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by Rebecca Romney

  “[Blake] paused & added, ‘I was Socrates,’ and then, as if correcting himself, said, ‘a sort of brother. I must have had conversations with him. So I had with Jesus Christ. I have an obscure recollection of having been with both of them.’”

  To generate income and keep him busy during the last months of his life, Blake was commissioned by one of his friends to design engravings for a new edition of Dante’s Inferno. Never content with a simple illustration of another’s work, he used the medium to make his own commentary on Dante’s epic, described by one scholar as “Blake’s most drastic act of reinterpretation.” Blake died before the series was completed, but the images left to us have proved to be “triumphs of the engraver’s art, among the finest line-engravings ever made.”

  William Blake died in 1827, at the age of sixty-nine. The exact causes of his death are unknown, but there is evidence that he was suffering from sclerosing cholangitis, an inflammatory bowel disease that may have been “caused or aggravated by chronic copper intoxication.” If that’s true, then, by his art, he lived, he dreamed, and he died.

  Blake was a man of contradictions. He was haunted by ghosts and demons, yet from those interactions, he created some of the most alluring and innovative works of the era. As one biographer notes, William Blake lived in a paradise of his own making, in “realms of gold.” This is a place “we too may dwell . . . if we use our imaginations”—if, that is, we can stomach the leering gods, demons, and terrifying man-fleas. Perhaps to join Blake, all we really need to do is listen. Escuchar a los muertos con los ojos, as Francisco de Quevedo said. “Listen to the dead with your eyes.”

  8

  THE MEMOIR THAT KILLED HER MEMORY

  IN LATE OCTOBER 1795, ONE of the most revolutionary authors of the last decade poised to throw herself from London’s Putney Bridge. Rationally, the author made this decision because she no longer believed in the superstitious tales of eternal punishment promised to those who “self-murder.” Irrationally, the author made this decision because she had been jilted by a lover. In a note calculated to haunt him, she wrote, “May you never know by experience what you have made me endure . . . in the midst of business and sensual pleasure, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.” That is a serious curse: Every time you make a business deal, I will be there silently watching. Every time you bed another woman, I will be there silently watching. Not so easy to get that pen of yours up now, is it? The writer of this odd suicide note was none other than Mary Wollstonecraft, the famous author of the protofeminist treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

  Even before the invention of the printing press, writers were wrestling with the question of professional authorship. Could writing be viewed as an actual career? Of course it can, says anyone who’s read Harry Potter. But making a living from writing is a fairly new phenomenon in the history of print. For the first three hundred fifty years, “professional author” was a made-up career, like philosopher, fantasy football manager, or American vice president.

  Over the course of the 1700s, the trade in printed books expanded so dramatically that, for the first time, many authors could actually list “writing” as their primary occupation. The number of titles available in England jumped 50 percent, from 1750 to 1775, but leapt 170 percent from 1775 to 1800. Writers enjoyed more venues to publish reviews, essays, histories, and even those newfangled and morally bankrupt “novels” that everyone was warning about. Hit the Zeitgeist with a single work, and your name could be lauded all across Europe.

  At this same time, a philosophical shift was creeping into the world of print. Authors were starting to be celebrated as heroes, special voices of authority sustained by virtue of their unique genius. They even began asserting, and winning, rights to previously nebulous concepts such as “intellectual property,” through landmark court cases such as Pope v. Curll (1741). This all sounds great, until you remember that this is the eighteenth century, a time before proper sewage systems, when bloodletting was still considered an important treatment for illness, and when married women were not considered fit to own property. Mary Wollstonecraft took on the challenge of becoming a literary authority despite the impropriety of possessing a vagina. As a result, Wollstonecraft’s reputation has varied so wildly over the past two hundred years that you’re just as likely to find statements calling her the “Mother of Feminism” as a “Prostitute.”

  When Wollstonecraft decided to end her life in 1795, October on the River Thames would have been about the worst time to do it. Autumn was apparently the busiest season for desperate women throwing themselves into a watery grave. According to her biographer Janet Todd: “Unconscious, [Wollstonecraft] floated downstream, until pulled out of the river by fishermen, doubtless used to suicides . . . The Royale Humane Society had been set up to pursue the enlightened policy of thwarting self-murders by receiving, and if possible, resuscitating bodies found floating in the Thames.”

  How would a lovesick suicide attempt affect the reputation of the fierce author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman? Here’s one report from The Gentleman’s Magazine just after Wollstonecraft was pulled from the icy river. “From a mind of such boasted strength we naturally expect fortitude; but, in this instance, she was weak as the weakest girl” [emphasis original]. So, only authors with the weakest, girliest of minds commit suicide. Just ask Ernest Hemingway.

  It wasn’t the suicide attempt(s) that would most damage Wollstonecraft’s hard-earned reputation, however. It was a memoir. Written by the man she married a year and a half after the fateful Putney jump. William Godwin intended to memorialize his well-known wife to the annals of literary glory, but, in the end, he served only to relegate her to the trash heap of history.

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT was born in 1759 to an unfortunate London family. By her own accounts, her father was a lazy tyrant who spent more time abusing her mother than supporting her. Her mother rarely pushed back; Wollstonecraft remembered her mother as more a slave than a spouse.

  Ducking the rage of her frequently drunken husband, Wollstonecraft’s mother took solace in her children—well, one of them, anyway, the eldest son, Ned. Generally neglected by both parents, Mary felt compelled to look elsewhere for acceptance. She found it in the London-based family of Matthew and Caroline Blood. Their daughter Frances (who went by Fanny, by the way. Fanny Blood. Aaaand moving on) would become one of Wollstonecraft’s closest friends and confidantes.

  At twenty-four years old, Mary, two of her sisters, and Fanny opened schools for young women in Islington and Newington Green in an attempt to carve out financial independence. Schools at the time were about as stable as dot-com businesses after 2001. The start-up was cheap and the qualifications for employment low, but most ventures sagged under starving profits, and eventually went under. Within two and a half years, both Wollstonecraft’s schools had failed.

  Ironically, while Wollstonecraft was failing at running her schools, she was succeeding in becoming an authority on them. In the same year that her Newington Green school closed, she began work on her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787). She became a nationally recognized “pedagogue with her own theory of education.” As the old saying goes, those who can, do; those who can’t, teach; and those who can do neither, write a book about it . . .

  Mary Wollstonecraft wasn’t destined to become the eighteenth-century Danielle Steel. She was more in the neighborhood of a poverty-stricken single mom who writes in cafés and makes ends meet by doing translation work. And yes, that’s an almost word-for-word description of J. K. Rowling, but Wollstonecraft didn’t have Harry Potter in her back pocket. She had the YA book Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. Wollstonecraft worked for years as a translator, journalist, and editor to financially support herself.

  The career path before Wollstonecraft was not easy. The concept of the professional author, one who could live solel
y off his writing, would have seemed more myth than reality to people living in the first centuries of print. For women, the idea was even more far-fetched. While there are some rock star exceptions, such as the fourteenth-century Venetian Christine de Pizan (who was widowed at twenty-five and made a living for herself and her three children as a popular author), until the eighteenth-century the world of print was guarded in a kind of aristocratic system, which generally excluded both the uneducated (see: poor) and the mentally inferior (see: women).

  Most readers today take for granted the concept of the author, but in the thousands of years that humanity has been writing, we’ve had a hard time figuring out just what an “author” is. Plato argued that most poets should be cast out of the city as useless liars. In the best cases, authors were seen as auctors, tasked with creatively standing in the place of God. To take sole credit for one’s work would have been akin to plagiarizing God. According to Dante, those guilty of fraudulent acts were sent to the eighth circle of hell, where they would be dipped in excrement for eternity.

  Through most of the Middle Ages, writing wasn’t even considered a paying gig: how can you sell something that was a gift from God? You can’t. Just like you can’t sell that pair of scratchy socks your nana knitted last year, you cannot, if you’re the medieval writer Boethius, sell The Consolation of Philosophy. Both are gifts. Equal-magnitude gifts.

  The concept of what an author did, what authority he had, and what he was owed for it, has never been consistent. The sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus was morally offended when someone suggested that his printer had paid him for his work. Even well into the 1700s, it’s easy to find documentation that shows an author was “still being represented as just one of the numerous craftsmen involved in the production of a book—not superior to, but on par with other craftsmen.” Yet, the blossoming of European capitalism rapidly expanded the market for books, which required more printers, more papermakers, more booksellers, more binders, and yes, even more writers.

  With the trail blazed by the likes of Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of a number of women who hoped she could earn economic independence on the same path. But because “authorship” overlaps “authority,” it rubbed some gentlemen the wrong way that a woman could dare to acquire some of the latter. It’s no coincidence that women writers have frequently been accused of plagiarism, from Anne Bradstreet in 1650 (“If what I do prove well, it won’t advance, / They’ll say it’s stoln, or else it was by chance”) to claims that Truman Capote was the actual writer of To Kill a Mockingbird in 1960. Nor is it surprising to see how many women writers, such as the Brontë sisters, used male pseudonyms when trying to establish themselves. For women, as one scholar put it, “authorship had to be denied so as to be attained.” The golden age of the author was just beginning, and writers were required to check their coats and their womenfolk at the door.

  Let’s pretend for a moment that this period of print history is a recipe for a soufflé. We take 1700–1850 CE and whisk it up as hard as we can. Then we add three cups of money, seven tablespoons of Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), a dash of Samuel Richardson (Pamela), and, let’s say, one hatful of Henry Fielding (Tom Jones). We’re pretty sure that’s how you make soufflés. You bite into this fluffy marvel of literary history, only to notice that something besides a basic familiarity with French cuisine is missing. Where’s the Mary Brunton in this recipe? Where’s the Charlotte Smith? Or the Sarah Fielding, Maria Edgeworth, and Elizabeth Montagu? Ann Radcliffe? Eliza Haywood? Maybe you added a little Jane Austen, so congratulations for that, but this is the moment when you realize that the soufflé you’ve just made is totally imbalanced. You put in way too much sausage and only one egg. (Good luck eating your next soufflé.)

  The systematic excising of the contributions of women in this era has its own name. It’s called the Great Forgetting. Mary Wollstonecraft’s name has been penciled in and scribbled out of our soufflé recipe for two hundred years. Historian Seán Burke makes the point that “it would scarcely be an exaggeration to say that the struggles of feminism have been primarily a struggle for authorship.” And you can bet this struggle is reflected in the world of rare book collecting. Many first editions by the female authors just listed can be purchased at a fraction of the price of those by their male counterparts—with the usual exception of Jane Austen, whose Pride and Prejudice can reach very high prices: seventy-five thousand dollars or more.

  During the Romantic Age, readers were eager for more than just the products of the author’s pen (gross). They wanted to know about the author himself. The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the greatest autobiographies ever written, was published at the end of the eighteenth century. So was the first “warts and all” biography: James Boswell’s delightfully unflinching narrative of Samuel Johnson (the lexicographer behind the greatest English dictionary). Soon biographies started cropping up as a mainstay of nineteenth-century literary life. One of the most famous of these was Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë, which praised Brontë’s “great genius” (while simultaneously suggesting that her “duties” as a Victorian woman suffered for that genius). The first authoritative biography of Charles Dickens was written during this period, by his close friend and literary agent John Forster. But before that was the sexually charged, tell-all memoir of Mary Wollstonecraft by her grief-stricken widower—the one that obliterated her reputation for more than a century.

  While the biographical approach to literary criticism can provide illuminating context to an author’s work, it’s also a double-edged sword. When sordid details of Wollstonecraft’s personal life became public, critics finally found the weapon they needed to strip her of her authority.

  Read Wollstonecraft’s epitaph, and note the emphasis:

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN

  Author of A Vindication

  of the Rights of Woman

  Born 27th April 1759

  Died 10th September 1797

  The crowning achievement of Wollstonecraft’s literary career, commemorated in stone, was published in 1792, just five years before her untimely death. Vindication “proposed a model of what we would now call ‘egalitarian’ or ‘liberal’ feminism. Grounded in the affirmation of universal human rights endorsed by such Enlightenment thinkers as Voltaire, Rousseau, and John Locke, Wollstonecraft argued that females are in all the most important aspects the same as males, possessing the same souls, the same mental capacities, and thus the same human rights.”

  That Wollstonecraft had to start with, Hey, everybody, men and women don’t actually have different souls, gives you an idea of what she was working with. Her treatise took a hard look at female education, arguing in particular that girls should be “educated in the same subjects and by [the] same method as boys.” Latin, for example, was considered a cornerstone of a schoolboy’s curriculum, whereas for girls, it made them “unmarriageable.” Because the only thing worse than a woman talking back to you is a woman talking back to you in Latin.

  What might Mary Wollstonecraft consider an “improper education”? Probably something like “the education of the women should be always relative to the men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them . . . to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable: these are the duties of women at all times, and what they should be taught in their infancy.” Cooking? Check. Mending holes in pantaloons? Check. But Latin? Hold on there, young lady, how exactly does that benefit a man?

  The public appeal to separate male and female educations was made by none other than Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 treatise, Émile, or On Education. Rousseau was one of the most influential philosophers of the French Enlightenment, and Émile was, he claimed, the “best and most important of all my writings.” Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was a giant futue te ipsum to Rousseau and the others who espoused his misogynistic views. In it she devotes a significant amount of time to dismantling Rousseau’s
ideas: “the mother, who wishes to give true dignity of character to her daughter, must, regardless of the sneers of ignorance, proceed on a plan diametrically opposite to that which Rousseau has recommended.”

  In addition to bettering female education, Vindication also advocated for joint possession of household resources, equal opportunity employment, women’s suffrage, and equal pay for equal labor. Most of the core principles that would resurface in the gender equality movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries were established in print by Mary Wollstonecraft two hundred years before, earning her that nom de guerre “Mother of Feminism.” But, in 1798, her husband published Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which punted said nom into relative obscurity for the next century.

  BY WRITING Memoirs, Godwin was paying tribute to Wollstonecraft, who had just died from complications of childbirth after delivering her second daughter. (This daughter, also named Mary, ran away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1814. She would write Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus four years later, aspects of which would falsely be credited to her more famous consort.) A radical himself and, at the time, an even more successful public intellectual, Godwin was deeply in love with his revolutionary wife. He respected her sharp intellect and writing skills. In the depths of his grief, he didn’t seem to comprehend how others might read her works and not also fall in love with her. A candid biography of his extraordinary wife should endear her even more to the public, right? It worked for the infamously irascible Samuel Johnson, so why not Wollstonecraft? Her successes and failures would be immortalized in print, and in the end, her contemporaries would judge her from the vantage point of God, with all the fairness, mercy, and understanding requisite of such an office. Mary made mistakes, sure, but who hasn’t? Unfortunately, for those who disagreed with Wollstonecraft’s liberal, revolutionary writings, Godwin’s Memoirs was a pile of fresh ammunition, just waiting to be loaded into the guns of their righteous indignation.