Connecting the work to Wollstonecraft's first novel, "" (1788), he celebrates its sensibility and "eroticizes the condition of feminine sorrow"; for Godwin, the work was an epistolary romance, not a work of political commentary. After Wollstonecraft's death in 1797, Godwin published her original letters to Imlay (destroying the originals in the process). He deleted all references to contemporary political events and her business negotiations, emphasizing the romantic connection between the two sets of letters. Favret contends that Godwin wanted the public to see Wollstonecraft's affair as a sentimental romance akin to that between Charlotte and Werther in Goethe's "Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774).