American author of fiction about personal freedom in man-woman relationships and the choices women make.

In childhood Godwin lived with her divorced mother, a writer and college literature teacher who was the model for some of Godwin's strong female characters. Godwin studied at Peace Junior College, the University of North Carolina (B.A., 1959), and the University of Iowa (M.A., 1968; Ph.D., 1971). She wrote about women smothered by marriage in the violent novel The Perfectionists (1970) and Glass People (1972), which features a wife prevented from ever making decisions.

The protagonist of Godwin's The Odd Woman (1974) is a college teacher who attempts to come to terms with her family and her married lover. The three principal characters of A Mother and Two Daughters (1982) are personally close yet grow in separate ways to self-fulfillment. Among Godwin's later novels are A Southern Family (1987), The Good Husband (1994), and Evenings at Five (2003). In Evensong (1999), a sequel to Father Melancholy's Daughter (1991), Godwin examines family ties and religious faith. Queen of the Underworld (2006), about an ambitious young woman working as a reporter, is a semiautobiographical novel. In 2006 Godwin published her journals from 1961–63 as The Making of a Writer.