Pamela Clemit is Professor of English at Queen Mary University of London and a Supernumerary Fellow at Wolfson College, Oxford. Her other books include The Godwinian Novel (1993), also published by Oxford University Press. She has published a dozen or so scholarly and critical editions of William Godwin's and Mary Shelley's writings, including an Oxford World's Classics edition of Caleb Williams (2009) and The Letters of William Godwin, Volume I: 1778-1797 (2011). She has been a visiting research fellow at the New York Public Library, at All Souls College, Oxford, and at Wadham College, Oxford. In 2016 she was awarded the Keats-Shelley Association of America Distinguished Scholar Award.

`to write ably and with little fuss or obvious polemic in an area where factions clash, and still to maintain a clearly discernable thesis with firmness and with concern for the reader's understanding and sympathy is rare ... This innovatory book ably demonstrates relationships between Godwin's fictions and his changing political ideas'Durham University Journal

• "Imogen" - Godwin's fuctional debut; "Caleb Williams" - the paradigm of the Godwinian novel; Godwin's historical novels - theory and practice; "Wieland" - Charles Brockdan Brown's American tale; "Frankenstein" - Mary Shelley's mythmaking; Mary Shelley's novels of the 1820s - history and prophecy; afterword - retreading the Godwinian novel.