Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  A letter to his wife in Ireland describes a post-Terror fête to celebrate the reburial of Mirabeau (for Wollstonecraft the pre-eminent leader of the Revolution, in contrast to his murderous successors) in the Panthéon. Rowan’s attention was caught by ‘a lady who spoke English, and who was followed by a maid with an infant in her arms, which I found belonged to the lady. Her manners were interesting, and her conversation spirited, yet not out of the sex.’ A friend whispered that she was the author of the Rights of Woman.

  I started! ‘what!’ said I within myself, ‘this is Miss Mary Wollstonecraft, parading about with a child at her heels, with as little ceremony as if it were a watch she had just bought at the jeweller’s. So much for the rights of women,’ thought I. But upon further inquiry, I found that she had, very fortunately for her, married an American gentleman a short time before the passing of that decree which indiscriminately incarcerated all the British subjects who were at that moment in this country. My society, which before this time was entirely male, was now most agreeably increased, and I got a dish of tea and an hour’s rational conversation, whenever I called on her. The relative duties of man and wife was frequently the topic of our conversation; and here I found myself deeply wounded; because if my dearest thought as Mrs. Imlay did, and many of their sentiments seemed to coincide, my happiness was at an end. I have sometimes told her so; but there must be something about me of deep deception, for I never seemed to have persuaded her that I had merited, or that you would treat me with the neglect which I then thought was my portion. Her account of Mr. Imlay made me wish for his acquaintance; and my description of my love made her desirous of your acquaintance, which it is possible may happen; and until you can decide for yourself, repay her, my dearest friend, some of those kind attentions which I received from her when my heart was ill at ease.

  Exiled from all he held dear, Rowan began to ‘croak’ his dark reveries to Mary, and passed messages between her and his level-headed wife. In doing so, he felt himself a connoisseur of female accomplishment. Since everyone addressed Mary as Mme Imlay, he assumed she had submitted to a ‘republican marriage’ for the sake of security, but whatever the legal situation, her connection with Imlay ‘had with her all the sanctity and devotedness of a matrimonial engagement’. At the same time she persisted in her opinion ‘that no motive upon earth ought to make a man and wife live together a moment after mutual love and regard were gone’.

  This made Rowan reflect on his treatment of his wife, and wonder if her attachment to him had been impaired.

  Mary assured him he ‘had no reason to be alarmed; for when a person whom we love is absent, all the faults he might have are diminished, and his virtues augmented in proportion’.

  Imlay continued to summon Mary to London–somewhat against her will. For she still had hopes of the Revolution, and wished Fanny to grow up in France.

  Finally, in April, she agreed, and Imlay sent a servant to ease her journey. Passing through Le Havre, she prepared their house for Archie Rowan, who was to stay there en route to America. France was too beset by war to interest itself in the fate of Ireland, and Rowan left for Philadelphia in July. He carried an introduction to Mary’s brother Charles Wollstonecraft, and went on to went on to lose money in a calico printing factory they set up together in Wilmington, Delaware.

  Ten or so days before Mary was due to sail for England, she weaned Fanny, hoping to endear the child to her father. She glanced across the Channel with a half-ray of hope hardly daring to light her eyes, but ready to return at a signal from Imlay. He did seem to give this signal when he wrote to her: ‘Business alone has kept me from you.–Come to any port, and I will fly down to my two dear girls with a heart all their own.’

  ‘I do not see any necessity for your coming to me,’ she replied on 7 April, wary, suddenly, of lending herself to his endearments. ‘I cannot indulge the very affectionate tenderness which glows in my bosom, without trembling, till I see, by your eyes it is mutual.’ On the brink of her crossing, her almost extinguished hope held to only the thinnest edge of life:

  I sit, lost in thought, looking at the sea–and tears rush into my eyes when I find that I am cherishing any fond expectations.–I have indeed been so unhappy this winter, I find it as difficult to acquire fresh hopes, as to regain tranquillity.–Enough of this–lie still, foolish heart!–But for the little girl, I could almost wish that it should cease to beat, to be no more alive to the anguish of disappointment.

  When Mary docked at the fishing port of Brighthelmstone (Brighton) on Saturday 11 April, she let Imlay know she would meet him at his London hotel the following evening: ‘I hope you will take care to be there to receive us.’ By ‘us’ she meant the child of a friend whom she had undertaken to escort from France; Fanny’s French nursemaid, Marguerite Fournée; and ‘our little darling’ of eleven months who, done with the breast, was ‘eating away at the white bread’. ‘But why do I write about trifles?’ she adds. ‘Are we not to meet soon?–What does your heart say!’

  Imlay had a furnished house waiting for her at 26 Charlotte Street, Rathbone Place (off Oxford Street, running north), only a block away from her old flat in Store Street. Though they shared the house, Imlay was evasive, claiming the demands of business. Fuseli, to whom she turned, snubbed her. Mary’s wish to hide her distress made her lie to Bess. Already, her sisters had wondered at Mary’s staying in France, and wondered too at Imlay’s avoidance. (So far, Imlay had distanced himself from Bess, while appearing the devoted husband: ‘I am in but indifferent spirits occasioned by my long absence from Mrs Imlay, and our little girl, while I am deprived of a chance of hearing from them.’) The sisters’ needs, as so often, centred on money–Bess, in particular, looked for rescue from her drudgery as governess-and here there was scope for misunderstanding: a husband was expected to help his wife’s family; one reason Mary had not married Imlay was to protect him from that obligation. She had to disabuse her sisters of a rumour (from their brother James) that Imlay had made £100,000. At the same time she was aware that Bess expected to join her married sister in Charlotte Street. Mary now made a bad blunder: in order to disguise the facts that she was not married and that the relationship was just then falling apart, she told Bess it would mar her happiness to have a third person with them. This blow to Bess led to permanent estrangement.

  Towards 20 May it was revealed that Imlay had taken up with an actress from a strolling company. Mary had long feared something of this sort, but the truth overwhelmed her. The fiction of living as a family ended when Imlay left the house, and she found herself cast in the mistress character she most despised: a discarded mistress whom a dutiful man continues to support despite his pressing debts. Support of this kind was insupportable. It was more than the loss of a lover. His explanations were ‘cruel’ because they locked her into the routine, age-old story of sexual surrender and betrayal. At the deepest level, it was a denial of the new genus, a threat to its continued existence. Explanations, she said, might convince the reason, ‘whilst they carry death to the heart’.

  Imlay protested his attachment to her.

  ‘My friend–my dear friend,’ she replied, ‘examine yourself well–I am out of the question; for, alas! I am nothing–and discover what you wish to do–what will render you most comfortable–or, to be more explicit–whether you desire to live with me, or part forever? When you can once ascertain it, tell me frankly, I conjure you!’

  Imlay’s unwillingness to hurt her with a straight answer prolonged the torment. During the last days of May she not only lost hope but seemed to have lost her very self: ‘My soul has been shook.’

  There were efforts to be calm. She even had Imlay to dine, promising to greet him with a cheerful face and avoid contention–yet at the centre of her calm was a ‘whirl’ of grief she could not subdue.

  At the end of May, she swallowed an overdose of laudanum. Later, her novel The Wrongs of Woman recreates what happened: ‘Maria’ feels her head swim and then faintness. Mrs Wolls
tonecraft’s dying words echo in her fading consciousness–‘have a little patience and all will be over’–before she allows herself to sink with the thought: ‘what is a little bodily pain to the pangs I’ve endured?’ Her final thought is for her child. At this, she vomits and resolves to live.

  Mary too did not die. Imlay, advised in time of her intentions, came to her rescue, and his promptness must have saved her life. With roused feelings, he urged her to go on. She had to live for her child; and she had to live because something indomitable in her could not accept Imlay’s conduct. She could not accept that this man of many gifts should not be educable, like Clarissa with Lovelace. Like Lovelace, Imlay had the attractions of a confident talker whose intelligence invites a woman to believe he is educable if only she can convey her character; but both Imlay and the fictional Lovelace are fixed in sexual habit. Lovelace is a practised deceiver of women, who at times can admit that the rake’s code betrays his own best interest. Imlay was even tougher to counter because libertinism was at home in the rhetoric of liberty. And then, too, he really did believe himself a friend to women. His rescue of Mary Wollstonecraft during the Terror appeared the act of a ‘generous soul’; only slowly did she find herself trapped in the fatal plot of the fallen woman–as Clarissa finds herself locked, literally, with whores by the very man to whom she had looked for rescue.

  Mary’s act stung Imlay’s conscience. His reputation, more than hers, was at stake: he risked the scandal of a celebrity whose attempted suicide declared ill use, even though she never spoke ill of him. He could have defended himself by denying her claim to be ‘Mrs Imlay’. He could have cast her off with the backing of society’s righteous virulence towards a wanton with a bastard. That Imlay did not do so tells us he was not that sort of scoundrel, and this is one reason why Mary held on as long as she did.

  Imlay’s answer to her rejection of his support was to offer her work in Scandinavia. For two centuries it has not been known what exactly this entailed, but it turns out that to discover the fate of the silver ship was not the purpose of her voyage. New archival evidence shows that, as the ice thawed in March, ‘Gilbert Inckay’ (as Swedish record calls him) had sold a ship called the Margrethe to Elias Backman of Gothenburg. Divers off the coast of Norway have looked for sunken treasure in vain. It’s now beyond doubt that the ship did not sink, and that Mary Wollstonecraft knew where it was before she arrived on the scene.

  Why did Imlay not undertake this journey himself? Some priority that ‘alarmed’ Mary Wollstonecraft directed him not to Norway but to France. It was more urgent to settle some difficult business there, most likely, awkward questions from Barlow’s contacts on the Food Commission, about the loss of the expected return of grain. Imlay had some explaining to do: he would have to convince the Commission that the silver had been stolen. He, the benevolent, trusting Imlay had been tricked by a thieving captain. Since Mary now warned him against his associates on both sides of the Channel, it may be worth noting that Imlay would again coincide with Joel Barlow, who was due to leave Hamburg for Paris.

  If Imlay’s part in this should prove ‘unlucky’, Mary told him, she would regret it less if it sent him home to her convinced that a true friend was another form of ‘treasure’.

  Mary Wollstonecraft was indeed an asset, known throughout Europe, and particularly in Paris, for her high-mindedness. It would vindicate Imlay’s case to have a celebrity of this calibre state his position, with her customary eloquence, to the prime movers in the case: Ellefsen’s lawyers, his judge, and most powerful of all, the Prime Minister of Denmark as ruler of Norway. So, while Imlay did his part in Paris, Mary Wollstonecraft was to back his case against the accused in Norway. There were two aspects to her projected journey: the more important, perhaps, from Imlay’s point of view was that a celebrity of moral standing would be seen to be on his side; and at the same time there were the practical matters: she was to carry through the repairs to the ship and confront Ellefsen.

  What is certain is that Imlay led Mary to believe that by pressing the rich Ellefsens for restitution, she could again make him, Imlay, her own. She agreed, she told him, ‘to extricate you out of your pecuniary difficulties’, while he, in turn, heartened her purpose by declaring her to be his wife in a letter of attorney addressed to Mrs Mary Imlay. Here were her orders:

  Know all men by these presents that I Gilbert Imlay citizen of the United States of America residing at present in London do nominate institute and appoint Mary Imlay my best friend and wife to take the sole management and direction of all my affairs and business which I had placed in the hands of Mr Elias Backman negotiant of Gothenburg or those of Messrs Ryberg & Co Copenhagen, desiring that she will manage and direct such concerns in such manner as she may deem most wise & prudent. For which this letter shall be a sufficient power enabling her to receive all the money that may be recovered from Peter Ellefsen or his connections whenever the issue of the tryal now carrying on against him, instigated by Mr Elias Backman as my agent for the violation of the trust which I had reposed in his integrity.

  There follows a tight, cryptic direction* concerning Norway, which could be unravelled in this way: Mary Imlay was to fix in her mind Imlay’s distress over the loss of the silver, ‘aggravated’ by further distress and loss resulting from ‘Ellefsen’s disobedience of…instructions’ to do with the ship. On the basis of that accusation (not, it appears here, an accusation that Ellefsen himself stole the silver), Mrs Imlay was to extract an unspecified sum as ‘damages’ due to her husband. The actual amount would depend on what she would find out on the spot: whether Ellefsen’s family found themselves ‘implicated in his guilt’; whether they had the ‘means’ to make a substantial ‘resistitution’; and whether they could be persuaded to settle out of court. The next paragraph, also cryptic, turns to Mary Imlay’s task in Denmark:

  Respecting the cargo or goods in the hands of Messrs Ryberg and Co Mrs Imlay has only to consult the most experienced persons engaged in the disposition of such articles, and then[,] placing them at their disposal[,] act as she may deem right and proper[,] always I trust governing herself according to the best of her judgment in which I have no doubt but that the opinions of Messrs Ryberg & Co will have a considerable and due influence.

  Thus, confiding in the talents zeal and compassion of my dearly beloved friend and companion[,] I submit the management of these affairs intirely and implicitly to her direction[,] remaining most sincerely & affectionately hers truly

  May 19th 1795 G. Imlay.

  The date shows this plan to have been in place two weeks before Mary took the overdose. It revived immediately after, encouraged by Imlay’s suggestion they meet up when their missions were done. The journey ahead also opened up the possibility of a travel book. An advance from Johnson would pay Mary’s debts and renew her confidence as a writer who could support herself through an uncertain future. Though hopes of Imlay were not dead, her doubts, understandably, had more hold.

  Ten years earlier, after Fanny Blood’s death, she had fought depression. Now, she had to pull herself free of the doomed plot of the fallen woman. Scandinavia, as a destination, was way off course from the usual Grand Tour centred on the Mediterranean. Between June and September 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft would show her mettle far north in lands no one visited at the time.

  12

  FAR NORTH

  Men often travelled with swords or pistols along roads infested with highwaymen. On 9 June, Mary, Marguerite and Fanny, three unprotected females, set off on an overnight coach for the north of England. Mary had little sleep with a one-year-old on her lap. When they arrived at the port of Hull, they found themselves in a damp room in a house like a tomb. It was two in the afternoon. The hoot of the post-horn broke the silence, Fanny echoed it, and tired as Mary was, she dashed off a letter to Imlay to catch the next post:

  I will not distress you by talking of the depression of spirits, or the struggle I had to keep alive my dying heart…Imlay, dear Imlay,–am I always to
be tossed about thus?…How can you love to fly about continually–dropping down, as it were, in a new world–cold and strange!–every other day? Why do you not attach those tender emotions round the idea of home, which even now dim my eyes?

  His determination to save her, and signs of regret when she departed, had raised ‘involuntary hopes’ he yet might change.

  Casual sex had atrophied his heart, she warned him. ‘You have a heart, my friend, yet…you have sought in vulgar excesses, for that gratification only the heart can bestow…–Ah! my friend, you know not the ineffable delight, the exquisite pleasure, which arises from a unison of affection and desire, when the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination, and renders every emotion delicate and rapturous. Yes; these are emotions…of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begeters, certainly have no idea.’

  She could hear Imlay demand to know the purpose of all this, and had her answer ready: ‘I cannot help thinking that it is possible for you, having great strength of mind, to return to…purity of feeling–which would open your heart to me.’