4 
Indiana University Studies 
hinted by any of his numerous biographers^ — his political 
activities as the adviser of a famous statesman of the French 
Revolution and as an intriguer in the interest of a foreign 
power during one of the first important international compli- 
cations that threatened the safety of the United States. 
II 
Of the earliest period of Imlay’s life, so far as the facts 
in my possession go, only a very meager account is possible. 
If we grant, as seems reasonable, that the Gilbert Imlay who 
was buried at St. Brelade's, Jersey, in 1828, was Imlay the 
adventurer and author, we have still to choose between the 
evidence of the parochial register, which would indicate that 
Imlay was born in 1754, and the evidence of the inscription 
^ Of the many accounts of Imlay which have appeared since the close of the 
eighteenth century, nearly all are based almost wholly upon William Godwin’s Memoirs 
of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1798 (pp. 103-149) and upon 
the letters of Mary Wollstonecraft as published in Letters Written during a Short Resi- 
dence in Sioeden,' Norivay, and Denmark, 1796, and in Posthumous Works of the Author 
of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1798. A somewhat superficial study of Imlay’s 
two books has usually furnished the only other information exhibited in the biographical 
notices that have followed Godwin’s. The most authoritative of these is Richard Gar- 
nett's article on Imlay in the Dictionary of National Biography. The valuable article 
which the same author published in The Athenceum for August 15, 1903, contains new 
material, but is concerned only with the date of Imlay’s birth and with the date and 
place of his death. Among the books on Mary Wollstonecraft which repeat in some detail 
the usual facts and conjectures concerning Imlay based on the Memoirs, the letters, and 
the two books by Imlay, the most important are C. K. Paul’s Mary Wollstonecraft, 1879 
pp. xxxvi-1) ; E. R. Pennell’s Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1884 (pp. 188-246) ; E. 
Rauschenbusch-Clough’s A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft, 1898, which devotes only a 
brief space to Imlay ; R. Ingpen’s The Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert 
Imlay, 1908 (pp. xv-xxiii of the prefatory memoir) ; and G. R. S. Taylor’s Mary Woll- 
stonecraft, 1911 (pp. 136-188). Of the books mainly concerned with Godwin which give 
some account of Imlay, C, K. Paul’s William Oodtvin: His Friends and Contemporaries, 
1876 (I, 213-230), is worthy of note, but the information to be found there is given 
in greater detail in the same author’s preface to his edition of Mary Wollstonecraft’s 
letters cited above. Recent works containing biographical summaries of Imlay which 
attempt to exhibit him as a Kentucky author are J. W. Townsend’s Kentuckians in His- 
tory and Literature, 1907 (pp. 13-25) ; the same author’s Kentucky in American Letters, 
1913 (I, 11-13) ; and the Library of Southern Literature (XV, 217). The chapter on 
Imlay in Kentuckians in History and Literature, which is by far the most comprehensive 
of the thi’ee accounts just mentioned, reproduces the Wilkinson letter of September 28, 
1784, but makes no mention of the many other Imlay papers which contain valuable 
biographical information. In the same book an attempt is made to trace the family of 
Imlay, with results which are discussed below (footnote 5). The date of Imlay’s 
arrival in Kentucky is given — ^^rightly, I think — as 1784, George May is correctly named 
as Imlay’s superior in the office of surveyor, and some partially accurate statements are 
made concerning the lands which Imlay possessed ; but there is no notice of the 
imjiortant facts contained in the records of the Kentucky court trials in which Imlay 
was involved, and the statements made regarding the length of his residence in Ken- 
tucky are, as I shall try to show, entirely erroneous. Bare mention is made of the fact 
that Imlay communicated to the French government a plan for the capture of New 
Orleans. 
