Even before her death, her illicit relationship with the anarchist philosopher William Godwin had put her firmly in the sights of conservative thinkers. If Sense and Sensibility is a work of the 1790s or very early nineteenth century, then it looks as if it were written as a deliberately and self-consciously feminist one. By 1811, of course, that effect would have been muted for a fair portion of readers who were less familiar with Wollstonecraft.