Fanny Imlay

Fanny Imlay was the illegitimate daughter of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the American commercial speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay. Fanny grew up in the household of anarchist political philosopher William Godwin, the widower of her mother, with his second wife and their combined family of five children. She became increasingly isolated from her family and committed suicide in 1816.

About Fanny Imlay in brief

Fanny Imlay was the illegitimate daughter of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the American commercial speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay. Fanny grew up in the household of anarchist political philosopher William Godwin, the widower of her mother, with his second wife and their combined family of five children. She became increasingly isolated from her family and committed suicide in 1816. Her half-sister Mary grew up to write Frankenstein and married Percy Bysshe Shelley, a leading Romantic poet, who composed a poem on Fanny’s death. She was born in Le Havre on 14 May 1794, or, as the birth certificate stated, on the 25th day of Floreal in the Second Year of the Republic, and named after Fanny Blood, her mother’s closest friend. She died in London in April 1795, seeking to win back Imlay, but he rejected her. In a last attempt to win him back, she embarked upon a hazardous trip to Scandinavia from June 1795 to September 1795. When she returned to England, she realized that she was over Imlay and went out with her daughter and a maid, in order to conduct some business for him. She went on a second trip with her only-year-old daughter, but this time she went out on her own with her maid, and she died in September 1797, nearly a year after giving birth to her first child, Fanny. She is buried in Kensington Cemetery, London, along with her mother and her half-brother, William, her sister Mary, and her step-father, the anarchist philosopher and political philosopher, William Godwins.

Her last words to him were: “O Misery, this world is all too wide for thee. Misery—O Miseries” She was buried in a grave that is now in the grounds of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where she is buried with her sister, Mary, her husband, William and their two children, and their mother-in-law, Mary Jane Clairmont. She had a daughter, Claire Clairmont, who was born on 17 May 1814. She wrote: “My little Girl begins to suck so manfully that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the Rts of Woman\”. Fanny, left behind, bore the brunt of her stepfather’s anger. 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 with an infant. Fanny was therefore, in Godwin’s words, a \”barrier child\”. Frances \”Fanny\” Imlay, also known as Fanny Godwin and Frances Wollstonescraft, was born. on 14May 1794. At one point during the French Revolution, the couple could meet only at a tollbooth between Paris and Neuilly, and it was there that their daughter was conceived. Most people, including Wollestonecraft’s sisters, assumed they were married—and thus, by extension, that Fanny were legitimate.

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