Center for Scholars and Writers
Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, Room 227
Humanities and Social Sciences Library
Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street
New York, New York 10018

presents a lecture by

Pamela Clemit
A Revolutionary Life: William Godwin's Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft
Wednesday, April 10 at 6 p.m.

William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) is one of the most significant biographical documents of the British Romantic era. Issuing from the pen of the leading radical political philosopher of the 1790s, and recounting the life, loves, and death of the proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, whom he married, Memoirs was a work of unprecedented biographical frankness. Dr. Clemit's lecture will propose that Godwin's philosophical biography of Wollstonecraft provides not only a commemoration of a loved individual, but also a vindication of the program of gradual social revolution they both sought to further, in their lives as in their writings.

Dr. Pamela Clemit is Reader in English Studies at the University of Durham, U.K. She has held a Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship and was a member of Peter Gay's inaugural class of Fellows at The New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers. Her publications include The Godwinian Novel (Oxford English Monographs), and she has edited numerous scholarly and critical editions of Godwin's writings, including (with Gina Luria Walker) Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Broadview Literary Texts). She has also edited two volumes of the Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley and a volume on Godwin in the Pickering & Chatto series, Lives of the Great Romantics by Their Contemporaries. She is writing a comprehensive two-volume study of Godwin's life, works, and contexts for Oxford University Press.

The Margaret Liebman Berger Forum is located on the second floor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. This is a free public program. Seating is limited. To register, please call 212-930-0084 or send an email to CSW@nypl.org.

The Center for Scholars and Writers sponsors a competitive fellowship program open to scholars, non-academic research professionals, scientists engaged in the humanities, and creative writers of demonstrated achievement whose proposed work will benefit directly from access to the Library's collections.

Made possible by a generous endowment by Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman in honor of Brooke Russell Astor, with major support provided by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The Estate of Charles J. Liebman, Sue Ann and John Weinberg, The Samuel I. Newhouse Foundation, William W. Karatz, and additional gifts from Mel and Lois Tukman and Sandra Payson.