• Name: Imlay, Fanny (Godwin)
• Gender: Female
• Birth Date: 14  May  1794
• Death Date: 9  October  1816

Fanny Imlay was born in May 1794 , the daughter of the unmarried Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay (DNB). After his relationship with Wollstonecraft developed, Godwin assumed a fatherly role, and Fanny bececame attached to Godwin early on (see Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Revolutionary Life). She often accompanied Godwin to lectures and the theatre, and was generally known as ‘Fanny Godwin’ (Locke, p. 217). As an adult, Fanny was prone to depression, ‘and the disastrous circumstances of the Skinner Street household deeply affected her’ – particularly ‘the gloomy house after the elopement of her sisters’ (Marshall, p. 322). Whether because she professed her unrequited love to Percy Shelley, the lover and husband of her half-sister Mary (as has been speculated), or as a result of her recurrent depression, Fanny committed suicide by taking an overdose of laudanum after leaving home of the 7th October 1816. Her letter to Godwin from Bristol stated, ‘I depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove’, and Godwin set out to find her right away, but his search was unsuccessful.

Godwin records Fanny's death as 'Swansea' on the 9th October, 1816. Godwin in his grief wrote a letter of deep regret to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, expressing his wish to keep the event secret in order to ‘disturb not the silent dead’ (Locke, p. 273).

According to his usual conventions, Fanny is referred to mainly as ‘F’, interspersed with a few somewhat random examples of her name spelled out. She has not been included in Godwin’s mentions of ‘children’, such as ‘5 Children’ in 1807, but perhaps she was too old at that point to be grouped as a child? On her death, the 9th October 1816 he marks, simply, ‘Swansea’ where the body was found – probably written in after the fact. On the 11th October he records the letters to Mary Jane , Percy Shelley and Jane. The entries to 'F G’ in 1799 and 1800 don’t seem to be Fanny, although the miss Marner (w. F G) at tea in 1806 could be. Confusingly, there’s also a ‘sup at F’s’ in 1795 and another in 1800, which means that some of the earlier F’s that have been coded as Fanny could be someone else – possibly Fell?

• DNB
• Locke
• Marshall
• Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000, paperback edn. London: Phoenix Press, 2001).
• Janet Todd, Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle (London: Profile Books; New York: Basic Books, 2007)

This table lists the people this person is most frequently noted with in the diary.