The Adventures of Gilbert Imlay 
By Ralph Leslie Rusk, Assistant Professor of English 
in Indiana University 
) 
I 
Every student of Godwin and Shelley has noticed in the 
background of the group which formed about these two radi- 
cals the shadowy figure of an American man of letters and 
adventurer — Captain Gilbert Imlay, first husband of Mary 
Wollstonecraft, and father of Fanny, the half-sister of Mary 
Shelley. In spite of the curiosity which his appearance there 
has always aroused, he has remained for the most part a sub- 
ject of the merest conjecture. For, tho it is true that he occupies 
a place second in importance only to that of Mary Wollstone- 
craft in the long tale of her misfortunes in love as related in 
the letters of her Posthumous Works, and again appears in 
the same character for a brief chapter in Godwin’s Memoirs, 
yet in both cases it is only Imlay’s attitude toward Mary Woll- 
stonecraft that is shown. Independently of the story of this 
love intrigue he has generally been known simply as the author 
of two celebrated books — A Topographical Description of the 
Western Territory of North America, written from Kentucky 
to a friend in England (or in Ireland, as some would have it), 
and of a novel called The Emigrants, which has for some time 
enjoyed, but with extremely doubtful right, the distinction of 
being the first important fiction produced among the pioneer 
settlers of the West. 
It does not yet seem possible to write in anything like its 
entirety the story of the life of this fascinating adventurer; 
but I hope to be able to show that a number of the gaps here- 
tofore existing in all accounts of him can be filled with well- 
authenticated facts, and that, altho the fame attaching to him 
as the earliest novelist of the West and as the author of one of 
the first books of travel and description written in Kentucky 
is the result of a misconception, he deserves new celebrity for 
a reason heretofore, to the best of my knowledge, but vaguely 
( 3 ) 
