after the birth of Fanny, he left Wollstonecraft in France in the midst of the French Revolution. In an attempt to revive their relationship, Wollstonecraft travelled to Scandinavia on business for him, taking the one-year-old Fanny with her, but the affair never rekindled. After falling in love with and marrying the philosopher William Godwin, Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth in 1797, leaving the three-year-old Fanny in the hands of Godwin, along with the newborn Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.