He is also successful as a poet, his poem written at the age of twenty-three having been universally acclaimed.

Making allowance for Mary's exaggeration and wishful thinking, we easily recognize Shelley: Woodville has his poetic ideals, the charm of his conversation, his high moral qualities, his sense of dedication and responsibility to those he loved and to all humanity.

He is Mary's earliest portrait of her husband, drawn in a year when she was slowly returning to him from "the hearth of pale despair." The early circumstances and education of Godwin and of Mathilda's father were different.

But they produced similar men, each extravagant, generous, vain, dogmatic.

There is more of Godwin in this tale than the account of a great man ruined by character and circumstance.