Sir Percy Florence Shelley, the son of Mary Godwin Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, and his wife Jane attempted to redeem the reputations of their parents and grandparents. They destroyed papers and letters that contained anything that could be considered scandalous, and they commissioned official biographies that would present their famous progenitors in only a positive light. One such task was given to their neighbor, a vicar by the name of Charles Kegan Paul. In 1876 he first published William Godwin, which gave a more suitable Wollstonecraft than the one drawn by Godwin. This was followed three years later by Paul's brief biography of Wollstonecraft and the publications of her letters to Imlay (Jump, introd. xxiii).

C. Kegan Paul begins his preface to his Wollstonecraft biography with:

Soon after Paul's biography, Elizabeth Robins Pennell gives a similar attribute: “Few women have worked so faithfully for the cause of humanity as Mary Wollstonecraft, and few have been the objects of such bitter censure.” In addition: “She devoted herself to the relief of her suffering fellow- beings with the ardor of a Saint Vincent de Paul, and in return she was considered by them a moral scourge of God” (1). This introduces the biography Pennell wrote for “Eminent Women,” a series that included Wollstonecraft as the ninth entry and was preceded by articles on George Eliot, Emily Brontë and George Sand. In that introduction, Pennell praised Paul for “vindicating [Wollstonecraft's] character and reviving interest in her writings […], re-establish[ing] her reputation” (10).

Paul makes a statement that all biographers who read Godwin's Memoirs might bear in mind: “But in fact Godwin knew extremely little of his wife's earlier life, nor was this a subject on which he had sought enlightenment from herself” (xxxi). As I pointed out previously, they were married for only five months and they had separate residences. Furthermore, as I have also noted, Godwin spent very little time in the room where Wollstonecraft lay dying.