Falling in love with the author usually precedes the death of the author, and not in a simulacrum way as it was described by Barthes.
In early 1796, the bachelor Godwin eagerly consumed Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. This epistolary travelogue had as its subtext the break-up of her republican or common-law marriage with the American revolutionary war captain Gilbert Imlay. The figure of Imlay hovered at the edge of the book, as the unnamed recipient of the author’s forlorn correspondence. Fanny Blood also featured as a ghost in Wollstonecraft’s Letters. Writing to her unnamed lover, the author recalls how she could hear her dead friend’s “soft voice warbling … over the heath” as she wandered along the ragged Scandinavian seashore. Undaunted by the spectres of the writer’s lost loves, Godwin went to call on Wollstonecraft – a talkative writer he had not liked when they met at a dinner party in 1791. Soon their unexpected friendship was, in Godwin’s words, “melting into love”. He would later look back on the Letters as a “book calculated to make a man in love with its author”.
