Vindication
Page 64
FI and Robert Owen: Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, 5–6, sees MW as a forerunner to the Owenite-socialist feminists of the 1830s and ’40s who did not regard the liberation of their sex as an isolated goal but as part of a historic movement towards a ‘new age … of perfect harmony between the aspirations of the individual and the collective needs of humanity as a whole’.
‘Fanny comes…’: MWSJ (13 Mar. 1815).
‘I cannot say…’: CC to Byron, after FI’s death, ClCor, i, 92.
‘Poets…’: The final line of Shelley’s essay, ‘A Defence of Poetry’, published eighteen years after his death, in 1840. SPP, 535.
‘sufferings’: FI to EW (9 Apr. 1816), ClCor, i, 23.
‘my unhappy life’: FI to MWS (29 July–1 Aug. 1816), ClCor, i, 58. Jane Austen, The Watsons, 110, endorses the drudge view of teaching for women in an exchange between Emma and Elizabeth Watson. Emma says to her eldest sister that there is an alternative to loveless marriage in teaching. Elizabeth puts her right: ‘I’ve been in a school, Emma, and know what a life they lead you; you never have.’ Marriage to any decent man is said to be preferable.
‘stupid letter’: MWSJ (4 Sept. 1816), 138.
FI’s note to MWS on 8 Oct: MWSJ, 139, plus a missing letter (referred to by Lady Shelley writing to Alexander Berry on 11 Mar. 1872, cited in notes to ClCor, i, 85).
FI’s note to PBS: CC, whose recollection of detail is on the whole remarkably good, recalled this for Silsbee, though she admits that she did not actually see the note. PBS scrunched it up. Silsbee Papers, box 7, folder 3.
FI’s warning and suicide note: ClCor, i, 85–6.
candle consume it: I can’t agree with alternative speculation that the servants could have destroyed the name to avoid a scandal or that Godwin’s representative would have done so. In either case, the identity would have got about. It wouldn’t have been in character for Shelley to have done it–he’d have been acutely distressed rather than worldly-wise. It would seem in character for Fanny, who was mindful of others.
‘owing to the preference…’: Gisborne, Journals and Letters (9 July 1820), 39. CC offered the same explanation in an interview when she was old. Silsbee Papers, box 7, folder 2. Cited in ClCor, i, 88–9.
‘On Fanny Godwin’: MWS omitted the first line, as well as what was on the back, when she came to edit PBS’s poems.
‘monster’: Recalled by CC. Silsbee Papers, box 8, folder 4.
Harriet’s suicide: Cameron, SC, iv, 769–802, dates this 7 Dec.
‘Thy little footsteps…’: This was thought to be about the death of William Shelley in Rome in 1819, but G. M. Matthews proved that it is addressed to FI: in ‘Whose Little Footsteps?’, in The Evidence of the Imagination, ed. Donald Reiman, M. C. Jaye and B. Bennett (New York: 1978).
MWS reread RW: MWSJ (Fri. 6–Mon. 9 Dec. 1816), 149.
the impact of FI’s ‘unfortunate’ birth: See Claire Tomalin’s convincing and touching portrait of Fanny in Shelley, 52. Tomalin notes how MWS and CC had embarked on bearing children outside marriage ‘to a considerable degree in conscious emulation of Mary Wollstonecraft’.
‘I cannot pardon’: 12 Jan. 1818, ClCor, i, 110.
CC’s novel: CC to Byron (c. Mar./Apr. 1816), ibid., 33. Could an idea for a Crusoe sort of girl have derived from The [Swiss] Family Robinson, published by CC’s mother under the Juvenile Library imprint? ‘The Ideot’ as well as CC’s voice to Byron suggests a pre-Brontë experiment. A precursor to Jane Eyre does not speak to the man she loves through custom and conventionalities; her voice comes from a soul equal to his.
‘hateful novel thing’: CC to Byron (19 Nov. 1816), ibid., 92. CC claimed to have learnt her ambiguity from Gibbon. ‘I would be exactly like a diamond who to the right reflects purple & to the left pink,’ she explained to Byron.
Byron’s women: Fiona MacCarthy, Byron, 163, 173, suggests that the numbers of women Byron bedded and his power over them served in some way as a distraction from the homosexuality he strained to repress.
ten minutes’ happy passion: CC in Moscow to Jane Williams in London (Dec. 1826), ClCor, i, 241.
PBS blamed MWS for coldness: In ‘Epipsychidion’.
love for women friends; political: Bennett, intro. to MWSL, i, xiv, xviii.
‘greatness of soul’: To Frances Wright (12 Sept. 1827), MWSL, ii, 3–4.
Jemima’s anticipation of Frankenstein’s monster: WW, chs 1 and 5.
Frankenstein and the pattern of women’s writing: Steiner, ‘Women’s Fiction’, 505.
‘What art thou?’; ‘I know…’; ‘prophecy’: ‘To Mary——’, SPP, 104.
like ‘the breath of summer’s night’: Similar to Byron’s words about a voice ‘like the swell of summer’s ocean’ when the breast of the deep ‘is gently heaving’. ‘Stanzas for Music’.
claimed that she knew Shelley…: Silsbee Papers, box 8, folder 4.
CC’s parting from Allegra: Sent to join Byron in Venice on 28 Apr. 1818.
‘Carissima Pisa’: MWS in retrospect from Genoa to CC (19 Dec. 1822), MWSL, i, 299.
PBS and MM: Silsbee Papers, box 7, folder 3.
Matilda: The narrator’s preoccupation with her death may go back to Richardson’s Clarissa which MWS reread between June and Aug. 1819, immediately after her son died. The title of the first draft of Matilda was ‘Fields of Fancy’, close to MW’s unfinished ‘Cave of Fancy’. It’s not easy to be sure what is the link.
‘often did quiescence…’: MWS, ‘Life of Godwin’, 97.
‘Minerva’: Byron spoke of MM as ‘Claire’s Minerva’ to MWS.
‘I made…’: CC to her Viennese sister-in-law, Antonia Clairmont (16 Aug. 1856), ClCor, 578.
‘Let me…’: MWSJ (25 Feb. 1822), 399–400.
CC to Byron about Allegra: Silsbee Papers, box 8, folder 4.
Allegra’s death: Said to be either from typhus or ‘after a convulsive catarrhal attack’.
‘That he should hate…’: MM to MWS, who was assisting Byron in Genoa (1 Feb. [1823]). Abinger: Dep. c. 517.
CC’s silence: There is one exception. MM mentions to MWS having received a letter from CC in St Petersburg (10 Sept. 1823), saying that she was reasonably satisfied with her situation. Ibid. Not in ClCor.
MWS’s ‘treasure’…: MWSJ (2 Oct. 1822), 429. Charlotte Brontë, then four years old, was another strong character who said the same, seventeen years later: The human heart has hidden treasures In secret kept, in silence sealed–The unseen space where a governess had to exist led to the explosiveness of her submerged words. When the Brontë sisters revealed their thoughts by night as they marched around the dining-room table in their Yorkshire parsonage, Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey thought they blew out the candles for economy. But darkness was a liberating cover; invisibility, a form of freedom.
‘out of his hand’: CCJ (8 Jan. 1827), 407.
‘My soul’: Ibid., n.d., 429.
MW mocked a showcase education: RW, ch. 12 (on national education).
‘They educate a child…’: To MWS from Moscow (29 Apr. 1825), ClCor, i, 215.
‘You write…’: 29 Nov. 1842. MWSL, iii.
domestic trials in Russia: ClCor, i, 222.
‘From Morning till Night’: CC to MWS (24 Mar. 1832), ibid., i, 286.
‘misery’: CC in Moscow to Jane Williams (27 Oct. 1825), ibid., i, 230.
‘The world is closed…’: 30 Jan. 1827, CCJ, 411.
‘the most contemptible of all lives…’: 25 Feb. 1822, MWSJ, 399.
‘I believe…’: Ibid., 554.
‘Composing;: (17 Nov. [1822?]). Abinger: Dep. c. 517.
‘I can, I do.,’: MWS to Jane Williams (7 Mar. 1823), MWSL, i, 320.
sensitivity and public effectiveness: See J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, ch. 3.
‘mind appeared more noble’: Revelation of her past for her Tighe daughters.
Advice completes MW’s work: St Clair, ‘Godwin as Children’s Bookseller’, 179.
‘Teach a being�
�’; cultivate courage: Advice, 330, 342.
Vaccà’s comments on Advice: MM to MWS (12 Sept. [1823]). Abinger: Dep. c. 517.
correspondence with Dr Parkman: MM initiated the correspondence in 1816. Parkman had proposed an asylum in 1814, and went on to write a pamphlet (1817) on the management of the insane. MM owned a copy, and also his book On Hysteria. He was murdered in 1849, aged about fifty-eight, by Professor John W. Webster, MD, in the New Medical College, Boston. For further details see Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Benefactors of the Medical School of Harvard University (Boston: 1850). Some of Parkman’s remedies suggest a self-absorbed crackpot conjoined with the man of sense.
MM’s revelation of her past to her daughters: Pf. SC, viii, 909–11.
stray scrap: Pf., Cini Papers, folder 26.
The Sisters of Nansfield: Published in London. Copy in Bodleian.
Casa Lupi: On what was then the Via San Lorenzo. Now numbers 15–19 on the corner of the present-day Via Andrea Vaccà Berlinghieri. It does seem appropriate that she should have lived in a street later named after her medical mentor.
Accademia di Lunatici: Alternatively, the name may have come from the Lunar Society of Birmingham (see Uglow, Lunar Men), which included Darwin and Priestley, both published by Johnson and known to MW.
centre of town: 1069 Via della Faggiola.
‘Nothing can equal…’: 26 Oct. 1832, ClCor, i, 290–1.
‘singular family’: CC to MWS (16 Sept, 1834), ibid., i, 313.
‘amor della patria’: Cini’s Avvertimento to posthumous Italian edition of MM’s Advice. Pf.
George Eliot’s tribute: Middlemarch, concluding paragraph.
CC was buried: At the cemetery of S. Maria in the commune of Bagno a Ripoli, about three and a half miles from Florence. (Photos in Pf.) She had told one William Graham of her wish to be buried with Allegra. Graham, letter (5 Jan. 1894), Cini Papers, Pf.
‘the subterraneous community of women’: Shelley’s entry in MWSJ, 32. The evening before, Thursday 6 Oct. 1814, CC had read some of MW’s letters.
‘The party of free women’: ClCor, i, 314–15.
18 GENERATIONS
‘not the experience of one life only…’: T. S. Eliot, The Dry Salvages: II.
Thompson’s aim; reprinted passages from RW: Taylor, Wollstonecraft, 248.
Mary Wollstonecraft [sister-in-law]: Boston Monthly Magazine, i (Aug. 1825), 126–35. Publ. under the pseudonym of D’Anville.
Distinguished Women: ‘Female Biography: Containing Notices of Distinguished Women’, in Dictionary of Christian Biography (Philadelphia: Leary & Getz, 1834) by Samuel Knapp. (Discovered in the Bodleian Library by Professor Kathryn Sutherland.) Knapp, the proprietor of the Boston Monthly Magazine, had clearly met this Mary Wollstonecraft. He tells us that she craved sun, and after Charles died in 1817, transplanted herself (taking her stepdaughter, Charles’s daughter from an earlier marriage) from New Orleans to Cuba. She had no children. Charles had joined the American army where he remained and had been promoted.
‘surprised’: De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1969), 590–1 (‘Education of Girls in the US’).
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and MW: See Margaret Reynolds’s introduction to her critical edition of Aurora Leigh (Ohio University Press, 1992), 12–19, and notes 60–65. With thanks to Mark Bostridge for passing this on, as well as the fact that Barrett Browning refuted a suggestion that Florence Nightingale’s ministry in the Crimea could be accounted a step gained for her sex.
George Eliot and MW: Daniel Deronda (1876), ch. 17. See George Eliot to Rabbi Deutsch: Letters, v, 160–1. With thanks again to Mark Bostridge whose Vera Brittain: A Life, 366, reveals that she, too, was bent on fictionalising elements of MW’s life. Her novel (which never got beyond the planning stage) was to be set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, and entitled: ‘Behold This Dawn’. More recent novelists Frances Sherwood and Michèle Roberts have also fictionalised elements of MW’s life.
George Eliot links MW and Margaret Fuller: ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’, Westminster Review (13 Oct. 1855), repr. in George Eliot , Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings (Penguin Classics, 1990), 332–8. Fuller’s work was published in 1843.
‘what is now called the nature of women…’: The Subjection of Women, ch. 1. Mill was the first to back women’s suffrage in the British Parliament, by presenting a petition signed by nearly 1500 women and speaking in favour of amending Disraeli’s Reform Bill of 1867 to read ‘person’ rather than ‘man’.
six generations: The Voyage Out, ch. 16.
‘The great problem is the true nature of woman’; ‘almost unclassified’: A Room of One’s Own (1929; originated in talks for women students at Newnham College and for the ODTAA Society at Girton College, Cambridge University, in 1928). A decade later Virginia Woolf again circled the mystery of ‘our still unknown psychology’ in Three Guineas.
‘I am a rising character’: Villette (1853), ii, ch. 27.
‘“Nature” is what we know…’: ‘“Nature” is what we see’, in Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (London: Faber, 1975), no. 668; Variorum Edition, ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1998), no. 721.
‘Let us…trust our whole nature’: Lyndall Gordon, A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women (London: Vintage; New York: Norton, 1999), 107.
‘grande nature ’: Henry James, Preface to The Portrait of a Lady (1881).
‘Who was she…’: Ibid., ch. 12.
MW against violence; ‘the real savages’: One of her last pieces of writing was about ‘rapacious whites’ savaging and exploiting the indigenous inhabitants of the Cape of Good Hope. Review of the English translation of M. Levaillant, New Travels into the interior Parts of Africa, by Way of the Cape of Good Hope, AR (May 1797); MWCW, vii, 479–84. Cited by Taylor, Wollstonecraft, 240–1.
heard the lash: RM. See ch. 7 above.
group portrait: The artist was Benjamin Robert Haydon, a protégé and critic of Fuseli. See ch. 8 above.
Benedict on MW: Publ. after her death in Writings of Ruth Benedict: An Anthropologist at Work, ed. Margaret Mead (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959).
Virginia Woolf on MW: ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, first publ. in 1929; repr. The Common Reader, 2nd series (1932).
‘a great season of liberation’: 31 Dec. 1932, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Anne Olivier Bell, iv (London: Hogarth; New York: Harcourt, 1982), 134.
the edifice of power: Joan Smith, Moralities, is a timely political analysis of mass opinion outside the old power structures, questioning their morality in the twenty-first century.
‘Outsider Society’: Woolf, Three Guineas, ch. 3.
‘enfranchised till death’: 28 Apr. 1938, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, v, 137.
Women who imitate men lack ambition: The most politically effective use of this phrase that I’ve heard came in a speech by Hilary Reynolds of the SABC at a breakfast in Cape Town (2 Aug. 2002) to mark fifty years of a women’s programme. Following her, Opposition MP Patricia de Lille was cheered by an almost all-women audience for her speech on government neglect of widespread sexual abuse as well as of the AIDS epidemic ravaging the country. A foremost candidate for blame was a woman health minister, a sycophant of President Mbeki’s protracted reluctance to supply life-saving drugs to his dying people. Instead, Mbeki, following Mandela’s sales of weapons to brutal regimes, chose to spend billions on weaponry.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIMARY SOURCES
*Documents asterisked are on the Internet site accompanying this book.
Abinger Collection. The main collection of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley papers. Bodleian Library, Oxford. Includes Mount Cashell letters to the Shelleys
——Shelley’s Guitar. Bodleian Library’s bicentenary exhibition of manuscripts, first editions and relics of Percy Bysshe Shelley by B. C. Barker-Benfield (Oxford, 1992)
Adams, Abi
gail, ‘Diary of her Return Voyage to America’ (Apr.–May 1788), in Diary and
Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L. H. Butterfield, iii (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1961)
——and John Adams, MS correspondence (with reference to Mary Wollstonecraft)
Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston: microfilm reel 377
Adams Family Correspondence, i, vi (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1993)
Adams, John. Copious marginalia (debating political issues with Mary Wollstonecraft) in his copy of FR. Rare Books, Boston Public Library: 221.15
American Manuscripts 1763–1815: An Index to Documents Described in Auction Records and Dealers’
Catalogues (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1977)
Arden, John, A Short Account of a Course of Natural and Experimental Philosophy (Beverley, Yorkshire, 1772)
Astell, Mary, Reflections Upon Marriage, 3rd edn (1706)
*Backman, Elias. Letter to the Swedish Regent (15 Mar. 1794), Stockholm Riksarkivet: Biographica B1 (Baar-Baesecke), 6454: 23
Backman, Pierre (brother of Elias Backman), ‘Fransmännen på Traneberg’
Västgötabygden, iii/4 (1958), 272–5
Barlow Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard (b MS Am 1448). The main repository of the Barlow Papers, including Joel Barlow’s unpublished letters and charming light verse to his wife, amongst the best things he wrote. Includes the letters of Ruth Baldwin Barlow; letterbooks; account book; memoranda book; diary of 1788. Substantial collection also in the Beinecke Library (Za Barlow 14; and MS Vault Pequot Box M 886–937, M938–94 and M995–1039). Other Barlow papers are scattered in various American archives such as the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Manuscript Division of the New York Public Library
——Will-letter (1796) mentioning MW to RB from Algiers during an outbreak of the plague: Houghton and American Literature, ix (1938), 442–9, and x (1938), 224–7. Draft version in Beinecke: Za Barlow 13
Benedict, Ruth, An Anthropologist at Work, ed. Margaret Mead (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959). Includes her homage to Wollstonecraft, a short biography unpublished in Benedict’s lifetime.