William Godwin: his Friends and Contemporaries
Ch. IX. 1797
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to William Godwin, 3 July 1797
“Monday morning, July 3d, 1797.
“Mrs Reveley
can have no doubt about to-day, so we are to stay at home. I have a design upon
you this evening to keep you quite to myself—I hope nobody will call!—and make
you read the play.
“I was thinking of a favourite song of my poor friend
Fanny’s: ‘In a vacant rainy day, you shall be wholly mine,’
&c.
“Unless the weather prevents you from taking your
accustomed ![]()
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walk, call on me this
morning, for I have something to say to you.”
Maria Gisborne [née Barnes] (1770-1836)
The daughter of James Barnes, Turkey merchant, and friend of William Godwin and Mary
Wollstonecraft, and later of the Shelleys; her first marriage was to the architect Willey
Reveley, her second to John Gisborne (d. 1836).
Fanny Skeys [née Blood] (d. 1785)
The consumptive friend of Mary Wollstonecraft; she married the Irish merchant Hugh Skeys
and died in childbirth in Portugal.
