Chapter Excerpt
Mary moves in soft beauty and conscious delight, To augment with sweet smiles all the joys of the night, Nor once blushes to own the rest of the fair That sweet love and beauty are worthy our care.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .And thine is a face of sweet love in despair,
And thine is a face of mild sorrow and care,
And thine is a face of wild terror and fear
That shall never be quiet till laid on its bier.
- "Mary," William Blake, c. 1801-1803
This story begins, as many tales do, with a love affair. It involved two brilliant yet very odd people who seemed utterly unsuited for each other. William Godwin was painfully shy, given to intellectualizing, and apparently a virgin at the age of forty, when he fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft. She was passionate to the point of recklessness, heedless of the opinions of the world, and insistent that she never take second place to anyone, male or female. What brought them together was their common interest: revolution.
If the term "radical chic" had been current in the late eighteenth century, Mary and William would have been its personification, for they were the idols of a generation of young people who wanted to overturn the existing order. Both of them had been inspired by the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789 and promised a complete transformation of society. Wollstonecraft had stunned the British public in 1792 with the publication of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (note the singular), which grew out of her defense of the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man. In those days, no one had previously thought it "sexist" to use the word man as a synonym for the human race; Wollstonecraft boldly spoke for half of all humanity, who desired their rights too.
A sample of the tart opinions expressed by the woman who is often called the first feminist:
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. . . . I wish to persuade women to endeavour to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings who are only the objects of pity . . . will soon become objects of contempt.
Another: "A mistaken education, a narrow uncultivated mind, and many sexual prejudices, tend to make women more constant than men." Also: "An unhappy marriage is often very advantageous to a family, and . . . the neglected wife is, in general, the best mother." Finally: "It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are, in some degree, independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection, which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean, and selfish."
These were revolutionary ideas in an age when women were the legal property of their fathers and husbands. Horace Walpole, the Earl of Orford, otherwise famous for writing the first Gothic novel, expressed the verdict of England's upper classes when he called Wollstonecraft a "hyena in petticoats."
Wollstonecraft's future husband, though timid and withdrawn in person, threw off his reticence in his writing. In his most famous work, Political Justice (1793), Godwin set out to describe the social conditions under which the human race could achieve perfection. Though the excesses of the French Revolution had aroused deep fears among the English upper class, Godwin declared that "monarchy was a species of government unavoidably corrupt." But he went farther, much farther, claiming that all governments by their very nature stood in the way of the improvement of the human condition. Godwin believed that it would only be through the power of reason, not coercion or force, that society would be transformed. The publication of his book made him one of the most famous people in England, and for a time he was idolized by young people who were swept away by his vision of perfecting society. Freud wrote that every person has a "family romance," a narrative that explains the different relations of their life. Mary Shelley, the daughter of these two famous radicals, would be haunted by their love story and would use it (and her own life) as the narrative for much of her literary work.
For Mary Wollstonecraft, to borrow another phrase from the 1970s, the personal was the political, and all her writings used her own experiences to illuminate her ideas. Mary had tempestuous relationships, for she was a mercurial person who could be by turns passionate, domineering, needy, or depressed. Her life resembled a story from the literature of her time-the angst of Rousseau's Julie: La Nouvelle Héloïse or the melodrama of Goethe's international best-seller The Sorrows of Young Werther. She was a woman of contradictions who took actions that often seemed at odds with her own radical philosophy. Hard as a diamond, if tapped the wrong way she could shatter. As she wrote when she was thirty-eight, "There is certainly an original defect in my mind, for the cruelest experience will not eradicate the foolish tendency I have to cherish, and to expect to meet with, romantic tenderness." Few have carried that "defect" as far as Mary Wollstonecraft.
She was born in London on April 27,1759, a year of military victories for the English that won them Canada and India, making England the most powerful nation on earth. At home, Englishmen were finding new wealth from the heightened economic activity called the Industrial Revolution. Wollstonecraft's grandfather had earned a fortune as a master weaver and supplier of cloth to the growing textile industry. His son, Mary's father, heir to two-thirds of the fortune, was a big spender, heavy drinker, and a man of violent temper. According to Godwin, Mary recalled that her mother was "the first and most submissive of his subjects."
Mary had the kind of childhood that could either crush a spirit or rouse it to greatness. The second of six children, she resented the favoritism shown toward her brother Ned, two years older than herself. Ned's position as the family's golden child was quite literal, for in his grandfather's will, he had inherited the other one-third of the estate. Money was not what Mary craved, however. She envied the attention and warmth that her mother, Elizabeth Dickson, bestowed on Ned. A significant factor in Mary's sibling rivalry was the fact that her mother had breast-fed Ned, while a wet nurse was hired to nourish baby Mary. It isn't clear how she knew of her deprived condition, but once she did know she considered it a profound fact. As she later wrote, a mother's "parental affection . . . scarcely deserved the name, when it does not lead her to suckle her children."
Additional complaints show up in a novel she wrote in 1787, titled Mary. (The title character was, not by coincidence, "the daughter of Edward, who married Eliza," the same names as the real-life Mary's parents.) The book describes not only the way men repress women's individuality but also shows that women often accept this domination. It was clear that the author was recalling her own family when she wrote: "Her father always exclaimed against female acquirements, and was glad that his wife's indolence and ill health made her not trouble herself about them. . . . [He] was very tyrannical and passionate; indeed so very easily irritated when inebriated, that Mary was continually in dread lest he should frighten her mother to death." For those who knew that the real-life Mary often slept on the landing near her mother's bedroom to protect her when her father was in one of his drunken rages, the portrait was hardly veiled.
Mary had only a few years of formal schooling, but her parents' fecklessness also gave her the freedom to run and play outside rather than being confined indoors, the fate of most girls at the time. To compensate for the chill she encountered at home, she formed intense friendships. Her best friend when she was fourteen was a schoolgirl named Jane Arden. The two girls exchanged letters in which they gossiped about "macaronis," the young fashionable men in the town. Then some incident led Mary to accuse Jane of favoring another girl. Mary wrote to her, "I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none." In another letter to Jane, she wrote, "I cannot bear a slight from those I love."
As Mary grew into adolescence, she was required to change from the loose shifts and comfortable petticoats of childhood to corsets with stiff stays of whalebone that constrained her body from chest to thigh. Compounding her sense of restriction, she lacked a room of her own where she could be alone. Displaying the signs of a growing rebellious streak, Mary announced that she would never marry for money, for she was seeking a nobler life for herself. She also became more socially concerned, especially about the living conditions of servants and the poor.
When Mary was fifteen, her family moved to Hoxton, outside London. Here she met Fanny Blood, with whom Mary immediately made "in her heart, the vows of an eternal friendship." Fanny too suffered from having a drunken father, and Mary soon confided to Jane that now she loved her new friend "better than all the world beside." Fanny, Mary wrote, "has a masculine understanding, and sound judgment, yet she has every feminine virtue." Their relationship would endure through additional relocations, and become one of the most important in Mary's life.
Marriage, whether for love or money, remained unattractive to Mary in view of the example given by her parents. As a result, she knew that she had to be self-supporting. ("I must be independent and earn my own subsistence or be very uncomfortable," she declared.) At the time, single women had limited options for work-teacher, governess, or companion. In 1778, Mary found employment as a companion to a wealthy widow. The job, despite its amiable name, could be quite unpleasant, for it required the hired person to cater to the whims of her employer: the author Fanny Burney called the occupation "toad-eating." But Mary made a success of it, staying for two years until she had to come home to nurse her mother through her final illness.
Mary faithfully attended her mother for the next two years. During that time, her brother Ned, now married, rarely came to visit. Though Mary hoped for some sign of deathbed favoritism and affection, she was disappointed. Her mother's last words were, ". . . a little patience and all will be over." Mary, however, would improve on these-and gain the affection she yearned for-when she wrote her autobiographical novel Mary. There, the dying mother's last words to her daughter are: "My child, I have not always treated you with kindness. God forgive me! Do you?" One day, Mary's own daughter would follow her mother's example of using her pen to "improve" her real-life experiences.
Six months after her mother's death, Mary's younger sister Eliza married Meredith Bishop, a boat builder some ten years older than she. In less than a year Eliza gave birth to a daughter and suffered from what we now know as postpartum depression. A concerned Bishop asked Mary to come and stay with her sister. Instead, Mary "rescued" her: with Fanny Blood's help, she spirited Eliza away from home when Bishop was absent, leaving the infant behind. They went into hiding north of London, living under false names. Eliza might well have returned to her husband if left to her own devices, but Mary stiffened her resolve.
Now Mary set out to achieve her dream of self-sufficiency and establishing a life with Fanny Blood. In 1783, joined by another of Mary's sisters, Everina, the four young women opened a school at Newington Green, on the outskirts of London. There, Mary met Dr. Richard Price, who took her under his wing and became a bit of a father figure. Dr. Price was a devoted lover of liberty; he had fervently supported both the American Revolution and the cause of reform within England. He corresponded with intellectuals and scientists in the United States and France-Franklin, Jefferson, and Condorcet, to name just a few. Price helped Mary to understand the intellectual underpinnings of what she felt instinctively about liberty and human rights.
The all-female family life that Mary hoped for was, however, doomed. In August 1784, word came that Eliza's baby daughter, still with its father, had died. Eliza suffered another nervous breakdown, and later would come to view Mary as the person who had destroyed her marriage and caused the loss of her child. (The resentment had repercussions even years after Mary's death when her two sisters, Eliza and Everina, rejected Mary's own daughter, who wanted to find a refuge with them.) At this time, Fanny Blood was also suffering from ill health: tuberculosis. When her longtime beau Hugh Skeys, who had become a wine merchant in Lisbon, sent a proposal of marriage, Mary encouraged Fanny to accept, arguing that the climate of Portugal would be good for Fanny's health. But after her friend's departure, she wrote, "without someone to love this world is a desert."
When Fanny became pregnant, Mary made the sea voyage to Lisbon to be with her, arriving only a few hours before the delivery. But she was only to be a witness to tragedy. Fanny's illness affected the birth, and both mother and child died. Fanny's death haunted Mary for the rest of her life. She would write, "the grave has closed over my dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath."
She closed the school in Newington Green when she returned to England and found work as a governess for an aristocratic family in Ireland. This lasted only a year, for the lady of the family thought that the children were more devoted to Mary than to herself. While in Ireland Mary read and became deeply influenced by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was the most important thinker of the second half of the eighteenth century. Mary found his work particularly appealing because of its emphasis on the personal, particularly in his Confessions. Rousseau was also, like her, a person of internal contradictions. In a letter to her sister Everina on March 24,1787, she wrote: "I am now reading Rousseau's émile, and love his paradoxes. . . . He was a strange inconsistent unhappy clever creature-yet he possessed an uncommon portion of sensibility and penetration." She might have been describing herself.
While at Newington Green, Mary had written a book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which a friendly clergyman, John Hewlett, had sent to the London publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson had accepted it and paid Mary twenty guineas, a sum that she immediately turned over to two of Fanny Blood's needy brothers, ignoring her own debts and obligations. Now, in 1787, she wrote to Johnson about her newest plan for selfsufficiency: to become a full-time writer. "I am determined! Your sex generally laugh at female determinations; but let me tell you, I never yet resolved to do anything of consequence, that I did not adhere resolutely to do it, till I accomplished my purpose, improbable as it might have appeared to a more timid mind." She relocated to London, where Johnson helped her find lodgings. A liberal in politics, he had published the works ofWilliam Blake and Benjamin Franklin as well as Thomas Paine, scientist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), poet William Cowper, and chemist Joseph Priestley.
Acclaimed as "the father of the book trade," for he was the first to commission books, rather than serve as a printer for those who wished to publish, Johnson became both a mentor and a friend. Mary bragged to Everina in a letter: "I am . . . going to be the first of a new genus," adding, "You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track-the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on."
Publishers were aware that women made up a large part of the reading public, and women like Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, and Hannah More were well known for their novels that dealt with women's interests. The bestsellers of the day included two genres of particular appeal to women-the novel of sentiment and the Gothic novel. In some ways, these reflected opposite sides of female personality. Novels of sentiment celebrated delicacy of feelings, and even fostered the practice of weeping in public. Such works praised women for their purity of refinement and moral superiority, exalting the traditional roles of mother, wife, and loyal sister. Gothic novels, on the other hand, looked into darker corners. Often set in exotic locales, the Gothics dealt with fear and the irrationality that lies beneath the surface of so-called normal life. Women writing in the Gothic genre discovered they could explore emotions and daring actions outside the norms regarded as "proper" for women. (Men were often fans of the Gothic genre too; the young Lord Byron read Ann Radcliffe's novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, and modeled part of his own soon-to-be-famous persona after one of its characters.)
Johnson suggested that Mary try her hand at writing books in the new field of children's fiction. His neighbor John Newbery had made a good living at it. (Today a children's book award is named for him.) In 1788, Mary's Original Stories appeared, depicting women in many different roles-single, married, widowed, working, and at home. It showed Mary's concern for the condition of the poor by portraying the suffering of unmothered children, victims of bad housing and corrupt landlords. For the second edition of the book, Johnson hired William Blake to illustrate it. The eccentric Blake was then an unknown artist and Mary found in him a friend as well as a collaborator who shared her social concerns. Soon Blake would be illustrating his own poems rather than acting as a collaborator for others' work.
Mary found a new intellectual circle opening to her. She wrote to Fanny Blood's brother George, "Whenever I am tired of solitude I go to Mr. Johnson's and there I meet the kind of company I find most pleasure in." Johnson hosted afternoon dinners where he entertained many of the leading writers, philosophers, and artists of the day. With time, Mary became one of the regulars, whom she called "standing dishes"- the only woman so honored other than the writer Anna Barbauld. Besides Blake, the guests included the painters John Opie and Henry Fuseli; the political philosophers Thomas Paine and William Godwin; the American poet Joel Barlow; radical reformer Horne Tooke, who had actually raised money in Britain to support the American colonies' struggle for independence; and Thomas Holcroft, who went from peddler's son and stable boy to become one of England's leading dramatists, just to name a few. Many of those in Johnson's circle were free thinkers, English versions of the French philosophes who were then challenging people to use rationality rather than religious faith to guide their lives. Mary found herself in the midst of daring discussions that challenged and encouraged her.
All of these people appealed to Mary's mind, but the artist Henry Fuseli stoked the fire in her heart. Mary was approaching thirty, and she longed for a great passion. In Fuseli she thought that she had found the "soul mate" she had dreamed of. Born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich in 1741, he had come to England in the 1760s, where he adopted his new name. He was the oldest son of a painter who insisted that he become a minister, so as a child he had painted only in secret. He became ordained when he was twenty, along with his best friend Johann Lavater, who would later become famous as the founder of physiognomy, a method of determining character through the examination of facial features. The two men had an intense relationship that may well have been sexual. Fuseli wrote in a letter to Lavater, "I grow too excited, I must stop here- O you who sleep alone now-dream of me-that my soul might meet with yours."When Lavater married, Fuseli wrote that a disembodied spirit would be around the lips of him and his bride.
Fuseli was a brilliant scholar who knew eight languages and wrote essays about painting, sculpture, art history, and Rousseau. When he came to England, a meeting with the painter Joshua Reynolds set him on the road to his true calling and he spent some seven years in Italy studying art. In 1782, he completed his most famous painting, The Nightmare, which caused a sensation. Bizarre, erotic, and emotional, it was reproduced many times in prints, and became an icon of Romantic art. The work portrays a sleeping woman lying across a bed, arms open as if filled with erotic desire. Looking through the window at her is a ghostly horse-a symbol of sexuality-with bulging, pale eyes. Seated on the sleeping woman's chest, staring out at the viewer of the work, is a grinning incubus, a male demon who had sexual intercourse with women as they slept. For a while the painting hung in Joseph Johnson's home as a token of the two men's close friendship. As guests engaged in the intellectual conversation of Johnson's dinner parties, they could enjoy a little erotica at the same time. (A century later, Sigmund Freud also displayed a print of this painting on the wall of his office.) And the image of the woman in the painting would much later become an inspiration for Wollstonecraft's daughter, when she wrote her famous novel.
When Mary met Fuseli she was twenty-nine and relatively inexperienced; he was a worldly-wise forty-seven. The short, lecherous, vain bisexual was a walk on the wild side for Mary, but unfortunately he was not a person capable of the kind of attachment she wished for. She was fascinated by his paintings and drawings, and loved listening to him discourse authoritatively on many subjects. His descriptions of the seamier side of life engrossed her too. He spoke openly of frequenting prostitutes; some of the drawings that he showed her were pornographic. All this-novel, daring, on the edge-was stimulating to Mary, in a way that the hightoned conversation of the crowd at Johnson's was not. She plunged into a love affair, meeting Fuseli at her own flat as well as his studio. At his urging, she changed her appearance. Before meeting him, she had dressed in a plain, almost careless, manner in coarse clothes, black worsted stockings, and beaver hat with her hair hanging loose about her shoulders. The fastidious Fuseli showed her how to dress more fashionably, and she now pinned up her hair.
As Mary's ardor increased, however, Fuseli's interest in her cooled; his friendship for her, he claimed, had been strictly intellectual. As Mary tried more desperately to call attention to herself, writing feverishly and often, Fuseli withdrew from her. He would pointedly allow her letters to remain unopened for many days. For a sexual partner, Fuseli preferred another: he married Sophia Rawlins, one of the models he used for his paintings. Ironically, she would burn her husband's more explicit drawings after his death.
It took a revolution to distract Mary from her unrequited passion for Fuseli. The French Revolution, which began in 1789 when a mob stormed and captured the Paris prison known as the Bastille, was the central event of the time. Its rallying cry of "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which proclaimed all citizens were equal under the law, not only electrified the French but inspired many Britons as well. Mary and her friends who gathered at Joseph Johnson's house cheered what was happening in France, for they felt it heralded a new day for all mankind. The young poet William Wordsworth summed up the feelings of many with the couplet: "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!" In October, Joseph Priestley predicted that revolution would spread to other countries- something that did not thrill Britain's upper classes. Indeed, after Mary's old mentor, Reverend William Price, gave a public sermon praising the revolution, saying, "I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading," a prominent member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, felt compelled to reply. Though Burke had earlier supported the American Revolution, his Reflections on the Revolution in France condemned the destruction of French aristocratic society and government. Burke used the language of a Gothic novel in his metaphor for the revolutionary forces: "Out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination."
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the first answer to Burke in her vigorous defense of the French Revolution, Vindication of the Rights of Man, which was published anonymously in December ????; the first printing sold out in a month, and the next printing had her name attached to it. Overnight, Mary became a heroine to English supporters of the Revolution. William Roscoe, a friend of Fuseli's, wrote a ballad satirizing Burke in which this stanza appeared:
And lo! an Amazon stept out, One WOLLSTONECRAFT her name, Resolv'd to stop his mad career, Whatever chance became.
The Revolution radicalized a number of women writers, who began to critique the role of women in society and the family. The revolutionary emphasis on the rights of man gave Mary the opening to write about the other half of the human race. She may have been inspired by a dinner at Johnson's house in September 1791, where Thomas Paine, the firebrand whose pamphlet Common Sense had helped spark the American Revolution, was a guest. Among those present was William Godwin, who had been looking forward to meeting Paine and was annoyed when, he felt, Mary monopolized the conversation.
Of course, Mary needed no other goad than her intelligence and social conscience, for the real-life circumstances of women were reason enough to protest. Women had very restricted opportunities. Indeed a married woman had no rights after her wedding; her very being and legal existence was incorporated into that of her husband. Britain's Matrimonial Act of 1770 called for the prosecution as witches "all women . . . that shall . . . impose upon, seduce, and betray into matrimony any of His Majesty's subjects by means of scent, paints . . . false hair . . . high shoes, or bolstered hips." Many people had little sympathy for the cause of women's rights, for they saw the humiliations inflicted on them as the will of God.
Socially, women were hemmed in by the customs and standards society set for the "Proper Lady," as a twentieth-century scholar, Mary Poovey, has called the ideal woman of that time. Etiquette books, intended for the young and for those who wished to "improve" themselves, described precisely how women should act. Women of the aristocracy were not limited by these values, but for the rest of women-particularly the middle class-they were essential to respectability. The ideal of the Proper Lady strongly handicapped ambitious women like Mary, for it ranked the virtues of modesty and moderation higher than any talent or ability. It even held in low esteem women who indulged in vigorous activities; sports of any kind were denied to them. The Proper Lady could only entertain herself by activities such as sewing, piano playing, singing, needlework, and painting. Modesty was carried to extremes, for no proper woman could admit to sexual urges. The double standard of sexual morality was everywhere the norm; for a woman to lose her virginity outside of marriage was equivalent to dishonor-but men were expected to seduce them if they could. In the words of an eighteenth-century text for the education of young women: "This [virginity] lost, every thing that is dear and valuable to a woman, is lost along with it; the peace of her own mind, the love of her friends, the esteem of the world, the enjoyment of present pleasure, and all hopes of future happiness."
Encouraged by Joseph Johnson, Mary used her newfound fame to take up the cudgels for her sex. Thoughts rushed from her brain as she wrote her magnum opus in just six weeks. Mary handed A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to the printer in January 1792. In it, she launched a frontal attack on the Proper Lady and defined as "negative virtues" such Proper Lady ideals as patience and docility. She urged women to demand their rights and declared that she wanted to "rouse my sex from the flowery bed, on which they supinely sleep life away."Wollstonecraft declared that women were human beings before they were women, and they were entitled to equal civil and political rights as well as opportunity for education and economic advancement. "I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves," she wrote. She boldly criticized no less an exalted personage than Rousseau for his notions of female inferiority.
Mary asserted that the differences between men and women were mainly the result of upbringing and education, not of biology. She insisted that women had the same capacity for learning that men did and she wanted girls to have equal opportunity for learning and education, preferably in coeducational schools outside the home. Recognizing the connection between equality and becoming financially independent, she insisted that girls be encouraged to aim for success in the professions.
Perhaps because of her own mixed feelings, Mary played down the importance of sexual relations, advocating friendship between men and women, rather than passion. (She was soon to change these views.) She constantly struggled with the conflict between her need for love and her desire to dominate -"to be first." Moreover, she wanted the respect and rewards that society gave to the Proper Lady, though she refused to abide by the standards that society demanded in return. In short, she wished to have it both ways.
With the publication of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she reached the height of her fame. It became an immediate bestseller and made Wollstonecraft one of the most famous women in Europe. French, German, and Italian versions appeared. (The sister-in-law of Abigail Adams, wife of the man who would become the second president of the United States, demanded that Abigail buy her a copy when she accompanied her husband to London.) Not all the attention was favorable. Hannah More, a prolific writer of pious plays, stories, and poetry, wrote to Horace Walpole: "I have been much pestered to read the Rights of Women [sic] but am invincibly resolved not to do it . . . there is something fantastic and absurd in the very title. How many ways there are of being ridiculous! I am sure I have as much liberty as I can make a good use of, now I am an old maid, and when I was a young one, I had, I dare say, more than was good for me."
By 1792 Wollstonecraft had changed her appearance again, allowing her hair to assume its natural curl and cutting it in a fringe in the latest French style. Her new relaxed clothing reflected French revolutionary sensibility, as well as medical approval: Erasmus Darwin had written that less restrictive clothing styles were good for one's health, prompting many relieved Englishwomen to cast off their stays.
Mary's newfound fame had not lessened her obsession with Fuseli. In a desperate move, she went to his home and asked his wife to allow her to live there in a kind of ménage à trois. Despite Mary's willingness to take second place for once in her life, Sophia rejected her offer and warned her never to visit the house again.
Crushed, Mary wrote to Joseph Johnson, "I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! . . . There is certainly a great defect in my mind-my wayward heart creates its own misery-Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child-long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it." Ironically, Mary's daughter would have to suffer the same "threesome" problem with her husband, Percy Shelley.
Mary escaped this humiliation by going to France in December ????, arriving as the Revolution was entering a new, more radical phase: France was now at war with Prussia and Austria, and by a narrow margin the Revolutionary Convention had sentenced King Louis XVI to death, something that shocked even many of the original revolutionaries. Yet publicly, the situation seemed calm, even joyous. The common people felt they had triumphed. Dr. John Moore, an Englishman who lived in Paris at this time, reported,
The public walks are crowded with men, women, and children, of all conditions, with the most gay, unconcerned countenances imaginable. A stranger just come to Paris . . . would naturally imagine from the frisky behaviour and cheerful faces of the company he meets that this day was a continuation of a series of days appointed for dissipation, mirth, and enjoyment. He could not possibly imagine that the ground he is walking over [had been] . . . covered with the bodies of slaughtered men; or that the gay lively people he saw were so lately overwhelmed with sorrow and dismay.
Mary's fame preceded her, and she soon made friends among the small English community in Paris, where she found many involved in love affairs. A freer attitude toward sex was part of the spirit of the revolution. Nuns and priests were encouraged to marry, for celibacy was regarded as unhealthy; unmarried mothers were helped rather than blamed; women argued for their right to divorce their husbands. Mary also found kindred spirits among the Girondists, members of the more moderate revolutionary faction who often met at the Jacobin Club, particularly the wife of a Girondist government minister, Madame Roland, who was one of the social and intellectual leaders of revolutionary Paris.
But danger loomed. In January 1793, the king was guillotined, an act that led to a declaration of war from England and Spain, countries whose monarchs felt their own necks threatened. In France, foreigners now began to encounter hostile stares; the government told landlords and innkeepers to report any suspicious activity, especially by English and Spanish residents. Mary's friends whispered stories of people being taken from their homes by revolutionary guards in the middle of the night. She slept with a burning candle in her room, fearful of what might happen.
In these tense circumstances Mary met the American Gilbert Imlay, who would bring a personal revolution into her life. Mary was thirtythree and Imlay a bachelor of thirty-nine. Born in New Jersey, he had fought in the American Revolution and was now a businessman and writer. Tall, handsome, and skilled at seduction and flattery, he could claim literary kinship with Mary, for he was the author of a book, A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America, and at the time she met him, he was completing a novel, later published as The Emigrants. He told Mary openly that he had lived with other women and that he intended never to marry. Mary's fame as well as her attractiveness and lively spirit were attractions that led him to court her.
As Mary learned more about his business interests, Imlay took on a romantic image. He was involved in a shady project to organize a French expedition against the Spanish colony in Louisiana, and he may also have been engaged in smuggling goods through the blockade that Britain, now openly hostile to the French government, maintained off the coast of France. Mary began to idealize him as a model of Rousseauian simplicity, as Europeans liked to imagine Americans (a pattern set by Benjamin Franklin's wearing animal skins and posing as a frontiersman during his visits to France). Besides, she was growing older and the humiliation she suffered over Fuseli led her to overlook Imlay's faults. By April, the two were always together and they soon consummated their love. According to her, she experienced orgasm-what she called "suffusion"-for the first time.
The pace of events in France pushed the relationship along. After the king's head fell, no one was safe, and the Revolution began to turn on its own. In May and June, the Girondists were rounded up; Mary's close friend Madame Roland was among those arrested. To protect herself, Mary moved to the Parisian suburb of Neuilly. Here, in the summer months of 1793, she and Gilbert enjoyed the height of their affair. Now infatuated, Mary wanted to make the relationship permanent, but Imlay suddenly departed for the port of Le Havre to carry out one of his shady business deals. Not wishing to be alone, Mary moved back to Paris, where conditions were even more dangerous than before. Robespierre, the most radical French leader, had come to power and instituted the phase of the Revolution known as the Terror. Madame Roland was one of thousands of former supporters of the Revolution who now went to the guillotine. All British citizens fell under suspicion, and to protect Mary, Imlay had registered her as his wife and an American citizen. In October, the English who had remained in Paris-including many of Mary's friends-were placed under arrest, but Mary was protected by her new status.
Imlay was still spending much of his time in Le Havre, and Mary now realized she was pregnant: "I have felt some gentle twitches," she wrote Imlay, "which make me begin to think, that I am nourishing a creature who will soon be sensible of my care.- This thought has . . . produced an overflowing of tenderness toward you." Meanwhile Mary worked on a new book, A Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, further endangering herself, for even her new citizenship status would not protect her if the work were to be discovered. She walked to the Place de la Revolution daily and witnessed the guillotine in action. When she expressed her horror at the gruesome sight, others in the crowd warned her to be silent.
Her days were taken up with writing: in her letters to Imlay she poured out her feelings: "I do not want to be loved like a goddess; but I wish to be necessary to you." She hinted that she wished an invitation to join him in Le Havre. Receiving none, she acted on her own, finding a carriage and driver to make the journey. There, on May 14, she gave birth to a daughter. Mary named the girl Fanny after her closest friend, Fanny Blood. Imlay signed the birth certificate, still claiming he and Mary were married.
They spent the next three months together, happy ones for Mary as she basked in the feeling of being wife and mother. She and Imlay talked of settling in America, but by this time he was growing tired of playing at marriage and his finances required attention. He told Mary he had to go to London on business. She returned to Paris, which was safer now that Robespierre had himself become a victim of the guillotine and the Terror was over.
Mary suffered through a very cold winter, waiting for Imlay to return but receiving nothing but excuses. Her own letters became more insistent, and she wrote to him much as she had earlier to Jane Arden. On January 9, 1795, she told him, "I do not chuse to be a secondary object." Little Fanny was a demanding child, although caring for her distracted Mary from allowing despair to overwhelm her. Finally she decided to return to England, writing Imlay from Paris, "My soul is weary,-I am sick at heart."When Mary reached London in April, she and Fanny and a French maid moved into a house Imlay rented for them, but he was cold to her; he had taken a new mistress, a pretty actress. After he told Mary frankly that he did not want to live with her and Fanny as a husband and father, Mary attempted suicide by taking laudanum. It was a cry for help, for she had sent suicide notes to both Imlay and her mentor Johnson. In Mary's novel Maria, when the heroine is deserted by her lover, she also takes laudanum, but a vision of the fictional Maria's baby girl makes her vomit the poison. In real life, Imlay, who had received Mary's suicide note in time, came to revive her.
As in her affair with Fuseli, Mary was blinded by her passion, still hoping to save her relationship with Imlay despite all indications that it was over. He was planning to go on a business trip to Scandinavia and she volunteered to take his place. Perhaps wishing to get rid of her, he agreed, giving her some assignments to carry out. She set off with Fanny and her nursemaid, visiting Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and then continuing on to Germany. During this trip she kept writing to Imlay, hoping to revive his feelings for her. At the same time, she analyzed herself keenly:
Love is a want [need] of my heart. Aiming at tranquility, I have almost destroyed all the energy of my soul. . . . Despair, since the birth of my child, has rendered me stupid . . . the desire of regaining peace (do you understand me?) has made me forget the respect due to my own emotions-sacred emotions, that are the sure harbingers of the delights I was formed to enjoy-and shall enjoy, for nothing can extinguish the heavenly spark.
When she returned, she found Imlay was now openly living with another woman. Mary's humiliation was now both complete and public. She again sought escape through suicide-this time with more determination. She wrote to Imlay, "I would encounter a thousand deaths, rather than a night like the last. I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek." On a rainy afternoon in October 1795, Mary carried out her plan. She rented a boat and rowed herself up the Thames to the Putney Bridge, which she had learned was less crowded than Battersea Bridge, the closest span to her flat. Leaving the boat, she walked back and forth along the bridge in the pouring rain to make sure that her clothes were so wet that she would sink under the waters. As she threw herself into the dark cold river, she expected death to embrace her kindly, the way Goethe had described it in The Sorrows of Young Werther: "I do not shudder to take the cold and fatal cup." (Werther was a bestseller that had prompted many suicides throughout Europe and was later to be one of the books that the monster reads in Frankenstein.) But as water filled Mary's lungs, she began to choke and was in pain before losing consciousness. A man who had seen her leap off the bridge jumped in and saved her. He took her to a tavern, where a doctor revived her. Death, apparently, would not accept her sacrifice.
Imlay offered financial help but Mary was too proud to accept it. She saw Imlay for the last time in 1796 and wrote to him the next day, "I part with you in peace." She resumed her writing career to earn her keep and get on with her life. From the Scandinavian trip came a charming book, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The act of writing it gave her some respite from the turmoil that raged within her, and she began to come to grips with Imlay's true character, realizing that the relationship could never have worked out the way she had wanted. Perhaps most importantly, Letters won the heart of William Godwin, whom Mary would meet a second time, with happier results than the first. William Godwin described himself accurately as "bold and adventurous in opinions, not in life."Though not as well known today as he once was, Godwin was one of the most important radical thinkers of his time. His courage did not extend to his relations with women, and it was only after becoming involved with Mary that he explored the intricacies of love. Their short life together provided for each of them the emotional and intellectual companionship that they had lacked. For their daughter Mary Shelley, who never knew her mother, their mutual affection was an ideal that continually inspired her fiction and her own desires.
Godwin was born March 3, 1756, in Wisbech in the Cambridgeshire Fens-a bleak area where the North Sea constantly threatens to overwhelm the land. He was the son and grandson of clergymen-so-called Dissenters who were stricter in their beliefs than the members of the Church of England. This devout religious background created an emotional rigidity that made William more comfortable with books than with the love and affection of other people. It fostered his shyness and coldness and did long-term psychological damage that he would pass on to his daughter.
William was the seventh of thirteen children, many of whom did not survive to adulthood. His father, John Godwin, was the minister of the Wisbech Independent Chapel and took in paying pupils to supplement his meager income. Because of the large family, William got little attention even as a young child. He was sent to a wet nurse for the first two years of his life and later, like Mary Wollstonecraft, was to fault his parents for this neglect. His formative years were marked by poverty and a dreary existence. They put a chill into his soul that would never leave him.
John Godwin belonged to the Sandemanian tradition, a small and joyless sect of Dissenters who embraced "primitive" Christianity. He believed in predestination, original sin, and divine retribution. Indeed his Calvinist views were so rigid that he alienated his congregation and had to move to Debenham in Suffolk when William was two. Here again, William's father had difficulties and two years later he relocated once more-this time to Guestwick, north of Norwich, where he would remain till he died. Much of Godwin's childhood was spent here. The local meeting house's most treasured possession was a carved oak chair known as Cromwell's chair. The young William occasionally sat in it, taking the place of Oliver Cromwell, the hero of the Dissenters, who had ruled England for five years when the Puritans had controlled the country.
William remembered his father as a man who had little love of learning or books and that he usually scribbled his sermon for the Sunday service at tea on Saturday afternoon. By contrast William himself was a very early reader and soon went through the Bible, books of sermons, The Pilgrim's Progress, and other religious literature. As he recalled, "I remember, when I was a very little boy, saying to myself, 'What shall I do, when I have read through all the books that there are in the world?'" A favorite "improving" book for him was James Janeway's A Token for Children, Being an Exact Account of the Conversion, Holy and Exemplary Lives and Joyful Deaths of Several Young Children-a series of stories about children who were saved by obeying God's will and dying at a young age. Uncle Edward Godwin, another minister, had written a children's book called The Death Bed, a poem concerning the Joyful Death of a Believer and the Awful Death of an Unbeliever, which all the young Godwins had to read. The title tells it all.
Death in its reality was not unknown to the Godwins. One brother drowned at sea and another in a pond right outside the Godwin home. William himself was a sickly boy and was lucky to survive an attack of smallpox; his religion forbade him to be inoculated, and he said he was "perfectly willing" to die rather than disobey.
All this piety made the young William fear that he might be damned forever for any small infraction. Even as a child, he wished to become a preacher himself. At home, he would stand on his high chair in the legal wig that had belonged to his great-grandfather and deliver sermons to an imaginary congregation. Rather than enjoying his son's performances, however, John Godwin feared that William was acting like a showoff.
When he was eight, William began attending school at a town two and a half miles away. He practiced preaching as he walked through the woods. One day he made a friend collapse in tears when he described the damnation that awaited him for his sins. Later he secretly borrowed the key to the meeting house and preached and prayed over his friend like an ordained minister. (In a note that he wrote to himself, he said he allowed the boy to kiss him. The nature of the kiss was not noted.) The only errant act of his childhood that William remembered was attending the theater in Norwich, when he was nine. Though his father's female cousin accompanied him, theater-going was forbidden by his religion.
His father sent him back to Norwich when he was eleven to be educated as the only pupil of the Reverend Samuel Newton. His father chose Newton because he believed that William needed even stricter training to instill more humility in him. Newton's preferred method of instruction was beating for the smallest behavioral lapses. William was beaten only once, but even that was an astonishing experience to him. As he recalled, "It had never occurred to me as possible that my person . . . could suffer such ignominious violation." After his schooling, William returned to Guestwick, where he worked as an assistant schoolteacher until his father's death in 1772.
John Godwin's death was a liberation. William's mother, conscious of her son's intellectual gifts, took him to London to the Hoxton Academy. Hoxton was a rigorous college-far more rigorous than Oxford and Cambridge at the time. (As a Dissenter, Godwin was not able to attend those prestigious schools, which were for Anglicans only.) Lectures started at six or seven in the morning and included classics, theology, and Greek philosophy; students learned Latin, Greek, and Hebrew along with smatterings of French, Italian, and German. Most important, for the first time in his life, Godwin was exposed to honest, passionate debate.
Though he did well academically, he was not happy at Hoxton. He had an intense desire to be liked by others, yet had little ability in the art of making himself popular. He later noted ruefully that the schoolmaster and other pupils thought him "the most self-conceited, self-sufficient animal that ever lived."Though he began what would be a lifelong friendship with a boy named James Marshall, Godwin felt a strong sense of loneliness. It would stay with him throughout his life, be a recurrent theme in his novels, and would be passed on to his daughter Mary.
When, after five years, Godwin left Hoxton, he still wanted to be a preacher even though he had now developed many other interests and his religious views had broadened. Then only twenty-two, he obtained his first job as a temporary minister in the town ofWare, near his birthplace, but problems soon developed. Though Godwin had not yet been formally ordained, he felt entitled to perform the communion service, because he had the consent of his congregation. It sounds like a minor issue, but other ministers in the county took umbrage and refused to use the title of Reverend in addressing him. Four congregations rejected him in four years. Godwin tried to open a seminary, but failed to attract students. He would never become formally ordained.
As Godwin's failures as a minister increased, he found his faith starting to waver as well. During this time, Godwin had started to read the works of the philosophes-the same thinkers who influenced his future wife, Mary Wollstonecraft. Rousseau's effect on Godwin was to make him realize that religion and superstition could not stand the test of reason. It was a profound shock to the young man's worldview. At first he shifted from Calvinism to Deism, but would in time become an atheist.
Bereft of the only sure force that had guided his life, he settled in London in 1782 and began his career as a writer, joining a part of the English literary world known as "Grub Street," which published cheap novels, books of poetry, and nonfiction. Godwin had to produce copy quickly and in great quantity. "In the latter part of 1783," he recalled, "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." Imogen was a spoof of The Poems of Ossian, a bestseller of the day that was supposed to be ancient Celtic lore, but was in reality a fake. Godwin's parody was spicy, including rape, a lecherous magician, and other highly un-Christian elements, although virtue did triumph in the end. He also wrote reviews for John Murray's English Review, a monthly that favored radical political positions. Publications called "reviews" were abundant in those days; they were often little more than collections of puff pieces used to push the newest books. (Murray was a book publisher as well; he would later publish Byron's works.) Godwin also took to critical writing-he attacked hack writers with relish, but was willing to praise writers who he thought were advancing knowledge. (Mary was equally honest; despite her feminism, she had no qualms about giving bad reviews to female writers, as when she called one book "one of the most stupid novels we have ever impatiently read. Pray, Miss, write no more!")
Though Godwin wrote for a radical publication, he was himself at first not politically active. In this he followed his father's example; the closest John Godwin had come to a political act was to take five-year-old William to a fireworks display in Norwich to celebrate the coronation of George III. Even so, at the time, the need for political reform was a hotly discussed topic, and William, with his background as a Dissenter, was particularly interested in it. The Act of Toleration of 1689 had given Dissenters only the freedom to practice their religion; English law still retained many restrictions against their conduct or liberties. For example, Dissenters were forbidden to hold civil or military offices, and were required to pay for the upkeep of local Church of England parishes.
The French Revolution inspired Godwin, as it had Mary Wollstonecraft. The issues being raised in France encouraged him to look for a way to bring about political justice through rational means in England. In 1791 he began planning a book that would "tell all that I apprehended to be truth," and secured an advance from a publisher to give himself the time to write it. The result, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, was published in February 1793; its appearance made Godwin famous overnight. His central premise was that humans were innately good; cruelty and injustice have made them what they are. Given that Godwin's original religious belief, as a boy and young man, was that humans are inherently mired in evil and need God's grace for salvation, it was clear that he was totally repudiating the faith in which he was raised.
Like his future wife, Godwin was not a philosopher who spoke in abstract terms alone. He intended to improve humankind by attacking the entrenched social and political institutions. Government, he wrote, was the central problem. In a time when the ruling class of England feared the French Revolution, Godwin was heedless of the consequences when he wrote such passages as, "With what delight must every well-informed friend of mankind look forward to the . . . dissolution of political government, of that brute engine which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind." Considering that a man had recently been thrown into prison for three months for drunkenly shouting "Damn the king" in a public place, it is surprising that Godwin experienced no harassment for his views. Other critics of the government were put on trial for their lives-Horne Tooke, one of those whom Godwin and Wollstonecraft knew from Joseph Johnson's dinner parties, was among them. (He was acquitted.) Godwin later claimed the authorities thought the book was too expensive to reach a large audience. For whatever reason, he escaped prison and the noose.
This was all the more surprising since Godwin's Political Justice was if anything more extreme than Wollstonecraft's book. Godwin condemned all forms of coercion, including those used by the government to keep order, making him one of the founders of anarchism. Godwin envisioned a society in which people lived harmoniously without compulsion or force. At the top of the list of coercive social institutions that he attacked was marriage, which he called a slavery for women and "the most odious of all monopolies."The world of the future, in his view, would be egalitarian and people would use reason in all their relationships. Reasonable individuals would only act after considering the general good of the society, and limits on freedom would no longer be necessary. Godwin saw no obstacles to this ideal society, for progress was his true theme; he believed that it would inevitably appear. It was not stoppable.
Godwin's optimism and idealism seem excessive today, but at the time, revolutions-the American, the French, the scientific, and the industrial-seemed to promise that anything humans could envision was possible. Godwin instantly became one of the leading figures in the intellectual ferment of the time, and he became a hero to those who were most idealistic.
Political Justice was both expensive and difficult for the average person to read. Even so, groups of people raised the money to buy a copy, and then gathered to hear it read aloud. Godwin set out to reach a wider audience by writing a novel that would express his views in simpler form. He told his new story from the first-person point of view to get the reader more involved, a technique that his daughter would also employ. The year 1794 saw the publication of Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which combined psychological insight with a mystery-an unbeatable combination that produces bestsellers even today. Lower-class Caleb Williams, a servant, discovers that his otherwise upstanding employer, the upper-class Falkland, is a murderer. To prevent Caleb from revealing the secret, Falkland frames him for a crime. Caleb goes into hiding, and the two become locked in a pattern of pursuit, which ultimately destroys them both. Mary Shelley, who knew her father's novel well, would make use of the relentless pursuit between two self-destroying individuals when she wrote about Dr. Frankenstein and his monster. Godwin continued to write novels for the next four decades. He was perennially in need of money, and novels were easier to write and sell than books of philosophy. Superficially-for he always used his novels as vehicles for his philosophy-his books employ Gothic elements, such as a struggle against a tyrannical authority figure, supernatural happenings, and a mysterious or exotic setting. (In Caleb Williams the narrator is warned never to open a trunk that stands in his master's room. Of course . . .) Despite Godwin's popular appeal, his novels posed important questions for society, and their resolutions were often tied to Godwin's radical proposals. He did not totally abandon nonfiction, writing the sensational Lives of the Necromancers (1834) two years before his death. It described such magicians as Cornelia Agrippa and Albertus Magnus of medieval times-questing figures who would interest both Percy Shelley and his fictional counterpart, Victor Frankenstein.
In 1796, William Godwin, at forty, was at the height of his fame. William Hazlitt, a contemporary essayist and critic, wrote that "he blazed as a sun in the firmament of reputation." But he had little experience with women, although recently he had shown some interest in two female writers, Elizabeth Inchbald and Amelia Alderson. Godwin feared that romantic involvement would take away energy from his intellectual activity.
In his mind, as expressed in his works, sexual relationships ranked well below friendship, and of course marriage was actually "evil."These ideas would be severely tested when he encountered Mary Wollstonecraft in January 1796. The two were reacquainted at a dinner at the house of Mary Hays, another writer and a great admirer of Wollstonecraft. Godwin expected, but did not find, the woman who had annoyed him in 1791, but Wollstonecraft was now a mother and had gone through considerable emotional trauma since then. She did not dominate the conversation.
Godwin's interest increased after he read Mary's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark. He later wrote, "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man fall in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration." Godwin went to call on Mary but she was away. When she returned, seeing his card, she paid a visit to him-a bold move, but one that was necessary to overcome Godwin's shyness. A romance blossomed that led to a love affair.
Godwin described his attachment to Mary in terms that were about as emotional as he ever got: "When we met again, we met with new pleasure, and I may add, with a more decisive preference for each other. It was however three weeks longer, before the sentiment which trembled upon the tongue, burst from the lips of either. There was . . . no period of throes. . . . It was friendship melting into love. Previous to our mutual declaration, each felt half-assured, yet each felt a certain trembling anxiety to have assurance complete." Nobody wanted to make the first move.
For Mary, this would be the first time she had been able to enter a relationship that satisfied both her intellect and her heart. She wrote to Godwin in September 1796, "When the heart and reason accord there is no flying from voluptuous sensations, I . . . do what a woman can-Can a philosopher do more?"
It was a particularly modern relationship. They wrote countless notes to each other, sometimes several times a day, developing a code to signal when it was a good time for sex. Godwin plotted Mary's menstrual cycle, which they used as a form of birth control. Mary assured William that he was free to see his other "Fairs"- there was to be no monopoly of affections. (Although in Mary's notes to him she referred to Elizabeth Inchbald as "Mrs. Perfection.") Indeed, it appears that Godwin proposed to Amelia Alderson in July 1796, but was turned down.
Wollstonecraft was more sexually experienced than Godwin but she was also emotionally fragile, and with the memory of Imlay still fresh, she feared her own vulnerability. Shortly after they began having sexual relations, she wrote Godwin about her doubts: "My imagination is for ever betraying me into fresh misery, and I perceive that I shall be a child to the end of the chapter. You talk of the roses which grow profusely in every path of life-I catch at them; but only encounter the thorns . . . Consider what has passed as a fever of your imagination; one of the slight mortal shakes to which you are liable-and I-will become again a Solitary Walker." (The italicized phrase, underlined in her letter, was from one of Rousseau's autobiographical writings.)
Godwin responded: "Do not cast me off. Do not become again a solitary walker. . . . Be happy. Resolve to be happy. You deserve to be so. Every thing that interferes with it, is weakness & wandering: & a woman, like you, can, must, shall, shake it off." It was the first time that Mary had a lover who was emotionally supportive. As the relationship deepened, Wollstonecraft felt secure enough to show Godwin her frank, honest, true self and to question intimately his interest. "Can you solve this problem?" she asked in one letter. "I was endeavouring to discover last night, in bed, what it is in me, of which you are afraid. I was hurt at perceiving that you were." In November, she wrote, "You tell me that 'I spoil little attentions, by anticipation.' Yet to have attention, I find, that it is necessary to demand it. My faults are very inveterate-for I did expect you last night-But, never mind it. You coming would not have been worth any thing, if it must be requested."
What Mary called Godwin's "chance medley system" of birth control did not work, and in December 1796 she realized that she was pregnant. Both she and Godwin were philosophically against marriage, but Mary worried about having a second illegitimate baby. Godwin agreed to marry her for the sake of their child. With Godwin's school friend James Marshall as witness, the couple wed at St. Pancras Church on March 29, 1797. For Fanny's sake, Mary had been calling herself Mary Imlay, but she signed the marriage certificate "Mary Wollstonecraft, spinster." It was to be a fresh start.
Godwin did not even mention the wedding in his journal. One of his chief objections to marriage was "co-habitation," the necessity for husband and wife to live together, denying "peace and privacy" to both. The newlyweds avoided that by continuing to occupy two residences. Though Mary and three-year-old Fanny, who called Godwin "Papa," moved into his home, Godwin maintained a separate office up the street where he could work privately during the day. Mary insisted that Godwin was still free to eat out with anyone he chose and that she was free to raise her children as she wished. They continued to communicate frequently by letter. Such was their answer to the problem of marriage "monopoly."
Meanwhile the two looked forward to the baby; they were sure it would be a boy and planned to name him William. Mary regained the enjoyment in motherhood and married life that she had experienced so briefly with Imlay. She wrote to Godwin in June 1797, "I begin to love this little creature, and to anticipate his birth as a fresh twist to a knot, which I do not wish to untie. Men are spoilt by frankness, I believe, yet I must tell you that I love you better than I supposed I did, when I promised to love you for ever."
The weather during that summer of 1797 was freakish; the strange phenomena would not be equaled until 1816. England experienced terrific storms that had been spawned by volcanic activity in the South American Andes. Unusually high tides struck the English coast, flooding the lowlying areas. The land was plagued by storms in which the lightning was so severe it seemed "to threaten the earth with universal conflagration." On the night of August 14, a comet appeared over London, bathing the city with its glow for the next eleven clear nights of calm weather. Mary and William called the comet their child's friendly star.
Since Mary's first pregnancy had gone well, she had no fears about this one. When she felt the onset of labor pains in the early morning of August 30th, she called Mrs. Blenkinsop, the midwife in charge of the famous Westminster Lying-In Hospital. She sent the first of several notes up the street to Godwin, informing him of her condition: "I have no doubt of seeing the animal [as she referred to the baby] today; but must wait for Mrs. Blenkinsop to guess at the hour. . . . I wish I had a novel, or some book of sheer amusement, to excite curiosity, and while away the time-Have you any thing of the kind?"
Mary's final note to Godwin reads, "Mrs. Blenkinsop tells me that I am in the most natural state, and can promise me a safe delivery-But that I must have a little patience"- it ends there, without a period at the end, or even her signature. Whether Mary was aware she was quoting her mother's last words, cannot be known. In any case, they were the last she herself would ever put on paper.
Wollstonecraft had a slow and painful labor, but a baby girl was born late that night. At three in the morning of the next day, William was told to find a doctor, for the placenta had not come out. When the doctor arrived, he had to take the placenta out by hand, for it had broken into pieces. With no painkillers the pain was excruciating; Mrs. Blenkinsop had to hold Mary's shoulders while the doctor worked for hours. Because he did not sterilize his hands or equipment, the doctor's treatment caused an infection that would kill Mary eleven days later.
For the first few days, a weakened Mary nursed her newborn, determined that her child should receive the maternal nurturing that she herself had not. By the end of a week Mary's strength had further declined and she suffered a fit of shivers that were so violent that the bed shook. When her condition worsened, the doctors believed that too much milk was the problem. The baby and Fanny were put in the care of Maria Reveley, a neighbor. Puppies were applied to Mary's breasts to draw off the milk; the doctors hoped that this might stimulate her womb to contract so the rest of the placenta could be expelled. By the time a surgeon came, hoping to remove the last parts of the placenta, Mary was too weak for surgery. Godwin stayed with her in the final days, giving her wine to ease her pain. "Oh, Godwin, I am in heaven," she murmured at one point. "You mean, my dear," he replied, "that your symptoms are a little easier." He was at her bedside when she died September ??. He entered in his diary only the words, "20 minutes before 8" followed by a long series of dashes. For once, words failed him.
Five days later, he was still too distraught to go to her funeral. She was buried in the churchyard at St. Pancras, where she had been married five months earlier. Godwin wrote to a close friend: "I firmly believe that there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again. Do not-if you can help it-exhort me or console me."
The political and literary journals of the time noted the obvious irony that Mary Wollstonecraft, the advocate of equality between the sexes, died as a result of giving birth. As the conservative Anti-Jacobin Review pointed out, her manner of death marked the differences between the sexes and pointed out the "destiny of woman."This kind of vicious reaction only underscored the effect Mary had wrought. She had challenged many of the prejudices of society in her short but productive life- doing so at great cost to herself. Her life and courage would be a source of inspiration and pride for her daughter, who would grow up with a name fraught with significance, reflecting both of her famous parents. The daughter, like her mother, would challenge propriety and pay a high price. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was aware from childhood that her birth was responsible for the death of her mother. This trauma and guilt would be one of the central factors in her life, and would find an outlet in Frankenstein.
Copyright © 2006 by Dorothy Hoobler and Thomas Hoobler
