![]() In fact, as the volume amply demonstrates, this is a period in which Godwin comes to life as a complex, multifaceted, flawed, man of many parts. It is a period, therefore, that is less familiar to most readers and one that might appear less promising as a consequence. The present second volume takes us into a period of Godwin's life in between the dramatic highpoints marked by his 1790s fame and relationship with Wollstonecraft and the arrival of P. ![]() Pamela Clemit's General Editorship of Godwin's Letters will eventually present us with six volumes ranging chronologically over the seven decades of the author's writing life. The addition of his correspondence, in an expertly constructed scholarly edition, cannot but be a considerable contribution to this reading experience, since those tensions, between principle and what for want of a better word we might call contingency, play themselves out in starker if not exactly unedited and unguarded fashion. It is this tension, above all else, that his fictional and non-fictional works explore and demonstrate. ![]() Much of the challenge and the pleasure of reading the writings of William Godwin lie in watching the principles of the Enlightenment wittingly and unwittingly come up against their limits.
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