Julie Carlson's biography begins with this statement: “Why is it that the life stories of the Wollstonecraft- Godwin- Shelley family tend to fascinate readers even more than their written works?” (1). Her answer is that people have been enthralled with Wollstonecraft's “high drama”: “unrequited passions for Fanny Blood, Henry Fuseli, and Gilbert Imlay and the psychic as well as geographical and literary extremes to which they took her” (1).

In the same year that Carlson published her biography, Janet Todd, after “many years” of having “been haunted by the figure of Wollstonecraft's eldest daughter, Fanny— the child who travelled with her mother through Norway, Sweden and Denmark and who featured so vibrantly in Mary Wollstonecraft's final works” (Death Preface), published a biography of sorts on Fanny Godwin, in the way that Carlson did; she deduced it from studying the writings of the Godwins and the Shelleys. She admits:

Her research found much betwixt and between, and Todd could not always discern whether contradictory texts were due to being secretive or bearing lies (Preface).

Similarly, in researching the lives and works of Wollstonecraft, Godwin and Shelley, Carlson discovered gaps between their novels and their biographies (3). She also found many contradictions between how these three defined “family” in their works and their practice (4). In her review of Carlson's book, Jacqueline Pearson suggests “The worst thing” is the title, noting the irony of it, since all the Godwin–Shelley group were notorious for their “ideological opposition to the family as an institution” (556). The title is ironic, but in that there is no other family in England that consisted of so many major writers, Carlson had a legitimate right to identify it as the “First Family of Writers.”