Your enquiries relate principally to the two daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft. They are neither of them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system and ideas of their mother. I lost her in 1797, and in 1801 I married a second time. One among the motives which led me to choose this was, the feeling I had in myself of an incompetence for the education of daughters. The present Mrs. Godwin has great strength and activity of mind, but is not exclusively a follower of the notions of their mother; and indeed, having formed a family establishment without having a previous provision for the support of a family, neither Mrs. Godwin nor I have leisure enough for reducing novel theories of education to practice, while we both of us honestly endeavor, as far as our opportunities will permit, to improve the mind and characters of the younger branches of our family. Of the two persons to whom your inquiries relate, my own daughter is considerably superior in capacity to the one her mother had before. Fanny, the eldest, is of a quiet, modest, unshowy disposition, somewhat given to indolence, which is her greatest fault, but sober, observing, peculiarly clear and distinct in the faculty of memory, and disposed to exercise her own thoughts and follow her own judgment. Mary, my daughter, is the reverse of her in many particulars. She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in every thing she undertakes almost invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty; Fanny[5] is by no means handsome, but in general prepossessing. WILLIAM GODWIN: _Letter to an unknown correspondent_, in ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries,’ by C. Kegan Paul, Boston: Roberts Bros., 1876. * * * * * [Sidenote: Her stepmother.] Mrs. Godwin [formerly Mrs. Clairmont], was a harsh stepmother.... She had strong views, in which many would agree, that each child should be educated to some definite duties, with a view of filling some useful place in life; but this arrangement soon had at least a show of partiality. It was found that Jane Clairmont’s mission in life, according to her mother’s view, was to have all the education and even accomplishments which their slender means would admit; while household drudgery was from an early age discovered to be the life-work of Fanny and Mary Godwin. That Mary Shelley was afterward a worthy intellectual companion to Shelley, is in no degree due to Mrs. Godwin, and little to her father’s direct teaching. All the education she had up to the time when she linked her fate with Shelley’s, was self-gained; the merits of such a work as ‘Frankenstein’ were her own; the faults were those of her home-training. C. KEGAN PAUL: ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: Mary at sixteen.]