Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  Smith, Joan, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, essay for the Penguin website (2003)

  ——Moralities: How to End the Abuse of Money and Power in the 21st Century (Allen Lane/Penguin Books, 2002)

  Spark, Muriel, Mary Shelley: A Biography, a revision of Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Shelley (1951, rev. edn New York: Dutton, 1987)

  Steel, Mark, Vive la Révolution:–A Standup History of the French Revolution (New York: Scribner, 2003)

  Steiner, Wendy, ‘Women’s Fiction’, in the Cambridge History of American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch, vii (1940-–90), 505–16

  Stephen, Leslie, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, Dictionary of National Biography

  Stocking, Marion Kingston, ‘Miss Tina and Miss Plin: the Papers behind The Aspern Papers’, in Donald H. Reiman et al., eds, The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interaction between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature (New York, 1978), 372–84, Quotes Richard Garnett’s description of E. A. Silsbee as an amiable version of CC’s old suitor Trelawny

  Stone, Laurence, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Penguin Books, rev. edn 1979)

  Strachey, Ray, The Cause (1928; repr. London: Virago, 1974). Fascinating appendix: Florence Nightingale’s outcry against the limitations of women’s lives in her autobiographical writings of the 1860s ‘Cassandra’.

  Sunstein, Emily, A Different Face: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York, 1975)

  ——Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Little, Brown, 1989; repr. 1991)

  Taylor, Barbara, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983)

  ——Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge University Press, 2003)

  ——‘Mary Wollstonecraft’, entry in The New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)

  ——‘Mary Wollstonecraft and the Enlightenment’, lecture, Oxford University (Hilary term, 2004)

  Taylor, J. Lionel, A Little Corner of London (Lincoln: J. W. Ruddock, 1925). On Newington Green.

  Tillyard, Stella, Citizen Lord (London: Vintage, 1998)

  Tims, Margaret, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Social Pioneer (London: Millington Books, 1976)

  Todd, Charles Burr, Life and Letters of Joel Barlow: Poet, Statesman, Philosopher (1886; repr. New York: Da Capo Press, 1970)

  Todd, Janet, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980)

  ——Gender, Art, Death (1988; repr. Polity Press, 1995). Includes deaths of MW and Fanny Imlay

  ——Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson; New York: Columbia University Press, 2000)

  ——Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict, 1798 (London: Viking, 2003)

  Tomalin, Claire, ‘A Fallen Woman: Reappraisal of Letters to Imlay by Mary Wollstonecraft’, in Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades (Penguin Books, 2000), pp. 19–23

  ——The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Harcourt, 1974; rev. edn Penguin Books, 1992)

  ——Shelley and His World (1980; repr. Penguin Books, 1992)

  ——Introduction, with background on the history of Margaret Mount Cashell and her daughters, to MWS’s story, Maurice (Penguin Books, 1997)

  ——Jane Austen: A Life (Penguin Books, 1998). Establishes a plausible link, through the East family, between MW and Jane Austen

  ——Robert Woof, and Stephen Hebron, Hyenas in Petticoats (Wordsworth Trust, Dove Cottage, Grasmere, 1997). Bicentenary exhibition of the lives of MW and MWS

  Tyson, Gerald P., Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979)

  Uglow, Jenny, The Lunar Men (London: Faber, 2002)

  Vaccà Giusti, Laura, Andrea Vaccà e la sua famiglia: Biografie e memorie (Pisa, 1878)

  Verlet, Pierre, French Royal Furniture (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1963)

  Vickery, Amanda, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), esp. 153–4 on the production and distribution of medicine

  Vidal, Gore, Burr: A Novel (New York: Ballantine, 1973). Western Separatism involving GI’s associate General Wilkinson and WG’s friend Aaron Burr

  Walkowitz, Judith R., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late Victorian London (London: Virago, 1992), ch. 5 (on the Men and Women’s Club for redefining the natures of the sexes)

  Wardle, Ralph M., ‘Mary Wollstonecraft, Analytical Reviewer’, PMLA, lxii (Dec. 1947)

  ——Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (1951; repr. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1966)

  Waters, Mary A. “The First of a New Genus”: Mary Wollstonecraft as a Literary Critic and Mentor to Mary Hays’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, xxxvii (spring 2004), 415–34

  Watson, Isobel, Hackney and Stoke Newington Post: A Visual History (London: Historical Publications, 1990, revd 1998)

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

  Weinglass, D. H., ‘Henry Fuseli’s Letter of Enquiry to Paris on Behalf of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Sister Everina’, Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly (spring 1988)

  Weir, Alison, The Six Wives of Henry VIII (New York: Ballantine, 1991). Stresses the kind of intellectual attainments and educative nurture in Katherine Parr that look forward in some ways to Wollstonecraft. The first two wives usually get most attention, but their old feminine power-games are less compelling to women of the future

  Whitelock, Dorothy, The Beginnings of English Society (Penguin Books, 1952, repr. 1971). The position of women in Anglo-Saxon England

  Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society 1780–1950 (Penguin Books, 1963)

  Women’s Writing, special issue for Mary Wollstonecraft’s bicentennial, iv/2 (1997)

  Woodress, James, A Yankee Odyssey: The Life of Joel Barlow (Philadelphia and New York: J. B. Lippincott, 1958)

  Woof, Hebron, Hyenas in Petticoats, see Tomalin, Woof and Hebron

  Woolf, Virginia, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ (1929); repr. Common Reader, 2nd series (1932), and in various collections of essays, including Leonard Woolf’s well-arranged selection for the Hogarth Press

  Yeo, Eileen, ed., Mary Wollstonecraft and Two Hundred Years of Feminism (London: Rivers Oram, 1997)

  Zunder, Theodore Albert, The Early Days of Joel Barlow: His Life and Works, 1754–1787, in Yale Studies in English, v/83–4 (1934)

  INTERNET DOCUMENTS

  For readers, teachers and students who would like access to some of the primary materials behind this book, the following items are posted on the Internet at www.lyndallgordon.net. Further documents will be posted if readers wish.

  Hunting the invisible Gilbert Imlay is one of the almost impossible challenges of Wollstonecraft biography, but he makes an unexpected appearance in a letter from Wollstonecraft’s husband, William Godwin, to an associate of Imlay’s London agent Mr Cowie. The latter had funded Mary Wollstonecraft on the basis of her expectations from the silver ship, the only Imlay venture in which she participated. The letter contains surprising information about big money due to be recovered from a venture that supposedly went wrong. A vital clue in the attempt to unravel the mystery of what happened to the silver.

  Joel Barlow, the American poet, was Imlay’s business associate, and participated in the mystery of the silver ship. An earlier letter to a stranger, written from Paris as one gentleman to another, shows Barlow selling frontier land to French dupes, and salving his conscience by asking assistance for them from this stranger who has no real inducement to offer it.

  American spies in Europe in the 1790s. As I searched archives for Mary Wollstonecraft’s American connections, I wasn’t initially thinking of spies. But documents amongst the Barlow Papers occasionally fall into a cryptic language that, together with other evidence, suggests that Wollstonecraft’s lover, Imlay, and her friend Barlow had connections with secret agents, if they were not secret agents of sorts themselves. If so, the
ir American network assumes significance.

  The Barlows’ story: a follow-up on their return to the States in 1805, after seventeen years in Europe, including Barlow’s subsequent appointment as American Minister to France in 1811 and his pursuit of Napoleon in Poland during his retreat from the disastrous Russian campaign in 1812.

  Scandinavian archives contain a number of documents to do with Imlay’s cargo of silver that took Mary Wollstonecraft there in the summer of 1795. One of these documents is a petition from Elias Backman, Imlay’s agent in Gothenburg, to the Swedish Regent, asking leave to import in secret a vast French treasure.

  Testimony of the crew of the silver ship.

  A long-buried letter from Mary Wollstonecraft, explaining her activities and point of view as ‘femme Imlay’, should be available to all, not only to those who read this biography.

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s one-time pupil Margaret King dressed as a man in order to attend medical lectures at the University of Jena in 1806. A traveller’s narrative set in what was then a battle area survives in the library of her Italian descendants in San Marcello. The narrator’s voice devises what could conceivably be a male character for herself, her cover as a travelling Frenchman.

  John Adams read Mary Wollstonecraft’s Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution twice: first in 1796, when he was elected as second President of the United States, and again in 1812. His copy is preserved in the Boston Public Library. This is an unknown gem of spontaneous repartee: Adams’s marginal comments are so vehement and abundant that they are set out here as a debate between conservative and radical revolutionaries, between the American and French Revolutions, and between man and woman. The President called his wife, Abigail Adams, ‘disciple of Woolstoncraft’, evidence of a domestic voice on Wollstonecraft’s side in a debate between two political thinkers of exceptional integrity who held opposed positions.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Biographies have predecessors of one kind or another and this one benefitted from Claire Tomalin’s enduring portrait; William St Clair’s accurate research; Janet Todd’s scholarship and wide knowledge of women in the eighteenth century; Diane Jacobs’s engaging succinctness; and the ten volumes of Shelley and his Circle with their authoritative commentary. Doucet Devin Fischer and Stephen Wagner have suggested, I think rightly, that Wollstonecraft was primarily an educator, and Richard Holmes’s portraits in Footsteps and Sidetracks brought her convincingly to life. I was heartened by Joan Smith’s essay published on the Penguin website in 2003. Then, towards the end of 2004, Nobel prizewinner Amartya Sen initiated a change towards ‘Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary’ with two articles suggesting how closely her ethical version of human rights speaks to the wrongs of our present world.

  Back in 1999, editor Alane Mason suggested extending a life of Wollstonecraft as a two-generation biography of ‘Mary and her daughters’, opening with a telling scene, as in my story of Fenimore and Henry James. At that time I did not know of any other biography in the works.

  Biographer Mark Bostridge has passed on items that helped to shape the final chapter, and encouraged alertness to the myths that collect in the process of biographical transmission. This was illuminated in particular by Lucasta Miller’s witty critique of biography in The Brontë Myth.

  Elizabeth Crawford, who puts out catalogues of women’s books and is an expert on London locale, set down a list of addresses for Wollstonecraft and her milieu. One rainy Sunday, 30 April 2000, we tracked them down, imagining the eighteenth-century scene as we crossed the Thames from Wollstonecraft’s lodgings along Blackfriars Road to her publisher’s house in St Paul’s churchyard.

  Cristina Dazzi, wife of a descendant of Lady Mount Cashell, and custodian of the family’s history, discovered an unknown travel narrative in their private library in San Marcello Pistoiese. I am grateful to her for transcribing and passing it on, also for her knowledge, and the gift of a beautiful and useful book. She, her husband, Andrea Dazzi, and mother-in-law, Giovanna, were graciously hospitable, and I shan’t forget the dim library that seemed hidden in the heart of the vast house and a walk in the untouched garden.

  Norwegian historian Gunnar Molden is re-opening the story of Wollstonecraft’s journey to Scandinavia with new and exciting discoveries. He brought boxes of his findings to Arendal, and pointed out the site where the silver ship would have docked in 1794. Over the next few years he generously shared his detective work and put me right if I went off track. Without this, my reconstruction of what happened to the silver would not have been possible.

  I am also grateful to Nicole Tiedemann of the North German Museum in Altona for her guidance around their great silver collection, and for her thoughtfulness in sending articles on the subject; to Lena Ånimmer at the State Archives in Stockholm who took the trouble to find Swedish books and articles on Wollstonecraft; to Anne Møretrø of the Aust Agder Archives in Arendal, Norway, who put me in touch with Gunnar Molden who, in turn, directed me to unknown material in Kristiansand. Oddleif Lian, the head archivist, was prompt with photocopies of documents to do with the treasure ship, together with exciting English summaries of their contents. This went far beyond expectations. His colleague Per Inge Nilssen transcribed the eighteenth-century Gothic hand of the records, and provided factual information about the hideaways of the ship in Groos and Oksefjorden–the latter I could not find on the map. Tor Weidling, at the National Archives of Norway in Oslo, sent a copy of Judge Wulfsberg’s letter to the Danish Prime Minister, summing up the version of events the judge had heard directly from Mary Wollstonecraft while she stayed near him during the happiest period of her journey. I must thank in particular novelist Marika Cubbold for offering to phone Sweden from London to explain what I was after. As a result, Lars Melchior in the Gothenburg Archives hunted up the amazingly detailed records of repairs to the silver ship, the dates of which revealed that these repairs were carried out at the precise time of Wollstonecraft’s stay in Scandinavia. His colleague Lars Holm found books and pictures of eighteenth-century Gothenburg. Before I went there, a Fellow of my college had asked with polite irony: And how are your Scandinavian languages? Thanks to the exceptional professionalism of Swedish and Norwegian archivists, what may have proved an insuperable handicap was–I won’t say overcome–but somewhat lessened.

  Ingunn Seidler did polished translations of the Scandinavian documents. Renée Williams, lecturer in French at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, was able to decipher eighteenth century documents in French–I could not have managed without her. So, too, Lorraine Castandet at the archives in Paris and Anke Bülow in Hamburg.

  Roy Foster answered questions about the Ascendancy in Ireland, North Cork violence, accents, and the changing landscape of Mitchelstown in the 1770s and 1780s. Canon David Pierpont kindly opened St Werburgh’s Church in Dublin where Wollstonecraft attended a recital of Handel. Liam McNulty of the Irish Pipers’ Society at 15 Henrietta Street–once home to the Kings–was welcoming, as was Áine Sotscheck at 11 Henrietta Street, an identical Georgian house, happily unconverted. Mary Wollstonecraft would have approved of the non-violent ethos of her school.

  My teacher-daughter Anna Gordon shares Wollstonecraft’s belief that empathy should have priority in education. Her enthusiastic response to the early chapters was an incentive to go on. Then, too, there has been the stimulus of discussions with Gillian Avery (on children’s books and the history of girls’ education), Sacvan Bercovitch (on why American revolutionaries didn’t turn into thugs), Hilda Bernstein (on power and testosterone), Ronald Bush (who lent me the invaluable and amusing Americans in Paris and his copy of Burr), Minde Chen-Wishart (on courage), Timothy Garton Ash (on world events), Gretchen Gerzina (on women and slavery), Timothy Hyman (on Fuseli), Laura Karobkin (on law in literature), Linn Cary Mehta (on America), Diane Middlebrook (on lives and how to live), Miranda Miller (on reading and writing), Susan Mizruchi (on American literature), Pamela Norris (on love), Judith Ravenscroft (on books), Hilary Reynolds (on her daily wom
en’s programme on South African radio), Joan Smith (on feminism and morality), and Kathryn Sutherland (on Jane Austen). Fellows and students of Hilda’s College–especially Hilda Brown (who sifted the connotations of sinnvoll as used by Wollstonecraft’s admirer), Angelica Goodden, Janet Howarth, Susan Jones, Jane Mellanby, Jenny Wormald and the Principal, Judith English–have continued to create a congenial environment for exchange of ideas.

  At a retirement dinner an Oxford Fellow and Tutor declared, ‘I have had a lifelong love affair [pause] with the Bodleian Library.’ I echo this as I bike there in five minutes, alternating with the English Faculty Library, the Vere Harmsworth Library, and my College library. I’m grateful to those who fetched innumerable books, as well as to Dr Barker-Benfield, Mr Hodges, Peter Allmond and Tatiana White. Michael Meredith, librarian at Eton College, provided a transcript of a lost Browning letter about a poem on Wollstonecraft and Fuseli. Ciaran McEniry at the National Library of Ireland was willing to photocopy Lady Mount Cashell’s pamphlets against Union. The National Archives in Paris photocopied the dossier of Paine’s arrest and imprisonment. Eric Goebel, Senior Researcher at the Danish National Archives, stopped me wasting time on futile searches, and Dr Carsten Müller-Boysen of the Landesarchiv Schleswig-Holstein patiently answered questions to which there was no easy answer. Then, too, I should like to thank Nancy Stein at the Allentown Public Library, NJ; Nicholas Graham and Carrie Foley at the Massachusetts Historical Society; Janet Bloom at the William L. Clements Library of Early Americana, University of Michigan; Robert S. Cox, at the Library of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia who took the trouble to offer detailed advice; Virginia Bartow, Curator of Rare Books at the New York Public Library; Rare Books and Manuscripts in Butler Library, Columbia University; RuthR. Rogers, Special Collections librarian at Wellesley College; Katherine Ludwig at the David Library of the American Revolution in Pennsylvania; Pen Bogart of the Filson Historical Society (who advised on Imlay); Roberta Zonghi and Diane Parks at the Boston Public Library; Susan Halpert of the Houghton Library, Harvard; and Stephen Wagner and Doucet Devin Fischer of the Pforzheimer Collection, New York Public Library. A special thanks to Karen V. Kukil, editor of Sylvia Plath’s journals and associate curator of rare books at Smith College, who produced almost the last remaining copies of Godwin’s Bible Stories and Margaret Mount Cashell’s reader for children.