The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  But whether the womanishness was Mrs I's or her own was not clear. Amelia was used to having her own way; she was the adored daughter of a Dissenting doctor in Norwich; her mother had died young, and she had spent her youth writing poetry and plays and organizing amateur theatricals as well as running the house. She had corresponded with Mrs Barbauld and her father, who had encouraged her to write, and when she was twenty-one she published an anonymous novel, The Dangers of Coquetry, with the impeccable moral ‘that the appearance of impropriety (especially in women) cannot be too carefully avoided’.10 Godwin had commented on the manuscripts of her plays, and she never failed to call on him when she was in town. Her father's politics were republican, and during the treason trials, which she attended, she knew that he intended to emigrate if the accused were found guilty. Consequently Godwin was a great man to her, even though she had too strong a sense of the ridiculous to be much moved when he began to woo her. A malicious description of him came from her pen, ‘his hair bien poudré, and in a pair of new, sharp-toed, red morocco slippers, not to mention his green coat and crimson under-waistcoat’.11 She took to Mary as soon as they met, declaring with her usual vivacity that the only two things in England that had failed to disappoint her were the Cumberland lakes and the author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman.12

  Amelia enjoyed being wooed; Holcroft proposed to her and had to be turned down, but Godwin was trickier. He had put on record his profound objection to the institution of marriage; he wanted love, but not a wife; and in any case he was divided in his feelings.

  Elizabeth Inchbald interested him as much as Amelia. Like her, and Godwin himself, she was Norfolk born, but her family were simple farmers, Catholics for generations.13 She had run away from a widowed mother and houseful of sisters to try her luck as an actress in London. Alone and penniless, beautiful and innocent, she called on theatrical producers asking for work and found that the road to advancement was not what she had expected. She was forced into a quick decision to marry a widowed actor who offered himself, and only through him did she have her first opportunity of joining a touring company. They had no children, he died; she fell in love with the great John Kemble, he would not marry her. Typically, she put him to use in another way, drawing his character in a novel, The Simple Story, which was a huge and deserved success.

  She acquired many admirers, conducted prolonged flirtations, but did not marry again; either she preferred independence or the men she liked were reluctant to propose to an actress. She turned to writing plays instead of acting, cultivated a ferocious respectability, and was heartbroken when one of her sisters went to the bad and died in sordid circumstances. Vanity and miserliness seem to have become her ruling passions. The few notes she left about her life had more to say of the state of her teeth and her investments than her heart, and she burnt the manuscript of her autobiography on the advice of her confessor. Coleridge has left a description of her, in a letter to Godwin:

  Mrs Inchbald I do not like at all – every time I recollect her, I like her less. That segment of a look at the corner of her eye – O God in heaven! – it is so cold and cunning –! thro' worlds of wildernesses I would run away from that look, that heart-picking look. ‘Tis marvellous to me that you can like that Woman.14

  But Godwin was fascinated by that heart-picking look, and Mrs Inchbald was friendly enough to Mary for the moment. Rivalry was in the air, but not a bitter rivalry. Mrs Inchbald's virtue was impregnable, Godwin was known to be resistant to marriage, there seemed no reason why they should not continue in a decorous round of visits and flirtations for as long as they liked without upsetting one another at all.

  And now, through this group, a considerable social life began to open up for Mary again. Other great ladies of the stage made her welcome; they all knew what it was to be famous and yet not considered quite respectable, and they were prepared to show her sisterly sympathy. Mrs Siddons befriended her, as did Mary Robinson, who had once dazzled the Prince of Wales as Perdita; now she too was bringing up a daughter alone, and had turned to literature to earn her living. And Mary was often invited to spend her Sundays with the Twiss family, who liked to gather theatrical and literary people under their roof: Frances Twiss was the sister of Mrs Siddons and John Kemble.

  Another woman writer who admired Mary was Elizabeth Fenwick;15 she had just published, anonymously, a novel called Secresy (sic) which was strongly feminist in tone, and gave a frank account of an idealistic young woman who entered into a marriage relationship without the marriage ceremony and was betrayed as a result. Mrs Fenwick was the wife of Godwin's revolutionary friend John; he took to drink and she was later obliged to separate from him and fend for herself and her children in the usual way: school-teaching, hack writing, governessing. She was also intimate with Mary Hays, and the three women obviously found a good deal to discuss together.

  With this sort of encouragement, Mary Imlay began to work on a new novel. It was to be called Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, and it embodied a whole series of case histories illustrating the iniquities of the legal position of women, defending their right to sexual freedom and bitterly attacking society's refusal to allow them proper employment. Mary was less skilful a novelist than Elizabeth Fenwick, Mary Hays or Elizabeth Inchbald; it is probably a pity she allowed herself to be sidetracked from writing a second volume of polemics and chose instead to embody her ideas in fiction. Yet the pressures and drama of her personal experience gave her writing colour and fire. Aspects of her childhood appeared again, and her justifiable resentment against her elder brother produced a sister's aphorism: ‘What was called spirit and wit in him, was cruelly repressed as forwardness in me.’ She also took the opportunity to sketch a portrait of Imlay: he made his appearance as a sympathetic and charming though somewhat empty-headed lover who seduced a married woman and then drove her by his neglect to attempt suicide with laudanum.

  The most striking thing about Maria was probably its outspoken assertion that women had sexual feelings and rights, and that the supposed refinement which tried to obscure this was actually degrading:

  When novelists and moralists praise as a virtue a woman's coldness of constitution and want of passion, I am disgusted. We cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us. Men, more effectually to enslave us, may inculcate this partial morality, but let us not blush for nature without a cause!

  And to enforce her point about the sexual inflammability of her heroine, she made Maria say: ‘I could not coquet with a man without loving him a little and I perceived that I should not be able to stop at the line of what are termed innocent freedoms, did I suffer any.’ As in Mary, she was trying to explore her own nature as honestly as she could, and with rather more experience to call on now.

  She also attempted something new: to see life through the eyes of the poorest sorts of women, without caricaturing them. Maria is full of servant girls turned away by their mistresses when found to be pregnant, girls who try to abort their babies or kill themselves, girls bullied by employers, women ill-treated and insulted by landladies, working wives whose husbands take all their earnings, hospital patients whose treatment is experimental and dictated by the convenience of the doctors and students rather than their own wellbeing. The prostitute Jemima, sullen and clever, dragged up in misery and just able to pick up some education from a ‘protector’, is the finest character in the book, and her attempt to find any work above the most menial is described in detail as the bitter farce any such attempt was bound to be.

  Maria was never finished, but left in a disordered and fragmentary state at the time of Mary's death. Even so, and apart from its intrinsic interest, it was important as a contribution to the small body of work by women writers who allowed their pens to dwell on guilt and misery without flinching. Mrs Inchbald's Nature and Art also showed a country girl, seduced and left with a baby, becoming a creature everyone else felt free to exploit economically as well as sexually. Mar
y Hays, both in Emma Courtney and in her second novel, The Victim of Prejudice, dwelt on the exploitation and helplessness of girls who were not protected by money or family. ‘I thought of myself as a wild animal fallen into the hunter's nets’ she made one such girl say after a weary effort to find and keep a decent job in London.16 These were frightening but not fanciful pictures of the dark side of life for women, what they had to fear if eligible husbands failed to appear, fathers’ fortunes were lost, rich uncles did not help; then they would indeed find that social superiors were implacably rude and cruel, and that the poor, instead of blending anonymously into the landscape, were individuals like themselves. Together, these novels serve as a reminder of the mass of silent girls who found the world empty of opportunity or happiness. They do something more than this, for they make up the first fictional school of women writing without reference to male tastes or models, and devoted to considering the place of their own sex in society.

  In her writing, Mary continued to dwell angrily on the wrongs of her sex, but in her personal life the months that followed her thirty-seventh birthday were more agreeable than any she had passed for a long time. She had many visitors; John Opie, whose divorce finally came through at Easter, took to calling on her so often that there was gossip about his intentions.17 The portrait he painted of her shows how sympathetic he found her; in it she appears a gentle, rather subdued and motherly-looking woman.

  Young men began to worship her too: ‘the crude young Jacobins, so soon to ripen into Quarterly Reviewers, were just now coquetting with Mary Wollstonecraft, or making love to the ghost of Madame Roland’.18 Southey wrote to a friend from London that Mary was the person he liked best in the literary world; he said her face was marred only by a slight look of superiority, and that ‘her eyes are light brown, and, though the lid of one of them is affected by a little paralysis, they are the most meaning I ever saw’.19 Coleridge admired her conversation and character, though he added that her books were ill put together. And if Wordsworth was silent about her it may be that he was uneasy in comparing her situation and reputation with his own avoidance of responsibility towards his French-born daughter. He was in London in June, staying with another young man who was exceedingly fond of Mary – Basil Montagu – and seeing Godwin every few days.20

  It may well have been through Montagu, who was engaged to Sarah Wedgwood, that Everina was presently found a job as governess to the Wedgwood children. Mary kept in touch with her youngest sister, but she was still totally estranged from Eliza, and there are no letters to any other members of her family from this period. Ned's children were being brought up to regard their aunt as a source of deep mortification.21 One day her brother James appeared at her lodging, tired of his life at sea and declaring that he had embraced revolutionary principles and wanted to become a French citizen. In spite of the war he managed to make his way to Paris, and François Lanthenas spoke up for him as a suitable candidate for citizenship; was he not the brother of Marie Wollstonecraft? The recommendation was good enough to allow him to settle down as a ‘student’.22

  Mary herself was no longer regretting her life in Paris. She was too busy. She went to the theatre a good deal, and there were dinners and other gatherings at which actors, painters, writers and politicians talked of world affairs and of their work. Sometimes she visited St Paul's Churchyard and Johnson took up his old fatherly role again. And there was one particularly pleasant and memorable evening at John Kemble's when Sheridan, the Irish leader Curran, Elizabeth Inchbald, Godwin and Mary were all present. Everyone was in good spirits, ‘the conversation took a most animated turn, and the subject was of Love’: a theme on which most of the company was becoming increasingly expert.23

  [17]

  Godwin

  IT is tempting to say that Mary's love for Godwin was more mature and in some way worthier than her love for Imlay; the theory satisfies a natural wish to see her life arrive at a happy climax after so much frustration. But there is not really much evidence for this in the letters, and at least one of her friends considered that her ‘real’ love had gone to Imlay and that Godwin was no more than a consolation prize of a superior kind. Leaving aside the question of whether love can be sized up for quality in this way, it must be said that Godwin was a more intelligent and scrupulous man than Imlay, but that it was Mary's need and his reputation that made the match. An adequate emotion drew her to him and bound him to her, and though there were one or two moments when it promised to grow into something greater, it was only in Godwin's violently emotional retrospect that their wooing and marriage took on the colouring of high romance.

  He was susceptible before, during and after his relationship with Mary, and was looking for a woman when she called on him, preferably an intellectual and good-looking one. He was not a man who inspired many women with passion, and it is quite possible that Mary decided to woo him for a husband in cool – if not quite cold – blood. In the Memoirs he was at great pains to say that neither wooed the other:

  The partiality we conceived for each other, was in that mode, which I have always regarded as the purest and most refined of love. It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before, and who was after. One sex did not take the priority which long-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil-spreader or the prey, in the affair.

  But the image was a curious one, and may perhaps have pointed to some covert sense he had that he had been a prey after all, though willing enough. In one of his angry notes to Mary he claimed that he had ‘found a wounded heart, &, as that heart cast itself upon me, it was my ambition to heal it’.1

  Neither of them was entirely reliable as a witness about the sequence of events in their wooing. When he said, for instance, that she was his ‘principal topic of solitary and daily contemplation’ on his trip to Norfolk in July 1796,2 we have to remember that he proposed (presumably marriage) to Amelia Alderson on 10 July, however much he may have been thinking about Mary.3

  Amelia turned him down, upon which he sat down and philosophically wrote Mary a flirtatious letter. She meanwhile was moving her furniture out of storage and into rooms at 16 Judd Place West, very close indeed to his rooms, so that on his return he found her conveniently installed as a near neighbour.* His letters grew warm; hers, during the early days of August, were studded with arch and anxious references to her rivals, Elizabeth and Amelia. Soon Amelia appeared in London and, in the guise of sweet womanly friendship, spurred Mary into a passion of jealousy by telling her Godwin was ready to ‘devour her’ and speculating on whether he had ever kissed a woman.4 Just over a week later Mary became Godwin's mistress, ‘chez moi’, as he wrote carefully in his diary.

  It was not an altogether ecstatic journey of sexual discovery. He says he ‘had never loved till now; or at least had never nourished a passion to the same growth’.5 He was forty; probably he had never made love to a woman who was a friend before he became Mary's lover, and possibly he had lived a life of absolute chastity, guarding himself as best he could against the assaults of the imagination and the women in the streets – he wrote with authority on the influence of the imagination on the senses of the solitary man.6

  Whereas Mary was clearly sexually curious, inflammable and enthusiastic. She had already enjoyed one affair with a lover singularly free of inhibition and had been living in torment ever since. However little emotional confidence she had, she was sexually confident and unashamed.

  The beginning of the affair cast Godwin into confusion, and the day after she had become his mistress he either acted sick or was genuinely not well enough to greet her as warmly as she had hoped. He attempted a written apology which risked a phrase out of the marriage service but was otherwise less than gallant:

  I have been very unwell all night. You did not consider me enough in
that way yesterday, & therefore unintentionally impressed upon me a mortifying sensation. When you see me next; will you condescend to take me for better for worse, that is prepared to find me, as it shall happen, full of gaiety & life, or a puny valetudinarian?7

  But this crossed with one of Mary's letters in which self-reproach merged into scolding. She offered to withdraw from the situation altogether:

  … despising false delicacy I almost fear that I have lost sight of the true… You talk of the roses which grow profusely in every path of life – I catch at them; but only encounter the thorns – I would not be unjust for the world – I can only say that you appear to me to have acted injudiciously; and that full of your own feelings, little as I comprehend them, you forgot mine – or do not understand my character. It is my turn to have a fever today – I am not well – I am hurt – But I mean not to hurt you. 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. Adieu! I was going to add God bless you!8

  The tone was painfully reminiscent of her letters to Jane Arden at fourteen, and she certainly did not expect Godwin to accept her adieu any more than her invocation of God's blessing. It is touching to see that he already revealed to her his affliction, the ‘slight mortal shakes' he suffered from throughout his adult life, and which were probably a form of epilepsy: it was a gage expressing his confidence in her affection.

  Godwin's answer to this letter of Mary's was one of the finest things he ever wrote to her: honest but comforting, he affirmed the strength of his feelings without bullying her, and told her frankly but tactfully for once where he thought she went wrong.