William Godwin

William Godwin (1756–1836) was an English political philosopher and novelist. Trained as a Dissenting minister, he lost his faith and in 1793 published An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, which argued that government, property and marriage were evils that reason would gradually abolish, and which made him for a few years the most talked-about thinker in England. His novel Caleb Williams, published the next year, is an early psychological thriller. He married Mary Wollstonecraft in 1797; she died that year after giving birth to their daughter, the future Mary Shelley, and his frank Memoirs of her scandalized readers. He spent his later decades as a bookseller and writer of histories.