Gilbert Imlay's tempestuous but ill-fated relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft has been recounted and picked over so often in the past two centuries that it has become one of the most notorious causes célèbres in British literary history. Wollstonecraft's collected letters to Imlay offer a poignant and revealing insight into the ups and downs of their affair, and literary history owes a significant debt to William Godwin, Imlay's successor, for deciding not to destroy the letters after his wife's death in 1797. Posterity would have been even more appreciative had Godwin not interfered with Wollstonecraft's letters. As it is, he not only expunged all proper names from the letters but particularly cut those sections from her letters to Imlay that might otherwise have detracted from the image he was trying to create of Wollstonecraft as a woman of great sensibility and deep emotions. Yet, heart-rending as the edited letters are, Wollstonecraft's correspondence with Imlay inevitably represents her side of the story; indeed, the entire sad tale of Wollstonecraft's affair with Imlay is very much part of her biography, rather than his. If Imlay's treatment of Wollstonecraft has become one of literary history's most notorious sagas of a lover's betrayal and abandonment, this is only because it has always been assumed and expected that both partners were from the beginning equally committed to their relationship. They were not.

Wollstonecraft's state of mind prior to when she first met Imlay has been well documented. On the eve of her projected six-week trip to France, Wollstonecraft joked in a letter to William Roscoe that she was ‘still a spinster on the wing’ who might in Paris ‘take a husband of the time being’.