by Paula Guran
So vast a problem, so much of which to speak, and—most insistent among her thoughts—who was Mary Wollstonecraft, former governess, sometime author and literary critic, to write A Vindication of the Rights of Men?
Now, as she mounted the steps to her George Street home, Mary did so with clenched teeth and renewed vigor. Her hands shook as she peeled away her gloves and hung her beaver-fur hat on its stand. She was not at all surprised to find a familiar figure waiting in her study.
“You are returned early,” the Grey Lady remarked as Mary seated herself at her desk. “I thought you might have stayed for dinner.”
“I find myself quite without appetite for food.”
“Did Mr. Johnson take your decision well?”
“Mr. Johnson said that I should not struggle against my feelings. That I should indeed lay aside the work if that would better my happiness. That he would destroy all that had already been written and printed, and do so cheerfully.” Mary snorted. “Cheerfully was the precise word he used. For such a mutilation.”
The Grey Lady smiled. “All is well then, and you may continue with your other work. A review of that play you attended with Henry Fuseli, perhaps?”
At the mention of the name, Mary felt her stomach flutter. She released a deep breath and steeled herself. No matter how great their genius, no matter how seductive their whispers, certain Swiss artists could be given no place in her heart this night, nor for many nights to come.
“I will put nothing aside,” Mary said. “Effusions of the moment these pages might be, but the moment is of no small import.” Unhappy with its banishment, Fuseli’s visage flitted across her mind. Undaunted, she flicked it away. “Tell me, why should genuine passion be so well regarded when it flows from the paintbrush of a man, but not from the pen of a woman?”
“It is the way of things,” the Grey Lady said. “As those with means and power govern those without, that which is male governs all that is female.”
“It need not be so,” Mary countered. “France shines hope upon us, no matter the worn and tired nostalgia that Burke and his ilk parade as vaunted tradition. We should yet see a progressive society built upon talent and ambition, rather than unearned privilege. Why should it be our continued duty to repair an ancient castle, built in barbarous ages, of Gothic materials?”
“Do you say, we should allow such edifices to crumble?”
“I say . . . ” Mary paused. Her eyes narrowed dangerously. “We should bring them to rubble ourselves.”
The Grey Lady clasped gloved hands together at her waist. “I would very much like to see such a world as you describe.”
Mary picked up her pen and found the place among her papers where her thoughts had stumbled and trailed off earlier in the day. Frowning, she crossed out a line or two. Then she cleared her throat, dipped nib into ink and began anew, words flying from her as furious wasps provoked from their nest.
She was called a hyena in petticoats, a philosophizing serpent. She was accused of lacking reason, of seeking to poison and inflame the minds of the lower classes, of being too shallow a thinker.
Those at the Gentleman’s Magazine confessed themselves astonished that a fair lady might seek to assert the rights of men, remarking that they were always taught to suppose that the rights of women were the proper theme of the female sex.
By rights, they did not refer to those of education or self-determination.
While Romans governed the world, they pointed out, the women governed the Romans. The age of chivalry having thankfully not yet passed, women should content themselves with ruling from the boudoir—though it remained questionable that such a viper as Mary Wollstonecraft might gain for herself so coveted a position.
The rights of women, indeed! Oh ho, what fertile ground for sarcasm and jest!
Lips moving silently as she walked, Mary Wollstonecraft rehearsed the words she would soon say to Sophia Fuseli, sounding them for depth and clarity. Hers was an inarguably practical solution, a proposal that would surely suit all parties, and a rational one at that. Despite her many impassioned letters to the man, Mary suspected a recent cooling of Henry’s sensibilities and she required the situation between them to be resolved. Her mind would otherwise remain fragmented, her thoughts unmarshalled.
The printing of a second edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had allowed Mary not only to correct some glaring errors of grammar and spelling, but to bolster arguments she feared too weak in the version Johnson had rushed to press this January—yet again! the Devil coming for the conclusion of a sheet before it was written!—but still she was unhappy. Although gratified by the book’s reception—more welcoming than her previous Rights of Man had enjoyed—a second volume remained to be written, her ideas expanded beyond the core theme of female education. If women were ever to be the equal of men, they would need to be treated thus, with responsibilities greater than coquetry, manners and marriage placed upon their dainty shoulders.
Why should they not aspire to autonomy? To their proper place within governance, commerce and the intellectual life of their society? A woman who had not power over her own self would remain forever a slave, and surely no true progressive argument could seek to deny universal rights to one half of the population . . .
Residual anger warming her cheeks, Mary paused to compose herself; she could not arrive in such a visible state of consternation.
Sophia Fuseli was already seated by the window when Mary was admitted into the modest but charmingly appointed parlor.
“Miss Wollstonecraft.” The younger woman scarcely smiled as she gestured towards a chair opposite. Her pretty face, those model features her husband so adored, remained stiff and unyielding. “May I offer you tea?”
Mary accepted both seat and beverage, though she perched nervously upon the edge of one and took little more than a sip of the other. Less than a quarter of an hour later, it was Sophia Fuseli whose complexion reddened and flushed. Her cup trembled on its saucer as she reached to place them on the table.
“You insult both my husband and his wife, Miss Wollstonecraft.” The woman’s tone was chilled, crisp as frosted glass. “And you make yourself a fool.”
“You misunderstand me,” Mary said. “I do not wish to share Henry with you in the manner of wife—”
“Kindly take your leave, Miss Wollstonecraft.”
But how could she, when Sophia was clearly confused as to her intentions—for why else would the woman take such prompt and livid offense? “Please, I do not mean to insult your marriage. My proposal arises solely from the sincere affection which I have for Henry, I can assure you. We have an intellectual affinity, he and I, and I plainly find that I cannot live without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily.”
“You shall have to find a means of living so.”
“But if we all inhabited the same household—”
“Will you not quiet your tongue?”
“Consider the practicalities, Mrs. Fuseli, if nothing else. We are none of us people of great means; to combine resources and share expenses within one household—”
“Miss Wollstonecraft!” Sophia Fuseli rose up in one violent motion. She thrust a finger at Mary, who struggled to gain her feet as readily. “You shall leave my house this moment and never again stain its rooms—or my husband’s studio—with your presence. You are no woman of principle, to speak so boldly of your rights and yet seek to trample roughshod over mine. You are no woman at all, but a monster.”
Escorted to the street by the Fuselis’ housekeeper, Mary stumbled but a dozen steps before stopping to brace herself against a wall. Around her, London bustled through its afternoon. Pedestrians passed oblivious to her humiliation as the clatter of hooves on cobblestones, the wooden groan of coaches, assaulted her ears. Her heart was an empty, gnawing thing within her. She had lost Henry.
She had lost Henry.
Her scalp prickled with sudden regard. Blinking away tears, Mary looked about her. On the opposite
side of the street, still and perfectly unjostled by the milling foot traffic, stood a tall woman wearing a hat dressed with ostrich feathers. The woman’s face was stern, reproving, and even at this distance, Mary could glimpse the disappointment in those steely eyes.
Well? Though she but mouthed them, the Grey Lady’s words pealed loud as funeral bells in Mary’s mind. Did I not warn you, Mary Wollstonecraft? Did I not say?
If her heart was a cage, she was unduly careless of its latch.
Fleeing the whispers and sneers of London, she sought refuge in Paris scant weeks before the execution of the king, and so became witness not to her beloved revolution but to the bloody terror that would claim it. Helpless to do aught but write, she took up her pen with fervor, heedless of the danger in her very English observations. In her politics, in her words, Mary Wollstonecraft was fearless.
But her heart was a cage, and its door remained open long after Fuseli had slipped featherless from its hold. Open, inviting another who alighted upon the flimsy bars and sang of love and desire and the untasted delight of sweat-salted skin. Another who skipped inside to settle for a while, or at least to give appearance of settling, his brash American plumage so bright and strange that Mary found herself wholly captivated—in her mind and soul and finally, wondrously, in her body.
“She is exquisite, is she not?” Mary Imlay, as she now styled herself, held her newborn daughter against her breast. “Ten perfect fingers in miniature, and look! Eyes the very shade of my darling Gilbert’s. Surely now that our Fanny is here, he will stay in Le Havre with us. Whoever could resist such eyes as these?”
“She is indeed a most agreeable child,” the Grey Lady said.
Frowning, the new mother glanced up. “You mock me?”
“I have never mocked you, Mary Wollstonecraft. But I do worry.”
Such concern was not misplaced.
Barely three months of shared parenthood were hers to enjoy that summer before Gilbert Imlay, her once-soulful lover, now less-than-official husband chafing under harness, left for London on matters of business similar to those that had dragged him away during her pregnancy. As before, he promised to send for her when matters were settled. As before, months slid past with no firmer word on when that might occur.
Her treatise on the French Revolution completed prior to Fanny’s birth, Mary was without a literary project with which to occupy herself. Instead, her word-churned mind bloated and burst itself over a near constant production of correspondence to Imlay—longing, scornful, desirous, admonishing letters that scarce received a satisfactory reply. Bodily, she devoted herself to Fanny, nursing the baby through smallpox, encouraging her efforts first to crawl and then to stand, rubbing her gums with chamomile as the first tooth began to cut.
“She will need to be weaned,” Mary said, wincing as the child mauled a nipple between her newly armed gums.
“She is not the only one,” the Grey Lady remarked.
Abandoned and friendless in the port city of Le Havre, Mary bundled up her daughter and returned to Paris. With Robespierre fallen, the streets were at last clean of the bloody work of the guillotine, but that winter proved the harshest of her thirty-six years. It was a winter of poor harvests and famine-priced food, a winter of unobtainable coal and wood cut laboriously by her own chapped hands, a winter of despair and burgeoning suspicion.
Imlay, came the whispers from foe and well-meaning friend alike, never intended to send for her or Fanny. Instead, he frittered his money away on the company of pretty London actresses.
On one pretty London actress in particular.
She tried to not heed them, but the words sank into her marrow.
Mary’s latchless heart was ill. Her soul was weary. The impish, smiling face of her daughter undid her daily; she loved the child more than she would have once thought possible, and yet those soft and vivacious features bore so solid a stamp of Imlay upon them, it was sometimes nearer cruelty than kindness to behold them.
At night, alone with the darkness and a silence that no sound save Fanny’s fluttering breath could penetrate, Mary’s thoughts thickened and set. She pitied the poor mite for being born a girl into a world run by men for their own ends, and wondered what earthly good she was showing herself to be as a mother. Certainly no better a mother than wife, or sister, or any kind of woman at all, and now that the child was no longer in need of her milk—
“I am nothing,” Mary whispered to the empty air.
She required, and received, no reply.
Finally, there came a summons to London, though she set off with little more than resignation in her breast. This was for Fanny, who deserved more from a father than the pauper-gift of his name, and it was for Fanny too that Marguerite accompanied them. The efficient new maid seemed as excited to see England as Mary had once been to visit France.
Mary’s gelid, smoke-grey thoughts trailed them all.
They were settled at Charlotte Street, the lodgings comfortably furnished with all but Imlay himself who vacillated between affection and apology, but remained acutely stubborn in his refusal to adopt the role of paterfamilias. A refusal of which, it seemed, all of London was jovially aware.
The laudanum, she later insisted, was an error of judgment.
She had not intended—
Certainly not—
She had once been Mary Wollstonecraft.
Movement was the key, as it always had been. If she remained still, in her body or in her mind, thick-thumbed gloom would smother her alive.
And so, to the astonishment of many, she agreed to Imlay’s proposal of a Scandinavian journey—some long-outstanding business she might follow up on his behalf, a traitorous ship captain to track down in Sweden, a purloined cargo of silver and gold to pursue in foreign courts—with the insinuation that their personal situation might be further resolved over the months of her—and Fanny’s—absence. Having sighted once more the woman who had so inflamed his passions in Paris, having held again the child those passions had born, might it not be that Imlay merely required time and space in which to unfetter himself from present entanglements?
At this barest hint of oil, Mary’s heart flung open with a shriek.
It was dim inside the carriage, and her clothing was wet and stinking of the Thames. She stared at her trembling hands, at fingernails still tinged corpse-blue, as though they alone had managed to resist the pull of the wakeful world.
“You are a foolish, obstinate woman, Mary Wollstonecraft.” The Grey Lady sat opposite, arms crossed over her breast, mouth drawn pencil thin.
“Mary Imlay,” she corrected, as she had done countless times this past year. Her throat rasped with the sting of a thousand wasps; she would never forget the unexpected agony of drowning, the furious burn of all that water rushing to fill her. If she had been foolish, it was only in her expectation that such an end might be painless.
The Grey Lady snorted. “You have never been Mrs. Imlay, in truth, and pray never shall be.”
“He is resolved that another might take that name.”
“You knew this.”
“Until yesterday, I only suspected.”
“You knew, Mary, let us not pretend otherwise.”
Mary shook her head. All those letters sent speeding back through Denmark, Norway, Sweden, all those notes received in turn from his deceitful hand, all those hints and promises that she and Fanny might still have a place by his side—only to return to find him setting up house with his actress. With the whole of London witness to her humiliation, to Imlay’s callous desertion, she had seen no other way to extricate herself or her daughter from the wretchedness into which they had been plunged.
“It was you who saved me,” Mary said.
“I breathed upon a fisherman’s nape,” the Grey Lady replied. “Encouraged him to turn towards Putney Bridge at the moment of your leaping; that was the furthest of my ability. It was he, and those in the tavern, who effected your resuscitation.”
“You would play my gua
rdian angel, then?”
“I am no angel, Mary. Must we tread this patch anew?”
“A monster then, to see me dragged back to life and misery.”
“To life, yes, and to your child.”
Tears coursed down her cheeks but Mary made no move to wipe at them. “I had—I had made provisions for Fanny. She was to return to France, to be raised safe from the taint of her mother’s errors, beyond the scorn of those who would damn her for her parents’ degradation.”
“This performance is wasted,” the Grey Lady snapped. “You are no martyr to wail in sackcloth and ashes.”
“You cannot know what I endure! What I have endured these past months—”
“But I do. Each passion, each degradation, that has e’er passed through you, I have felt most keenly. I know you, Mary Wollstonecraft. I know that you suffer, I know that your suffering is genuine—but, oh, how you delight in feeding it.”
“Do not presume to tell me—”
“I shall do more than presume and, for once, you shall do naught but listen.” The Grey Lady leaned forward; her eyes were flat metal discs in their shadowed sockets. “You make of people what you would have them be—such superior beings! so worthy of your heart!—and then you mourn their failings, when you are not blinding yourself to them. Imlay, Fuseli, even Fanny Blood—yes, Fanny; do not appear so shocked—they are more vital to you in their absence, for their presence can never approach the chimeras you have fashioned in their stead.”
“You take Gilbert’s side in this?” Beneath her despair, a renewed anger simmered.
“Never.” The Grey Lady’s voice was softer now, its barbs for the moment withdrawn. “I will always stand with you, but I will not tip soothing lies into your ear, nor will I aid this melancholy. You are stronger than you imagine, Mary, and I would have you see yourself through clear, unclouded eyes.”