Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  Following her three calm messages to Godwin during labour, there are echoes of her voice during the days that followed: her call for Fordyce; her plea for her Berkshire friend, Mrs Cotton, to come and nurse her; her gratitude to Eliza Fenwick for untiring attentions; and her agreement with Dr Fordyce that if her milk were contaminated, the baby must stop feeding at the breast. The abrupt removal of the baby on the Monday–she was taken to join Fanny at Mrs Reveley’s–would have left Mary’s breasts rock-hard within hours. A bizarre solution was to put puppies to her breasts to draw off the milk. This would have granted some relief in a situation where gradual weaning was not deemed in the baby’s interest. While the puppies did their work, Mary managed ‘some pleasantry’ with Godwin and others in the room.

  ‘Nothing,’ Godwin said, ‘could exceed the equanimity, the patience and affectionateness of the poor sufferer. I intreated her to recover; I dwelt with trembling fondness on every favourable circumstance; and, as far as it was possible in so dreadful a situation, she, by her smiles and kind speeches, rewarded my affection.’

  Joseph Johnson, who had seen Mary on the Friday when she had appeared better, returned that Monday to see her growing worse. At a guess, it was Johnson–her trusted adviser and seasoned publisher of medical texts–who persuaded her that Clarke should take a hand.

  Clarke was brought in next day, nearly a week after the birth. It’s likely that he blamed the midwife, for Mrs Blenkinsop, who had been called on Sunday and Monday, now disappeared from the scene. The agreed diagnosis was that Dr Poignand had been mistaken in thinking he had removed all the pieces of the placenta. Dr Clarke arrived with some idea of surgery, but judged it too late. Sepsis had spread through the body. In fact, no surgery could have counteracted its fatal course, and Mary’s resistance to the surgeon would have been sound in that it spared her the unspeakable agony of another operation without anaesthetic. In desperation, the following day Godwin called in yet another doctor, their friend Carlisle, who prescribed the routine palliative, a wine diet with an idea of keeping up the patient’s strength. Godwin was opposed to wine. Spirits would demean the spirit his wife continued to show, teasing Godwin for his refusal of divine consolations.

  ‘I feel in Heaven,’ she told him.

  ‘I suppose, my dear, that that is a form of saying you are less in pain.’

  It wasn’t unfeeling rationalism, as it seemed later to Victorians; it was their old repartee of mind and feeling. Even in the shadow of death, they still joked. They were still themselves. Reluctantly, Godwin resigned their spark to the doctors’ distorting regime and, starting on Wednesday afternoon at about four, fed Mary as much wine as she would take over several hours. Of course, it was futile. By ten o’clock on Thursday night, Carlisle, who never left the house, had to tell his friend that his wife was dying.

  Whatever the effects of the wine on Wednesday and Thursday, on Friday Mary’s head cleared. For Godwin’s diary records a ‘solemn communication’ as she faced the ‘Idea of Death’. Mary always had a robust constitution, and lingered longer than doctors predicted. On Saturday morning, Godwin spoke to her of Fanny and Mary. What did she wish for her daughters? He would try to fulfil that wish, even though she–the author of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters– had been supremely fitted to care for them, while he, alas, was not. His reasonable voice, addressing a prone and silent form, asked her guidance. No answer. Then, after he repeated the question a few times, she managed to reply, ‘I know what you are thinking of.’ Her last conscious words were that Godwin was ‘the kindest, best man in the world’.

  That night he stayed by her side till one in the morning, when the faithful Carlisle persuaded him to sleep, promising to call in case of a change. The doctor woke him at six, and he sat with Mary until she died at twenty minutes to eight. His diary for 10 September 1797 sets down the precise time, underscored by three wordless lines across the page.

  Fanny was returned home for dinner later that day, and then sent back to Mrs Reveley. It would have been customary to take the child upstairs to kiss her mother goodbye. Godwin sat with a copy of Thoughts on the Education of Daughters to hand–though he could not bring himself to read. The ‘poor animals’ his wife had left behind were ‘hers’; he could not feel as a father, and spoke of the newborn as ‘it’. During the following week ‘it’ became alarmingly ill at Mrs Reveley’s; doctors were called; then little Mary took a turn for the better when she came home to Mrs Fenwick’s skilled arms.

  Mrs Fenwick stayed on for two nights to ensure her recovery. At Godwin’s request, she wrote to Everina, who was to tell Bess and assure her of Mary’s fondness. In this letter Mrs Fenwick reports Godwin’s ‘unremitting and devoted attentions’ to his wife, and her gratitude for ‘the kindest, best man in the world’. The baby, she adds, is the finest she ever saw.

  The Wollstonecraft sisters did not melt. Godwin received no word from them.

  ‘Be sure I feel it,’ he declared to a friend. ‘Be sure I am not the fool to look for that happiness in any future vicissitude of life, that I was beginning to enjoy, when I was thus dreadfully deprived of it. My understanding was enlarged, my heart was improved, as well as the most invaluable sensations of admiration & delight produced in me by her society.’ Privately, he thought Mary had been too quick in conceiving resentments, yet ‘they left no hateful and humiliating remembrances behind them’. His passion had always been to associate with the intellectually great. Godwin never thought to exclude women from this category, and when it came to his wife, he ‘honoured her intellectual powers and the…generosity of her propensities’. It was characteristic of him to slight ‘mere’ tenderness. ‘Mere tenderness,’ he ruminated, ‘would not have been adequate to produce the happiness we experienced.’ Mary had been glad, she once told him, ‘to discover great powers of mind in you’, but remained convinced ‘that the strongest affection is the most involuntary’. She wished he would find himself, rather, ‘enamoured of some fugitive charm that seeking somewhere, you find every where: yes,’ her voice went on, teasing, transforming the austerity of his singleness, ‘I would fain live in your heart and employ your imagination–Am I not very reasonable?’

  15

  SLANDERS

  A contest for Mary Wollstonecraft’s memory began with her death. On the day she died, Joseph Johnson wrote to Godwin: ‘I know her too well not to admire and love her. Your loss is irreparable. May you know the same strength of mind which…she exerted for your support.’ Two days later Johnson’s voice changed. He laid a claim, an undeniable claim of prior knowledge, when, on 12 September, he discovered that Godwin meant to exclude Henry Fuseli from the circle of legitimate mourners–a circle including Johnson himself, her portraitist Opie and her early adviser John Hewlett–who were to be invited to her funeral. Here is Johnson’s protest:

  Dear Sir

  In the list you shew’d this morning I did not observe the name of Fuseli. It is true that of late he was not intimate with Mrs. Godwin, but from circumstances that I am acquainted with I think he was not to be blamed for it; before this they were so intimate and spent so many happy hours in my house that I think I may say he was the first of her friends, indeed next to ourselves I believe no one had a juster sense of her worth or more laments her loss.

  The first of her friends: this is about more than an invitation to a burial; it’s about constructions of the past. Fuseli’s spitfire speech lurks behind Johnson’s persuasiveness when he asks Godwin to grant Fuseli his part in Mary Wollstonecraft’s life. Who owns the great? Who has the right to mourn and remember? Already, a struggle for possession had begun, starting with the question: what version of this woman’s life will be transmitted to posterity? In his quietly firm way, Johnson reminds Godwin there had been others who had loved Mary Wollstonecraft and helped make her what she was.

  On 15 September she was buried in the churchyard of Old St Pancras, where she had married five months before. Godwin did not attend. Instead, he sat brooding in Marshall’s lod
gings, a return to his bachelor companion. ‘I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world,’ he wrote to Holcroft. He picked up Mary where he had left off the day she had been in labour, and read the unfinished manuscript of The Wrongs of Woman. Then he plunged into her letters. Those to Imlay he thought the most touching love-letters in the language. It came to him that his wife had been a female Werther, suicidal, doomed. They had read Goethe’s novel The Sorrows of Young Werther aloud on 29 August, the night before she had gone into labour, and its arch-Romantic image of surrender to destructive emotion was presented to the public in Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in January 1798. The resilience so marked in the course of her life was somewhat obscured by Godwin’s own sorrow. In the weeks following her death–while he reeled off the memoir–it was he who gave way to melancholy, finding in it a Werther sort of relish foreign to his wife’s temperament. A white-faced portrait shows him in mourning at the age of forty-two, less angular than as a bachelor, and neater; his thinning hair, cut short, is parted in the centre. He looks out above his jutting chin with sombre eyes. Godwin’s unaccustomed surrender to emotion was all the more dangerous for his illusion of control.

  ‘I love to cherish melancholy,’ he confided to Mary’s friend Mrs Cotton. ‘I love to tread the edge of intellectual danger, and just to keep within the line which every moral and intellectual consideration forbids me to overstep, and in the indulgence and this vigilance I place my present luxury.’ His vigilance did not prevent his offence to Fuseli, nor rows with Mary Hays and Mrs Inchbald, nor his frostiness towards the Wollstonecraft sisters which spared no thought for their status as Fanny’s aunts, the only blood relatives who might one day interest themselves in the girl’s welfare. Godwin’s grief in the last quarter of 1797 took him out of his measured habits in ways that were to have consequences for the reputation of Mary Wollstonecraft and for the fate of her beloved Fanny.

  When Mary Hays had visited Mary Wollstonecraft five days before her death, Godwin had not encouraged her to stay. From his point of view he had enough attendants, but all were habitués of his own circle. As Wollstonecraft’s loyal friend and the one who had brought the Godwins together, Hays protested that she was ‘not altogether insignificant’.

  Godwin jumped on what he mistook for vanity. ‘To speak frankly, I think you have forgotten a little of that simplicity & unpresuming mildness, which so well becomes a woman.’

  To someone of spirit this smacked of ‘tyranny’. So Hays rebuked a thinker who had made tyrants his target.

  Godwin said she ‘poisoned’ the roots of friendship and deserved to lose him as her mentor. ‘We are at present, twin stars that cannot shine in the same hemisphere.’ Despite the awful solemnity of this pronouncement, they did visit now and then. Mrs Inchbald was cast off more completely. Godwin wrote to four people on the day of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death, and Mrs Inchbald was one of them. ‘My wife died at eight this morning,’ he wrote. ‘I always thought you used her ill, but I forgive you.’ Mrs Inchbald offered polite condolences without the intensity of regret Godwin required from a one-time friend who had snubbed Mary in public. Suddenly, control snapped.

  ‘I must endeavour to be understood as to the unworthy behaviour with which I charge you towards my wife,’ he began. ‘I think your conversation with her that night at the play base, cruel, and insulting…I think…that you have an understanding capable of doing some small degree of justice to her merits. I think you should have had the magnanimity and self-respect to have shewed this. I think that while the Twisses and others were sacrificing to what they were silly enough to think a proper etiquette, a person so out of all comparison their superior, as you are, should have placed her pride in acting upon better principles, and in courting and distinguishing insulted greatness and worth; I think that you chose a mean and pitiful conduct’–and so on.

  Mrs Perfection was unrepentant. She needled Godwin’s wound by reminding him of her reluctance to know Mary Wollstonecraft. Perfection could not, as she put it, ‘sufficiently applaud my own penetration in apprehending, and my own firmness in resisting, a longer and more familiar acquaintance’. She proceeded to put ‘an end to our acquaintance for ever’. This was accompanied by an offer of ‘the most perfect forgiveness of all you have said to me’. She added, ‘I respect your prejudices, but I also respect my own.’

  By the time Godwin received this on 26 October, he had already determined on a public vindication of his wife. In the past he had attacked public wrong through his pen, most effectively with the collapse of the Treason Trials in 1794. At that time he had been prudent enough to act anonymously; this time he meant to use his wife’s name and fame in defiance of gendered morals. He burned to express his outrage that ‘the firmest champion, and, as I strongly suspect, the greatest ornament her sex ever had to boast’ had been snubbed by those who condoned ‘the dull and insolent dictators, the gamblers, and demireps of polished society’.

  So a fortnight after his wife died, Godwin began to set down his version of a life he had known only in its final phase–less than two of Mary’s thirty-eight and a half years. Needing basic information, especially on her early years, he turned to a man who had known Mary Wollstonecraft only at second hand, apart from her one month in Lisbon in November–December 1785. In his most formal manner, Godwin wrote to Fanny Blood’s husband Hugh Skeys in Dublin. This letter appoints Skeys to question the Wollstonecraft sisters, and Skeys may have felt flattered by Godwin’s dependence, but it’s hardly an approach to appeal to the sisters. Only two weeks after Mary was buried, Godwin, who has not so far addressed a word to her sisters himself, fails to imagine their loss. Instead he makes a case for biography and for himself as biographer, a case where logic gets lost in insistence. For even as he claims to ‘know a good deal respecting every period of her life’, he is forced to own, ‘I am not well prepared on the subject’, and has to limit to a factual shell his surprisingly uninformed queries:

  [early] Oct 1797

  …I should be glad to be informed respecting the schools she was sent to, & any other anecdotes of her girlish years. I wish to obtain the maiden name of her mother, & any circumstances respecting her father’s or her mother’s families. Her sisters probably could tell some things that would be useful to me respecting the period when they lived together at Newington Green. I am doubtful, for instance, whether she did or did not frequent Dr. Price’s meeting house. You must know many things respecting her…I think the world is entitled to some information respecting persons that have enlightened & improved it. I believe it is a tribute due to the memory of such persons, as I [am] strongly of the opinion that the more intimately we are acquainted with their hearts, the more we shall be brought to respect and love them.

  Remember me in a very kind manner to [the second] Mrs Skeys & my wife’s sisters.

  I am, sir,

  With very great respect,

  W. Godwin

  Mrs Fenwick…wrote rather a long letter to Miss Wollstonecraft, about a fortnight ago. You do not mention whether she has received it.

  Why does Godwin not communicate directly? In part he may be sore that the sisters have not seen fit to reply. Neither they nor Godwin seemed able to heal the estrangement, and were compelled to communicate through intermediaries. The coldness during Everina’s last visit to Mary in February 1797 had reappeared in Godwin’s report on Everina to Mary when he visited the Wedgwoods in Staffordshire: ‘Your sister would not come down to see me last night at supper, but we met at breakfast this morning. I have nothing to say about her.’ Mary had been rueful: ‘I supposed that Everina would assume some airs at seeing you–she has very mistaken notions of dignity of character.’ Neither makes allowance for the inferior position of a governess meeting her employers’ guests, and Mary seems to forget her own trials of that kind. Eventually, it was Everina who crossed the barrier and wrote directly to Godwin about his ‘hurry’. By 17 October, the posthumous manuscripts
were already with the press. A month after the funeral, he was not only well into the Memoirs, he had also performed the massive editing job required by the half-finished Wrongs of Woman. By 15 November, two months after the funeral, Godwin had a complete draft of the memoir. He proceeded to give it a scant four days for revision. His rationale was ‘that the public curiosity was most excited relative to an eminent person by publications that appeared in no long time after their decease’.

  The Wollstonecrafts were taken aback to discover that Godwin intended a more candid and detailed life than they had been led to believe. Everina’s first and just concern was biographic accuracy:

  When Eliza and I first learnt your intention of publishing immediately my sister Mary’s life, we concluded, that you only meant a sketch to prevent your design concerning her memoirs from being anticipated. We thought your application to us rather premature, and had no intention of satisfying your demand till we found that Skeys had proffered our assistance without our knowledge–he then requested us to answer his questions, and give him dates, which we complyed with, though reluctantly. At a future day we would willingly have given whatever information was necessary; and even now we would not have shrunk from the task, however anxious we may be to avoid reviving the recollections it would raise, or loath to fall into the pain of thoughts it must lead to, did we suppose it possible to accomplish the work you have undertaken in the time you specify. The questions you have addressed to me confirm this opinion; and I am sorry to perceive you are inclined to be minute, when I think it is impossible for you to be even tolerably accurate.

  My sister Mary’s life: Everina reminds Godwin–as Johnson and Hays had tried to remind him–that he alone did not own Mary’s memory. Of these protests, Everina’s is the most pointed. Godwin took no notice, and excluded his wife’s sisters from the memoir, except as peripheral recipients of her largesse. He used friction between them and Mary to press his own ‘maxim’ against ‘cohabitation’; and he saw fit to publish a judgement on the sisters’ jealous inferiority. Another biographer might have tried to draw out their invaluable knowledge, as well as the trove of letters in their possession. He might have noted, for a start, their choice of independence over marriage, and they could have alerted him to his error in blaming the caustic note in Mary’s voice on the influence of Fuseli. As her sisters would have known, that voice went back to her schooldays: ‘I have a heart that scorns disguise, and a countenance which will not dissemble,’ she had said at fifteen. Godwin possessed a different Mary from what he called the ‘harsh’, ‘rigid’ author of the Rights of Woman. For Godwin had fallen in love with a woman wounded almost to death–a suicidal Dido abandoned by her sea-going lover, a ‘female Werther’, a creature of ‘exquisite sensibility’ in a state of intractable depression, who had come to him for help. This familiar plot–the rescue of a Fair in distress–Godwin laid like a grid over an uncategorised creature with a plot of her own in the making. That grid has fixed Mary Wollstonecraft’s image in the public mind for more than two centuries.