The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  J. P. Malcolm, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London, London 1808.

  Dorothy Marshall, The English Poor in the Eighteenth Century, London 1926; Clifton, New Jersey.

  H. W. Meikle, The French Revolution in Scotland, London 1912.

  J. Michelet, Les Femmes de la Révolution, Paris 1855.

  Hannah More, Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, London 1799.

  F. A. Mumby, Publishing and Bookselling, London 1930; New York.

  Per Nyström, Mary Wollstonecraft's Scandinavian Journey, Acts of the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences of Gothenburg, Humaniora No. 17, 1980. Per Nyström of Gothenburg established the facts of Imlay's attempted silver smuggling out of France and his claim against Ellefson when he was in turn defrauded.

  Mary-Anne Radcliffe, The Female Advocate, or an Attempt to Recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation, London 1799.

  Constance Rover, Love, Morals and the Feminists, London 1970.

  Ph. Sagnac, La Législation civile de la Revolution française, Paris 1898.

  M. Sydenham, The Girondins, London 1961; Connecticut 1973.

  E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, London 1963.

  J. M. S. Tompkins, The Popular Novel in England 1770-1800, London 1932; Gloucester, Massachusetts.

  Priscilla Wakefield, Reflections on the Present Conditions of the Female Sex; with Suggestions for its Improvement, London 1798.

  G. F. A. Wendeborn, A View of England, London 1791.

  Jane West, Letters to a Young Man, London 1801.

  Jane West, Letters to a Young Lady, London 1806.

  3 Letters

  Letters of Jane Austen, ed. R. W. Chapman, Oxford 1932; New York 1952.

  Collected Letters of Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, Oxford 1956; New York.

  Letters of William Cowper, ed. Thomas Wright, London 1904; New York.

  Letters of George Forster, ed. his widow Thérèse, Germany 1829.

  Love Letters of Mary Hays, ed. A. Wedd, London 1925.

  Letters of Madame Roland, ed. Perroud, Paris 1900.

  Letters of Anna Seward, Edinburgh 1811; New York.

  Letters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ed. C. Price, London and New York 1966.

  Letters of Horace Walpole, ed. Mrs Toynbee, Oxford 1903–5.

  Correspondence of Josiah Wedgwood 1781–94, London 1906.

  Letters of Wordsworth, ed. de Selincourt, revised C. Shaver, London 1967.

  4 Unpublished Sources

  Parish records in the Guildhall Library, London, the General London Council archives and St Andrew's, Enfield, Middlesex, have been consulted, as well as wills in the Public Record Office and letters lodged in Doctor Williams's Library, London, and Stoke Newington Library. Wollstonecraft family papers preserved in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia, have helped to give some account of the fate of Mary's brothers and sisters. The French national archives, while they failed to yield any of Mary's lost letters, contained references to Godwin and Christie, and the archives at Le Havre produced the birth certificate of Françoise Imlay. The Bentham manuscripts in University College, London, were consulted for his notes on female suffrage, and Bishop Percy's letters in the British Museum manuscript room for references to Mary's involvement with the Kingsboroughs.

  5 Diaries

  H. Crabb Robinson, ed. Edith Morley, London 1938.

  Diaries of Fanny Burney, London 1842, 7 vols; and vols 1 and 2 of Joyce Hemlow's 1972 edition.

  Thraliana, the diaries of Mrs Piozzi, ed. K. Balderstone, Oxford 1942.

  Portions of Samuel Rogers's diary appear in The Early Life of Samuel Rogers, ed. P. Clayden, London 1887; US 1973.

  Nancy Woodforde's diary for 1792, amongst the Woodforde papers, London 1932.

  6 Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft

  William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, two editions London 1798, the second slightly altered.

  Elizabeth R. Pennell, Mary Wollstonecraft, London 1885; New York 1972. A straightforward and sympathetic life, drawing on Kegan Paul's material (in Godwin and his Friends and the preface to his edition of Letters to Imlay) and Godwin's Memoirs. Mrs Pennell, an American writer who lived in London for several years, asked the Shelley family if she could see Mary's letters but was not allowed to.

  E. Rauschenbusch-Clough, A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman, London 1896. The emphasis is on the intellectual background.

  G. Stirling Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, a Study in Economics and Romance, London 1911; US. Enthusiastic and readable.

  W. Godwin, Memoirs, new edition with supplement by W. Clark Durant, New York 1927. A scholarly labour of love.

  Marthe Severne Storr, Mary Wollstonecraft et le mouvement féministe, Paris 1932. Most thorough in its account of Mary's feminist predecessors: a French academic thesis.

  H. R. James, Mary Wollstonecraft, a sketch, London 1932; US. The author died before he could revise this slight and personal book.

  Ralph Wardle, Mary Wollstonecraft, Kansas 1951. The first adequately researched life, meticulous and always interesting, but not much concerned with the feminist debate or Mary's contemporaries.

  Margaret George, One Woman's Situation, Illinois 1970. A brilliant discussion of Mary's failure to find a role as a free woman in a bourgeois society.

  Edna Dixon, Mary Wollstonecraft, London 1971. A romantic biography, marred by factual errors.

  Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft, New York 1972. An excellent book; my own book duplicates some of the research, but my conclusions are not always the same.

  7 Memoirs, biographies and autobiographies

  William Beloe, The Sexagenarian, published anonymously in London in 1817. A mass of gossip by a violently reactionary anti-feminist.

  Ed. M. Betham-Edwards, Autobiography of Arthur Young, London 1898; New York 1926. Useful account of his time with the Kingsboroughs ten years before Mary.

  J. Boaden, Life of Mrs Inchbald, London 1833. Mrs Inchbald, a Catholic, burnt her autobiography on the advice of her confessor; Boaden's attempt to replace it is dull.

  Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. Chapman, London 1953.

  Cecilia Brightwell, Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie, Norwich 1854.

  Ford K. Brown, The Life of William Godwin, London and Toronto 1926. Corrects and fills in Kegan Paul.

  Peter Brown, The Chathamites, London 1967. Useful section on Price.

  Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth, London 1971; New York 1972. Especially interesting in its full account of Maria's relations with her father and stepmothers.

  L. Cahen, Condorcet et la Révolution française, Paris 1904; New York.

  George Chandler, William Roscoe of Liverpool, London 1953. Describes his friendship with Mary, Fuseli and Johnson.

  A Narrative of the Life of Charlotte Charke by herself, London 1755. Charlotte Charke was the youngest daughter of Colley Cibber, quarrelled with her family, liked to dress as a man and had to support herself and daughter after she separated from her husband. Vivid and absorbing account of her struggles, a generation before Mary.

  Ed. Brian Connell, Portrait of a Whig Peer, papers of second Viscount Palmerston, London 1957. Palmerston was in Paris in 1792, and the letters and diaries printed here give a good picture of the attitudes of his class.

  J. Cottle, Reminiscences of Southey and Coleridge, London 1847.

  Allan Cunningham, Lives of Painters, London 1829. The section on Fuseli, malicious in its account of his relationship with Mary, is not necessarily invalid; Cunningham knew many of Fuseli's friends.

  Edward Dowden, Life of Shelley, London 1886; US. The full two-volume version is one of the most entertaining biographies ever written, and is informative about Fanny Imlay.

  Ada Earland, John Opie and his Circle, London 1911.

  Eliza Fletcher, Autobiography, Edinburgh 1875. Mrs Fletcher was a young and ardent Edinburgh radical during the 1790s.

  Everilda Anne Gardiner, Recollecti
ons of a Beloved Mother, London 1842. The mother was Mary's childhood friend, Jane, who became a schoolmistress of extreme piety and prevented her pupils from reading the works of Byron.

  Stéphanie de Genlis, Memoirs, London 1825.

  Frank Hamel, A Woman of the Revolution, London 1911. Well-documented life of Théroigne de Méricourt.

  Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Autobiography, London 1840; New York 1973. A United Irishman and friend of Mary and her family, he gives an account of his meeting with her in Paris.

  Ed. (and compiled by) Hazlitt, Autobiography of Thomas Holcroft, London 1816. Godwin made Hazlitt cut references to Mary and Imlay in Holcroft's diary; the chapters Holcroft dictated from his deathbed are probably the best he ever wrote, and remind one of Dickens in their insight into the mind of a boy whose sensibility is finer than that of those who surround him.

  Ed. F. P. Hett, Memoirs of Susan Sibbald, 1783–1812, London 1926; New York. Describes a conventional middle-class country and boarding school upbringing.

  M. Gladys Jones, Life of Hannah More, Cambridge 1952. One of Mary's opponents; shows Miss More's dependence on the devoted services of her sisters.

  Charles Kegan Paul, William Godwin and his Friends, London 1876; US. Pious in its attitudes to Mary especially, and unreliable, but another classic of Victorian biography.

  R. D. King-Harman, The Kings, Earls of Kingston, Cambridge 1959. A privately printed book that draws on unpublished family letters and gives a vivid picture of the characters of Mary's employers.

  Charles Knight, Shadows of Old Booksellers, London 1865.

  J. Knowles, Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli, London 1831.

  R. Laboucheix, Richard Price, London 1971.

  J. Lackington, Memoirs, London 1810. Contains an account of the rise of female literacy, by a bookseller.

  Leopold Lacour, Trois Femmes de la Révolution, Paris 1900. Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt and Rose Lacombe, a socialist and feminist.

  E. McAleer, The Sensitive Plant, London and North Carolina 1958. Lady Mountcashel, née Margaret King, is the subject; a hostile account of Mary and her relationship with the family is given.

  Margaret MacGregor, Amelia Alderson Opie, Worldling and Friend, Smith College Studies in Modern Languages, 1932.

  Philip Magnus, Edmund Burke, London 1939; New York 1973.

  Eudo Mason, The Mind of Henry Fuseli, London 1951. Extremely useful selection of his writings, personal and official, with translations of German letters, bibliography, etc.

  Claude Mazauric, Babeuf et la conspiration pour l'égalité, Paris 1962.

  F. Mège, Le Conventional Bancal des Issarts, Paris 1887.

  Victor Clyde Miller, Joel Barlow, Revolutionist, London 1791–2, Hamburg 1932. Succinct account of Barlow's activities.

  Mary Moorman, William Wordsworth: a biography, Oxford 1957.

  E. Morchard Bishop, Blake's Hayley, London 1951; New York 1972.

  J. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, London 1812–15.

  Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs, London 1784. Another woman obliged to support herself after being divorced for adultery. She tried to earn her living as a writer in London; one of her patrons in Ireland (where she was born and to which she returned) was the uncle of Mary's Robert Kingsborough.

  J. F. E. Robinet, Condorcet, Paris 1893. Robinet takes it on himself to refute Condorcet's feminist ideas.

  Madame Roland, Memoirs, various editions include two English translations printed by Joseph Johnson in London, 1795 & 1796.

  Ralph Rusk, Adventures of Gilbert Imlay, Indiana University Studies 1923.

  Ed. J. T. Rutt, Life and Correspondence of Joseph Priestley, London 1831.

  William St Clair, The Godwins and the Shelleys, London 1989.

  Mrs H. Sandford, Thomas Poole and his Friends, London 1888; US 1973. Gives Poole's reading lists and letters demonstrating his interest in feminism at the time he first knew Coleridge.

  Mary Anne Schimmelpenninck, Life, London 1858. Valuable account of the Priestley family and their Unitarian friends during the 1790s. The author is a perfect specimen of those who rejected eighteenth-century rationalism for a comforting piety; she thought the Unitarians expected too much of themselves and others.

  Edward Smith, The Story of the British Jacobins, London 1881. A sympathetic account.

  J. T. Smith, A Book for a Rainy Day, London 1845, and Nollakens and his Times, London 1829 – both rich sources of anecdote and information.

  Ed. (his son) C. C. Southey, Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, London 1849.

  A. Stephens, Memoirs of John Horne Tooke, London 1813; New York 1968. Shows Horne Tooke as an old-fashioned radical, uninterested in feminism. He never married, but adopted his two illegitimate daughters and expected them to cheer his old age; they were taught a little art so that they might support themselves. The illegitimate son was shipped off to India.

  Claire Tomalin, Shelley and his World, London 1980 and Penguin 1992.

  A. Wedd, The Fate of the Fenwicks, London 1927.

  Helen Maria Williams, Souvenirs de la Révolution française, Paris 1827.

  L. D. Woodward, Hélène Maria Williams et ses amis, Paris 1930.

  8 Fiction

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, La Nouvelle Héloïse, 1760, first London edition 1784 (a Dublin one in 1761).

  Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774, English translation London 1779.

  These two novels were favourite reading of Mary and her circle.

  Thomas Holcroft, Anna St Ives, London 1792; New York 1970. The heroine looks forward to an ideal future in which marriage will no longer be necessary, determines for the present to marry for the good of society rather than merely to please herself; she quells a would-be rapist by sheer force of personality and marries her father's steward's son.

  Mary and Elizabeth Hays, stories in Letters and Essays Moral and Miscellaneous, London 1793. They demonstrate the superiority of educated women over ignorant, and imagine ideal settlements in the American woods.

  Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants, London 1793. Pictures American life and advocates easy divorce.

  Thomas Holcroft, Hugh Trevor, London 1794–7; New York 1973. Rambling political novel, discussing exploitation of women as well as poor, talented young men.

  Elizabeth Fenwick, Secresy, London 1795. Gothic novel with feminist ideas and criticism of marriage.

  Robert Bage, Hermsprong, London 1796. A radical hero and two spirited, independent and well-read heroines; several references to Mary Wollstonecraft.

  Elizabeth Inchbald, Nature and Art, London 1796. Another radical novel, with a bold account of the ruin of a village girl through seduction and her inability to restore herself to a tolerable existence thereafter.

  Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney, London 1796. The sad life of an active and educated young woman who wants to find work and woo her own husband; portrait of Godwin and almost certainly his actual letters quoted.

  William Godwin, St Leon, London 1799; New York. Written in the aftermath of Mary's death, it contains an idealized portrait of her.

  Mary Hays, A Victim of Prejudice, London 1799. The persecution of the illegitimate daughter of a young woman who has died (the only copy in the BM is a French translation, Paris 1799).

  Elizabeth Hamilton, The Modern Philosophers, London 1800. Crude satire on radicals and feminists, featuring Bridgetina Botherim (meant for Mary Hays) and the hairdresser Valloton, turned orator and planning an ideal community in central Africa.

  Amelia Opie, Father and Daughter, London 1801. Another young woman with an illegitimate child; she drives her father mad with grief and is ostracized.

  Maria Edgeworth, Belinda, London 1801. Attacks feminists in the person of Harriot Freke, whose behaviour is coarse and who encourages her women friends to adultery.

  Anne-Louise-Germaine de Staël, Delphine, 1802, and Corinne, 1805: both books describe women struggling against the limitations imposed on them by society, but are strictly novels o
f high life.

  Maria Edgeworth, The Modern Griselda, written about 1803, satirizes a dissatisfied wife who insists on a divorce and then regrets it.

  Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray, London 1805. Supposedly based on the story of Godwin and Mary, it depicts an idealistic young couple who resolve to live together without marriage on principle and suffer hideously as a result; except perhaps for the physical description of the heroine, it cannot be taken seriously as an account of Mary.

  Amelia Opie, A Wife's Duty (date unknown; the only copy I have seen is in the London Library in a nineteenth-century reprint collection). The story is set during the period of the French Revolution and the wife behaves as Mary reported herself when she found herself beside the guillotine. The message is that wives should endure patiently any amount of provocation from husbands.

  Maria Edgeworth, Madame de Fleury, a story printed in Tales of Fashionable Life, was written about 1805. It contrasts a good, submissive heroine with her wicked cousin who supports the Revolution and comes to a deservedly bad end.

  Fanny Burney (Madame d'Arblay), The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties, published in London in 1814 but planned and begun ‘before the end of the last century’, shows clearly that its author had brooded over the question of women's rights, influenced no doubt by Madame de Staël and her own sister Susanna as well as the English feminist writers.

  Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (London 1811; New York 1913), also planned and drafted in the 1790s, contains in Marianne a heroine who is brought to say, ‘Had I died, – it would have been self-destruction.’ It is perhaps worth pointing to a link between Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft which suggests that Miss Austen probably knew Mary's story: Sir William East, a neighbour of the Mrs Cotton with whom Mary stayed in Berkshire in 1796 after her second suicide attempt, is said to have shown her much kindness. The son of Sir William East was a resident pupil in the house of Jane Austen's father.

  Notes