Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  She sent this to Godwin that same day, Friday 19 August. It was a simple plea for warmth, but Godwin could not or would not ‘read’ it. His bristles rose.

  ‘I have no answer to make to your fable, which I acknowledge to be uncommonly ingenious & well composed. I see not however its application,’ he told her, and it ‘puts an end to all my hopes. I needed soothing, & you threaten me. Oppressed with a diffidence & uncertainty which I hate, you…annihilate me. Use your pleasure. For every pain I have undesignedly given you, I am most sincerely grieved; for the good qualities I discern in you, you shall live for ever embalmed in my memory.’

  As it happened, they had grown too necessary to each other to stop now. After they made up, they tried again ‘chez elle’, and yet again on the 21st, more effectively for Godwin–‘chez elle toute’–though less so for Mary. This time, it was her turn to lose confidence: ‘I am sometimes painfully humble,’ she told him next day. ‘Write me a line, just to assure me, that you have been thinking of me with affection…’

  ‘Humble!’ Godwin exploded, ‘for heaven’s sake, be proud, be arrogant! You are–but I cannot tell what you are. I cannot yet find the circumstance about you that allies you to the frailty of our nature. I will hunt it out.’

  When he was to dine with Mrs Perfection, she reminded him where his ‘fealty’ was due. Should there be ‘a possible accident with the most delightful woman in the world’, she warns, ‘take care not to look over your left shoulder–I shall be there–’

  ‘I shall report my fealty this evening’, Godwin promised.

  In uncertain weather, when the wind still whistled through Mary’s branches, there was the shared haven of work. She passed Godwin her manuscript–her next chapter of The Wrongs of Woman–or asked him to bring a revision of The Iron Chest (a dramatisation of Caleb Williams) to read aloud at her fire: ‘–and we shall be so snug–yet, you are such a kind creature, that I am afraid to express a preference, lest you should think of pleasing me rather than yourself–and is it not the same thing?–for I am never so well pleased with myself, as when I please you–I am not sure please is the exact word to explain my sentiments–May I trust you to search in your own heart for the proper one?’

  ‘Your proposal meets with the wish of my heart,’ Godwin returned. It’s not quite the language of love, but at least he picks up the words. How delicately she moves from sure ground to that frontier of language. And how disconcerting that a lover like Imlay should cross that frontier with ease, while an honest man like Godwin could not find it in him to speak his heart. Mary repeated her failed message to Imlay: ‘I would describe one of those moments when the senses are exactly tuned by the rising tenderness of the heart.’

  So she searched for words, making Godwin her co-searcher in the space between the sexes. Her tenderness for him might vent itself in a ‘voluptuous sigh’, yet ‘voluptuous’ was often expressive of a meaning she did not intend. ‘I am overflowing with the kindest sympathy–I wish I may find you at home when I carry this letter to drop it in the box,–that I may drop a kiss with it into your heart, to be embalmed, till we meet, closer–.’ She draws a line through ‘closer’, and adds: ‘Don’t read the last word–I charge you!’ Words are at the centre of what was happening: her efforts to find words that could quicken desire without narrowing its capacity to generate ‘closer’ affections.

  ‘I shall come to you to night, probably before nine–May I ask you to be at home,’ she wrote. ‘Should I be later–you will forgive me–It will not be my heart that will loiter–bye the bye–I do not tell any body–especially yourself–it is always on my lips at your door–.’ Since Godwin is the person she can tell least of all, this is not about secrecy as some suppose; again, it’s about what is unsaid between them. Repeatedly, she leads this master of words to the brink of a language he has yet to learn. ‘Our sober evening was very delicious,’ she said once when she was down with a cold, ‘–I do believe you love me better than you imagined you should–as for me–judge for yourself–.’ There are scenes to be acted; they stir at his door.

  Godwin’s unpreparedness for her drama went back to the austere Calvinism he had followed as a minister. His father had been an exceptionally silent man who could sit through a social event without uttering; and Godwin himself could scarcely begin a conversation where there was no set topic.

  Mary asked if he could be ‘gay’ without effort.

  No, not without effort, Godwin said, reminding her to bring Latin books for her lesson.

  ‘I will tell you why you damped my spirits, last night, in spite of all my efforts,’ she said next day. Could ‘Man’ (as Godwin called himself, mimicking little Fanny) be afraid of her? she wondered, rather hurt.

  So effort sometimes replaced spontaneity. And all the while convention would have militated against unacted desires, a convention policed by the small-minded like Francis Twiss, a gaunt Shakespeare scholar (brother-in-law to John Kemble and Sarah Siddons) whose talk, Mary thought, expanded the gender gap, mocking women and bringing out the satyr in men.

  Godwin could later own that he did lack ‘an intuitive sense of the pleasures of the imagination. Perhaps I feel them as vividly as most men,’ he added, ‘but it is often rather by an attentive consideration’, and ‘liable to fail…in the first experiment’, guarded by caution in case he should be deceived. He saw this as a gender trait, in contrast with Mary’s quick warmth. It surprised him that ‘her fearless and unstudied veracity’ should prove sound. Such a companion, he said, ‘excites and animates’. Godwin always remembered 3 September when Mary was present at Kemble’s, and conversation became heated on the subject of love. Other celebrities took part, Sheridan (the playwright), Curran (the Dublin lawyer) and the ubiquitous Mrs Inchbald.

  Truncated nights called for a two-way passage of notes and letters. If she had written intensively to Imlay (seventy-six letters) because they lived mostly apart, she wrote more intensively to Godwin (146 letters over a briefer span) even though they lodged around the corner. Their very proximity allowed for up to three exchanges a day dropping through their doors, responses coming off the pulse with the speed of emails. It’s a remarkable record of intimate conversation two hundred years ago, allowing us to eavesdrop on the past. A jubilant communication from Mary to Godwin on 13 September indicates when their real union took place:

  Let me assure you that you are not only in my heart, but my veins, this morning. I turn from you half abashed–yet you haunt me, and some look, word or touch thrills through my whole frame–yes, at the very moment when I am labouring to think of something, if not somebody, else. Get ye gone Intruder! Though I am forced to add dear–which is a call back–

  When the heart and reason accord there is no flying from voluptuous sensations, I find, do what a woman can–Can a philosopher do more?

  Godwin records their making love every night. Though Mary had brought him ‘a wounded and sick heart’, it was not, he insists, ‘a heart querulous, and ruined in its taste for pleasure. No; her whole character seemed to change with a change of fortune. Her sorrows, the depression of her spirits, were forgotten, and she assumed all the simplicity and vivacity of a youthful mind.’ His words recall the start of Mary’s attachment to Imlay, and the first readers of his Memoirs were shocked by the keenness with which Godwin appears to register the transforming effect of her love for another man. Those first readers ridiculed Godwin as a sort of cuckold. More astute readers of the present day have realised that he was actually recording what he himself had witnessed as she came back to life. ‘She was like a serpent upon a rock, that cast its slough, and appears again with brilliancy, the sleekness, and the elastic activity of its happiest age. She was playful, full of confidence, kindness and sympathy. Her eyes assumed a new lustre, and her cheeks new colour and smoothness. Her voice became chearful, her temper overflowing with universal kindness, and that smile of bewitching tenderness from day to day illuminated her countenance, which all who knew her will so well recollect, and wh
ich won, both heart and soul, the affection of almost everyone that beheld it.’

  This glow of health can be seen in the portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft painted during her association with Godwin, and now in the National Portrait Gallery. It’s a strong rather than pretty face, with a bloom on cheeks and lips. They are well cut, dented lips, the lower lip a little fuller. Her long eyebrows disappear beneath her hair, short and wavy about her face; and her shapely nose is too long for beauty. Her expression is calm and contained.

  It’s usual for historians to confirm the happiness of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin. They are right in general, but day-to-day living can’t sustain the finality of romance. For one thing, these were two people with the capacity to go on developing. For another, they were committed to candour. Since they lived apart, their intimate mutters to each other open up the differences that pass unnoted–like conversation–in the lives of most pairs.

  Once, when she is at the theatre in a poor seat Godwin has obtained for her, she resents the sight of him in a better seat next to Mrs Inchbald. ‘You and Mrs. I were at your ease enjoying yourselves–while, poor I!–.’ Ruefully, she asks if she might ‘spend my spite’.

  One Friday, Godwin complains to Mary, ‘You spoil little attentions by anticipating them.’

  ‘Yet to have attention, I find, that it is necessary to demand it.’ Mary broods over this, when he doesn’t turn up on the Sunday as arranged. ‘Your coming would not have been worth anything, if it must be requested.’

  Another time, when she is ill in bed, she resents his wish to go out instead of staying with her–and blames herself, too, for not letting him go. We overhear them on an ordinary day–a quiet Wednesday, 21 September 1796.

  ‘Though I am not quite satisfied with myself, for acting like such a mere Girl yesterday–yet I am better,’ Mary says. ‘Say only that we are friends; and, within an hour or two, the hour when I may expect to see you–I shall be wise and demure–never fear–and you must not leave the philosopher behind–.’

  ‘Friends? Why not? If I thought otherwise, I should be miserable,’ Godwin replies. ‘ In the evening expect me at nine, or a little before.’

  There are times when she is put out by his ‘false interpretations’, and especially his defensiveness when she broaches women’s needs. If she opposed him, she wouldn’t jest, she says. Could Godwin the ‘profound Grammarian’, master of the comparative–as in good, better, best–allow her a private bill of rights to a comparative freedom to be herself, to be playful and even ‘frolicksome’, once a year–or when the whim seized her ‘of skipping out of bounds’?

  Godwin agrees by return: ‘I can send you a bill of rights…carte blanche…But to fulfil the terms of your note, you must send me a bill of understanding. How can I always distinguish between your jest & earnest, & know when your satire means too much & when it means nothing but I will try.’

  His role as her mentor was changing. He felt freer to be severe in the manner of an educated man reproving an untrained woman. At the same time he allowed Mary to see drafts of his essays on education and literature (published in 1797 as The Enquirer). She wished him to recommend day schools in preference to boarding-schools, which deprived children of domestic affections–to her, ‘the foundation of virtue’. Godwin was not won over–domesticity had never figured on his agenda–but he made a rather grudging effort to oblige her by raising the issue in a noncommittal paragraph at the end of the essay on ‘Public and Private Education’.

  Her interest was fanned by reading him, she found, ‘while other recollections were all alive in my heart–.’ Her willingness to lend herself to his writing contrasts with Godwin’s criticisms of her own manuscript–The Wrongs of Woman. She had sent it to him six days earlier, in need of ‘encouragement’. His opinion reduced her to ‘painful diffidence’. On this occasion, Godwin could not disguise his irritability with something in her grammar that appeared to him a fundamental flaw. He offered her a grammar lesson. Mary, restraining an impulse to throw down her pen, defended herself.

  ‘I am compelled to think that there is some thing in my writings more valuable, than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm eulogiums–I mean more mind–denominate it as you will–more of the observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination–the effusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain…’

  Insistence was not her usual way with Godwin. She preferred to ‘woo philosophy’. The following year, when Coleridge and Hazlitt were walking in the West Country, Coleridge asked Hazlitt if he had ever seen Mary Wollstonecraft. ‘I said I had once for a few moments,’ Hazlitt recalled, ‘and that she seemed to me to turn off Godwin’s objections to something she advanced with quite a playful, easy air.’ Her playfulness softens Godwin up in advance of the lesson he was to give her. She fancies how the Grammarian will pause, as Milton’s Adam paused in his speeches to kiss Eve in Paradise:

  You are to give me a lesson this evening–And, a word in your ear, I shall not be very angry if you sweeten grammatical disquisitions after the Miltonic mode–Fancy, at this moment, has turned a conjunction into a kiss; and the sensation steals o’er my senses. N’oublierez pas, I pray thee, the graceful pauses, I am alluding to; nay, anticipating–yet now you have led me to discover that I write worse, than I thought I did, there is no stopping short–I must improve, or be dissatisfied with myself–

  Sometimes, a figure in recent memory can reflect light on someone further in the past. Mary Wollstonecraft had to cope with a harshness in Godwin, a critical kind of stubbornness that can remind us of Leonard Woolf, and of Virginia Woolf’s way of coping through play and jokes that weren’t only jokes, as when she named his room ‘Hedgehog Hall’. The curtness of Leonard’s factual diary–like Godwin’s–manifests a respect for fact that is almost fierce. Then, there is his staunchness and honesty in relationships, and above all a biblical sense of justice that Woolf absorbed as a Jew who was also the son of a barrister, and that Godwin absorbed from reading the Bible with his surrogate mother, Miss Godwin.

  It is a peculiarity of the English climate that while the month of August is often rainy, summer can make a belated and almost magical appearance in September. So it was in 1796. The fine weather roused Mary to ‘vagabondize’ in the country, and introduce Godwin to the landscape of her Essex childhood. ‘I love the country,’ she told him, ‘and like to leave certain associations in my memory, which seem, as it were, the land marks of affections–am I very obscure?’ Accordingly, they set out for the Wollstonecraft house near the bend in the road known as the Whalebone, where Mary had lived from the age of six till she was nine. The house was uninhabited and the garden a wilderness. They visited the market at Barking, and the old wharf, crowded with barges. Here, where the Thames, nearing the sea, winds through the Essex marshes, she had lain on her back and gazed at the sky, awed by a sense of creation–a counter-force to an unloved child who was helpless against her father’s violence. It mattered to revisit this place in her potent character as loved woman of thirty-seven in the company of a man who was a ‘kind creature’. Godwin found that ‘no one knew better than Mary how to extract sentiments of exquisite delight from trifles’. A little ride in the country could open her heart to offer ‘a sort of infantile, yet dignified endearment’. She found a ‘magic in affection’ when Godwin clasped his hands round her arm in company. Anguish visited her more seldom, he noticed. She was now more ‘tranquil’.

  Mary told Godwin that she experienced ‘not rapture’ but ‘sublime tranquillity’ in his arms. ‘Hush! Let not the light see…These confessions should only be uttered–you know where, when the curtains are up–and all the world shut out…’ However reassuring this was for her, he may have wondered at the absence of ‘rapture’. It was something she had known with her frontiersman.

  Another uncharacteristic act on Godwin’s part–a ploy out of keeping with his straightforwardness–does suggest a wish to provoke Mary’s jealo
usy. To maintain their secret, it was their habit to go separate ways. Mary, for instance, dined often at this time with Fuseli and his wife, every Tuesday and other days as well. For all that, she was disconcerted by Godwin’s air of indifference one evening when, accompanied by Mrs Perfection, he left her supping with Mrs Robinson.

  ‘I thought, after you left me, last night, that it was a pity we were obliged to part–just then,’ Mary protested the following day. ‘I was even vext with myself for staying to supper with Mrs R. There is a manner of leaving a person free to follow their own will that looks so like indifference, I do not like it. Your tone would have decided me–but to tell you the truth, I thought, by your voice and manner, that you wished to remain in society–and pride made me wish to gratify you.’

  ‘I like the note before me better than six preceding ones,’ Godwin admitted. ‘I own I had the premeditated malice of making you part with me last night unwillingly. I feared Cupid had taken his final farewel.’ Relenting, he offered to call on her in the course of the day, and his diary records that they spent the night together in his rooms.

  One Saturday night Godwin let go an idea that it would not be good for his health to make love just then. Next morning, their exchanges flew:

  If the felicity of last night has had the same effect on your health as on my countenance [Mary wrote], you have no cause to lament your failure of resolution: for I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning when recollections–very dear, called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair…