The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  Towards the end of July she settled in Tönsberg for a while without Fanny and enjoyed walking, riding on horseback, rowing and sea-bathing; she also embarked on the work Johnson had given her. For a while she felt happier under this regime, but by the time she returned to Fanny in August she was nagging at the idea of whether Imlay would live with her again or not, and received three unkind letters from him all at once:

  … you tell me that my letters torture you [she wrote back]… Certainly you are right; our minds are not congenial. I have lived in the ideal world, and fostered sentiments that you do not comprehend – or you would not treat me thus. I am not, will not be, merely an object of compassion – a clog, however light, to teize you.

  She accused him of writing to her after dinner, ‘when your head is not the clearest’, but her own letters, though evidently always sober, are not always easy to follow:

  What peculiar misery has fallen to my share! To act up to my principles, I have laid the strictest restraint on my very thoughts – yes; not to sully the delicacy of my feelings, I have reined in my imagination; and started with affright from every sensation, (I allude to —) that stealing with balmy sweetness into my soul, led me to scent from afar the fragrance of reviving nature.

  It is hard to be certain what exactly was stealing with balmy sweetness into her soul. Her attempt to sort the higher love from the lower left her in the usual difficulties. ‘I will not in future confound myself with beings whom I feel to be my inferiors’ was perhaps a way of trying to write off the pain of Imlay's sexual preference for girls she despised, but it left her with a decidedly etiolated ‘better’ love: ‘Love in some minds is an affair of sentiment, arising from the same delicacy of perception (or taste) as renders them alive to the beauties of nature, poetry, etc.’

  To hate Imlay and his behaviour was beneath her dignity as a rational person, and yet she could not write off her sufferings without writing off the love that had led to them:

  Gracious God! It is impossible to stifle something like resentment, when I receive fresh proofs of your indifference. What I have suffered this last year, is not to be forgotten.

  And, most touchingly,

  Love is a want of my heart. I have examined myself lately with more care than formerly, and find, that to deaden is not to calm the mind – Aiming at tranquillity, 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.

  To feel that jealousy and despair are wrong was not to extinguish them; she was still caught in the same perpetually recurring cycle of emotion as she travelled to Denmark and on to Hamburg, giving up any hopes that Imlay might meet her in Basle. She may have saved his fortune, but her courage and efficiency did nothing to improve their relations. Once again she returned to England, this time disembarking at Dover; once again he did not meet her, but greeted her with equivocal remarks in London and saw her to her lodgings. Once again, a prey to uncontrollable emotion, she persisted in nosing out the true situation. There was a new girlfriend; this time Mary questioned the servants to find out about her, a procedure she had always held in the utmost contempt. She must have felt that she had almost completed her own moral self-destruction when she was driven to ask a lodging-house cook about the sexual behaviour of the man she had hoped to live with in a new and infinitely more dignified way than the world had yet seen.

  [15]

  Putney Bridge

  By now Mary knew she could not reasonably hope for Imlay ever to become her lover again. Worse still, he was not even ready to keep up appearances like a conventional husband; he was preparing to set up house with his actress, exposing Mary to public humiliation and forcing her to acknowledge openly the failure of her brave social experiment. It is one thing to defy the opinion of the world when you are happy, another altogether to endure it when you are miserable. Mary's Dissenting friends, Johnson, the Newington Green ladies and her family must have wondered at her behaviour and her plight and felt dismay when they realized she was now a discarded mistress saddled with a child. For Mary, the princess, author of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, to be reduced to this was peculiarly painful.

  There was this to face; and, equally humiliating, the realization that Imlay found her all too easy to forget and replace. His desire for her had lasted scarcely more than a few months. Mary had protected herself in the past from minding about her sexual failures by claiming indifference to the sexual aspect of love. Now she could no longer do this; the wound was hideous and exposed. And although she never acknowledged it, she must have known that Imlay's desertion was perfectly in accord with their agreed theories about the importance of freedom and the immorality of maintaining a tie once feeling had ceased to sanction it. At the same moment Mary and Imlay were wrestling with their problem, William Godwin was working on the second edition of Political Justice and extending his section on marriage with a discussion of inconstancy: it was loathsome, he said, only where it was concealed.1

  Clearly Imlay tried in his rather feeble way to appeal to such theories in his letters, but Mary would not – could not – take the point. Nor could she quite give up hope that something extraordinary might yet change him again. Till the end of her correspondence with him she harped on the idea that there was a real, better version of Imlay who had somehow become mislaid. Unfortunately the real one, the light-hearted romantic sensualist, a man made to move on with a polite sigh or a well-meant shrug, was liable to turn nasty if demands he could not meet were made on him.

  So Mary went round and round in her mind and in her letters until she was again emotionally exhausted. To escape became the most important thing; to escape, and to punish the conscience of those she escaped from. Desire for vengeance, self-hatred and headlong flight from intolerable reality pointed once again to suicide.

  The flaw in Mary's courage – or it could be called the sensible loophole she left – was the carefully dispatched letter to Imlay in which she not only announced her intention of killing herself but explained how, and even gave some indication as to where she proposed to carry out the deed. ‘I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of being snatched from the death I seek.’ And of course there was a veiled appeal here too: love me enough to come and save me, she was saying. If not, death is to be ‘peace’ and ‘comfort’, in contrast with the treatment he has been handing out. ‘I would encounter a thousand deaths, rather than a night like the last.’2

  She had arrived at full romantic status: prepared to die for lack of love. Hitherto heroines had more often died of shame, making their deaths a repudiation of the act of love. Shame was not something she could ever admit to, but she was determined to point a moral to Imlay in the process of dying: ‘Should your sensibility ever awake, remorse will find its way to your heart; and, in the midst of business and sensual pleasure, I shall appear to you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.’3 The agony was genuine, but the majestic vision of herself appearing Banquo-like before Imlay's Macbeth sets up a faint irritation in the reader. Probably Imlay was infuriated by it; after all, he too felt trapped by the situation, however much he was responsible for it.

  For Mary, the way out of a trap was always to fling herself into action, and this is what she now did. In the rainy October afternoon she wrote her note to Imlay and gave it to a servant to be delivered. Fanny – poor Fanny – was hugged and left with Marguerite, who must have known her mistress's state of mind well enough without being able to comfort her; women intent on suicide have sometimes convinced themselves they are performing a service for their children and abandoned them with almost exalted feelings. Mary set off westwards on foot through the streets towards Battersea Bridge. It was a long walk, but she was a good walker, and there is a certai
n numbing comfort in tramping steadily under drizzling skies: she continued to pace about when she reached Battersea. The low, flat, marshy fields made it a dismal place. Men went there to shoot pigeons or fight duels and not much else. But still it turned out to be too public for Mary's purpose, and after a while she decided it would not do.

  She had money in her pocket, and approached a boatman. The apparition of a strange damp woman asking for a boat which she proposed to handle herself in the autumn twilight was unusual, but she persuaded him of her need and began to row upstream towards Putney. There was plenty of time now to remember other days when she had gone to Johnson's country house at Fulham, or to visit her sisters at their Putney school. She may even have called up a wry memory of one of Madame Bregantz's silly pupils who tried to drown herself in the river after getting into debt.4 But there was nothing in these thoughts to make her abandon her own plan.

  By now it was raining harder than ever. She beached her boat on the bank under the old wooden bridge and decided to go up on to it, high above the water. Why she did not simply drop into the water from the boat is mysterious, but she may have hoped the fall from the bridge would stun her and make drowning easier.

  Putney Bridge had a tollgate at either end with a barrier and a bell which prevented anyone from passing without paying their statutory halfpenny.5 To make her payment she had therefore to be seen again, but once on the bridge she could conceal herself in the bays constructed all along its length to allow foot passengers to keep out of the way of coaches. It was a busy bridge, but she dodged from bay to bay in the darkness until she felt her clothes were completely soaked in rain. Then she climbed on to the railing, a flimsy structure of two wooden bars, not difficult even for a woman in cumbersome clothes to get over, and jumped.

  ‘All is darkness around her. No prospect, no hope, no consolation – forsaken by him in whom her existence was centred… blinded and impelled by the agony which wrings her soul, she plunges into the deep, to end her sufferings in the broad embrace of death.’ Goethe's seductive account of suicide, which Mary liked to dwell on, was belied by the reality. There was no broad embrace in the river; she found herself still floating and conscious and struggled to press her wet clothes down around her body. She continued with this effort, gasping and choking, the very pain suffered in the process arousing her to a kind of amazed indignation: if this was the price of death, it was surely too high. But finally she became unconscious.*

  As it turned out, some watermen had seen her fall. By the time she had floated two hundred yards downstream they reached her and fished her out. They took her to a none too respectable public house called The Duke's Head, on the Fulham side, where a doctor was called and helped to revive her. Nobody knew who she was, and the locals talked about the incident for some time before they learnt the name of the lady who had jumped from the bridge.6

  But soon she was fetched, probably at Imlay's behest. He must have received her letter and sent after her. Conscious again, exhausted, sick, wet and wretched, she was bundled into a carriage and driven back to Finsbury Square, where Rebecca Christie had agreed to take her into her house.

  Imlay then sent a letter to Mary, saying he did not know how to extricate either of them ‘out of the wretchedness into which we have been plunged’; to which she replied tartly that he at any rate was long since extricated. In the same letter she defended her suicide attempt as ‘one of the calmest acts of reason’, and complained of having been inhumanly brought back to life and misery, ‘a living death’.7

  Imlay told her he felt unable to visit her, out of delicacy towards his new mistress, and instead offered her money, which she of course refused. Now, according to Godwin, he very foolishly vacillated once again, suggesting that his new love affair was a casual and light-hearted one of no permanent importance. It was a ham-handed piece of consolation, but she clutched at it. Perhaps he might after all come back later to her and Fanny.

  So Mary, for the second time in her life and with very different feelings, suggested a ménage à trois. Why should she not join Imlay and his girl in their house? He would at least be a father for Fanny. Imlay, still unable to act decisively, actually took her to inspect the house before making up his mind that such a situation would not do. It is not inconceivable that the actress put her foot down at the prospect of living with her formidable predecessor, especially when she heard Mary had plans for undertaking her education. The project was abandoned.

  Thomas Christie may have been inclined to sympathize with Imlay over a crisis involving two women and a baby, and since he was a business colleague too Imlay was a frequent caller at the Christie house. Mary decided to move out into lodgings, but settled near by in Finsbury Place so as to be close to Mrs Christie, who was her friend in the affair. She began to think how she might start earning money for herself once more, and her thoughts naturally turned to Johnson and the Analytical. She started reviewing again, prepared a new edition of Original Stories, and made up her mind to attempt a play based on her own experiences. This comedy was in fact offered to two producers in a rough draft and then set aside when they rejected it. Unhappily, Godwin later destroyed the manuscript. Whatever its defects, it would have been instructive to see how Mary presented her life in the comic mode.

  She also decided to make a book out of the letters she had sent Imlay from Scandinavia. She asked him for their return, and he at once complied. Then on impulse she wrote to Fuseli for her letters to him too:

  I have long, ceased to expect kindness or affection from any human creature, and would fain tear from my heart its treacherous sympathies. I am alone. The injustice, without alluding to hopes blasted in the bud, which I have endured, wounding my bosom, have set my thoughts adrift into an ocean of painful conjectures. I ask impatiently what – and where is truth? I have been treated brutally; but I daily labour to remember that I still have the duty of a mother to fulfil.

  Only Mary could have been capable of inviting one man who had used her ill to sympathize with her over another's usage. She ended her letter to Fuseli half apologetically, half unable to resist an appeal for reassurance: ‘I have written more than I intended, - for I only meant to request you to return my letters: I wish to have them, and it must be the same to you.’8 But it was not the same to Fuseli, and he paid her the meagre compliment of refusing to return them.

  For business reasons, or to escape from the situation and soothe the ruffled feelings of his present mistress, Imlay now set off for Paris. Mary still pursued him with letters in which she castigated his theory of morals, predicted an unhappy old age for him and reproached him for his failure to help her family financially.

  He wrote back telling her that she was tormenting him, and pointing out that his conduct was unequivocal. She answered furiously that it had not been so – on the contrary, it had been warm and loving even when he was deceiving her: ‘With these assurances, is it extraordinary that I should believe what I wished?’ And she still begged him to see her again, until the next to the last letter of all. In that she threw his words in his face: ‘forbearance’ and ‘delicacy’ were not what she had found in him.

  I have no criterion for morality, and have thought in vain, if the sensations which lead you to follow an ancle or step, be the sacred foundation of principle or affection. Mine has been of a very different nature, or it would not have stood the brunt of your sarcasms. The sentiment in me is still sacred. If there be any part of me that will survive the sense of my misfortunes, it is the purity of my affections. The impetuosity of your senses, may have led you to term mere animal desire, the source of principle…9

  This was the revived voice of the Mary who had written Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, her face turned away from the world of the senses. Paris and its lessons were forgotten. She was too outraged not to take refuge in a puritan morality once again.

  But with Imlay physically out of the way and some friends about, things did begin to improve at last. In January Johnson published her Letter
s Written during a Short Residence in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, entirely made of letters she had sent Imlay from Scandinavia. She was a good travel writer; although the Letters were touched with melancholy personal complaints they were also full of sharply sketched accounts of the people she met and the manner in which they amused or shocked her, the social conditions she found and the northern scenery of rocks, waterfalls and forests in its summer incarnation. Some of her phrases were good enough to provide Coleridge with inspiration.10

  There was no pretence of a systematic approach; Mary had simply allowed her eye for nature, her curiosity about mankind and her bent towards didacticism to run together in oddly successful harmony. She could end one letter:

  A crescent hangs out in the vault before, which woos me to stray abroad; – it is not a silvery reflection of the sun, but glows with all its golden splendour. Who fears the fallen dew? It only makes the mown grass smell more fragrant.

  – and overleaf be transformed into a sociologist: ‘The population of Sweden has been estimated from two millions and a half to three millions’, going on to discuss the conditions of servants, the taxation system and the beneficial effects of the French Revolution on remaining monarchies.

  Reviewers and public praised the book, which showed her not only as a courageous traveller (Anna Seward was particularly struck that she took the baby with her) but as a gentle and thoughtful woman. Amelia Alderson, still an unknown and aspiring young writer, summed up what many readers undoubtedly felt when she wrote to Mary in 1796 saying,