r an author-activist adept in many genres??? up until the last quarter-century Wollstonecraft's life has been read much more closely than her writing.[48] After the devastating effect of Godwin's Memoirs, Wollstonecraft's reputation lay in tatters for a century; she was pilloried by such writers as Maria Edgeworth, who patterned the freakish Harriet Freke in Belinda (1801) after Wollstonecraft.