NOTE: William Godwin's 'Damon and Delia'

The British Library has recently acquired this early novel by William Godwin of which no copy was hitherto known to be extant. It is known that Godwin wrote three novels in 1783-4; his manuscript autobiographical notes, quoted by C. Kegan Paul in William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries (1876), record 'This was probably the busiest period of my life; in the latter end of 1783 I wrote in ten days a novel entitled "Damon and Delia", for which Hookham gave me five guineas, and a novel in three weeks called "Italian Letters", purchased by Robinson for twenty guineas, and in the first four months of 1784 a novel called "Imogen, a Pastoral Romance", for which Lane gave me ten pounds.' All three novels had disappeared until relatively recently, when copies of Italian Letters and Imogen turned up