I woke in the morning to footsteps outside my door, threw on my robe, and opened it to find a small pot of steaming tea and a pitcher of cream on a tray beside my manuscript, with Johnson’s corrections, gentle but exacting. I had never studied grammar, not really, and my style lacked elegance, but I could tell from the care he took that he was shepherding the book. I put on my spectacles and set to work at once, not even asking for water to splash my face, sending his woman away when she offered me lunch, never stopping until I was called down to dinner, when I realized how many hours had slipped by. Not lost hours, but found.
I can tell you, sweet daughter, that during those few weeks under Johnson’s roof, I found the first true home I’d known in my life—apart from Fanny Blood—where I was not just welcomed but wanted, not just wanted but listened to, not only listened to but wondered at. When I wasn’t at work upstairs, I followed him around his bookshop by day, peppering him with questions. We jousted on issues of grammar and merit, sported over ideas. By night I sat at his dinner table, often the lone woman, but an equal in his eyes, with as much right to be there as anyone. Joseph Johnson treated me as the person I believed I was, or wanted to become. There are good men in the world, and bad, little bird, but then there are other men altogether: the ones who hold up a light that we might all better see our way.
He found me a small terraced house, cheerful yellow brick, in George Street, a ten-minute walk across the Thames, and engaged a maid from the country part of his family to shop, cook, and clean for me. I was terrible at asking her for anything, in fact, shocked her when I said we should take our meals together when at home. (I had seen Lady K tyrannize her servants, and vowed never to do the same.) It wasn’t the stylish side of the river, but I didn’t care. I had no money for furniture. I didn’t buy new clothes, didn’t curl, puff, or powder my hair. But I had a place of my own, a bed, table, chair, paper, ink, and sharp-nibbed quills. What else could I possibly want?
I worked on the novel, and surprised Johnson by presenting him with a book of stories based on my “Mrs. Mason” and the King girls, meant to teach morals to children and adults alike.
“So a conduct book, which you swore never to write?” Johnson asked.
“Only a sort of conduct book. To form the mind to truth, goodness, compassion.”
“Well, I like it. We’ll come out with it first; our readers will eat up its piety and virtue, and then we’ll hit them with your novel—the radical Wollstonecraft!”
What happiness was mine, daughter! If not writing, you’d find me walking through a gritty London fast becoming my city. I stalked the Thames daily, past the bustling waterfront, ships jammed in like stacked logs. I dressed simply, hair down my back; in cool weather my beaver hat, in warm my straw. If I was an oddity, no one cared. I’d begun to earn more money with less trouble, felt in better health than I’d enjoyed in so long—no headaches, stomach troubles, monthlong bouts of despair. I breathed in the fragrant spring, content, as if I’d found my soul again. Fanny was still with me, every day, but her loss no longer skewered me.
Each day at five o’clock I’d walk to Johnson’s house for dinner, a daily pilgrimage along Great Surrey Street past Albion Mills, up to the start of Blackfriars—as if a bridge from my old life to my new—with its solid brick arches and girders under my feet, and a view of all London, from Westminster downstream to Billingsgate, and everything in between, the gilded dome of St. Paul’s floating above it all.
I’d arrive, exhilarated from my walk, at Johnson’s upstairs dining room to find a world unto itself, and the one I took most pleasure in. The dinners were neither vast nor elaborate, no drawing room drinks before or after, nor a display of courses, but everything on the table all at once, with instructions to help ourselves. The food was simple: variations of boiled cod, roast veal or beef, potatoes, vegetables, and rice pudding, in some rotating order, but the wine was extravagant, and the company always rich. Here was my old mentor Price, when he felt up to it, my friend Hewlett. Another night, John Bonnycastle, who wrote math and science books for the common reader. Another, William Blake, desperate for whatever engraving jobs Johnson threw his way, including my own children’s book. Here, William Cowper, a sad young poet who needed loans to live on. Over there the naturalist Erasmus Darwin. They were high-minded and silver-tongued, believed ideas could change the world, and, like Hewlett, that reason would lead to the perfectibility of the human species.
At first I wasn’t sure of my place at the table. But when Johnson published my Original Stories and the novel that fall, with my own name on the cover, I felt their regard grow, that is, until the arrival of the much-anticipated Henry Fuseli—Johnson couldn’t stop talking about him—just back from some Roman picture tour. He was Johnson’s best friend, though they could not have been less alike. Fuseli was always last to arrive, like the legend he was, cutting a dash in the room, his silver-streaked hair going this way and that, as if he’d just come from a windswept moor or a ship tossed at sea. He was near fifty, gnomish and bowlegged, with a nose too grand for his small face, and a heavy brow over smart, piercing eyes that seemed to look straight through everyone. He sat opposite Johnson at the long oval table, a seat that was always his, in front of the very picture he himself had painted that dominated the room: a sleeping woman bathed in white light and loosely clothed, arms and head flung over the edge of a bed, hair falling like a fountain, with a demonic incubus crouching on her loins. The whole painting shone with blackness, the woman the only light there was. I couldn’t help staring at it, now that the artist himself was present.
“Ah, my Nightmare. Does it shock, frighten, or titillate you?” Fuseli asked when he found me staring at it over his shoulder.
“It does seem she’s having a horrific dream,” I said.
I caught a lightning glance from Fuseli to Johnson, as if to say, Ah, you’ve brought me new prey.
“Oh no,” said Fuseli. “That is a painful and soul-shuddering ecstasy. The incubus has made love to her in her sleep. She’s been shaken to her core, deliciously depleted.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps she ate a bit of bad pork.”
Fuseli was quick-witted and pugnacious, had eight languages and a degree in theology. He considered conversation a blood sport, could speak of the highest things, but preferred the lowest. Everyone adored him most when he recounted his sexual exploits, with men and women. I knew he hoped to shock me, but I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
“Well, I’m not easily titillated,” I said, neatly quartering my potato. “I’m no prude. I simply believe that sex oppresses women; it doesn’t free them at all.”
“It certainly frees them of their clothes, and inhibitions,” he said, to laughter all around.
“Aren’t you married, Mr. Fuseli?”
“Indeed, I am. Quite recently. But Sophia Rawlins enjoys the same privileges, I assure you. Equality of sex, isn’t that what you want?”
“Of the sexes, yes. But equality is difficult when gifted men so often mate with their inferiors, beauty coupled with a childish vivacity—like sporting lambs and kittens.”
“Oh, my bride has vivacity, all right, as well as beauty, and ‘sports’ like the devil. Mrs. Fuseli is no philosophical sloven. Her hair is not lank at all,” he said, cutting into his meat.
I set down my knife and fork. “I should rather you spoke of my sentences than my hair.”
“Well, then, I find it all loose and informal, without structure.”
“My sentences, or my hair?”
He covered his smile by flourishing his knife in the air. “You have a sort of disorganized, running style.”
“True to the way I think, and feel. I seek propulsion, an openness to experience, honesty. Not flaccid, love-fixated romances.”
“‘Flaccid,’ you say?” interjected Darwin, an expansive, bulbous man of sixty, who wanted to play. “Have you read my Loves of the Plants? It was deemed too pornographic for unmarried female readers!”
“In fact,” I said, “
one woman asked me whether she might read your book without losing her female delicacy.”
“And what did you tell her?” asked Johnson.
“That she could not. And by all means, should read it at once!”
Darwin threw back his head and laughed, then wiped his face with the napkin tucked in at his neck, suddenly serious. “You know, every specimen is some combination of male and female sex organs, which has equality built into it, as Nature prefers.”
“Our Erasmus is only interested in the sex life of flowers, I’m afraid,” said Fuseli, flashing his dark eyes at me.
“I believe the canna lily boasts one male and one female in each flamboyant flower,” I said.
“An ideal arrangement!” said Darwin. “Our Miss Wollstonecraft is a proficient in botany!”
“I once cared deeply for someone who was,” I said, bringing a curious silence to the table.
“More pistil or stamen, your botanist?” Darwin asked, with a mouth full of roast beef.
Fuseli set his chin on folded hands, awaiting my answer. “My guess is pistil,” he said, as if reading my mind. “I take it from the Mary in your novel that she has a great passion for her female friend.”
“The point is having the freedom to love, not which gender.”
“The freedom to pluck each other’s petals, shall we say?” He popped a potato into his mouth, getting laughs. “Certainly your girl doesn’t care much for men.”
“No man can offer the erotic satisfaction that Nature can. As I said, sex with men is uniformly a disaster because it’s fundamentally unfree and chokes a woman’s capacity for genius.”
This brought guffaws all around. I thought Darwin might choke on his beef.
“Sex with men,” said Fuseli. “Have you had any?”
My cheeks flushed, I could feel it. I had never loved a man, it was true. I don’t believe a man had ever loved me. But I had loved a woman, whose memory was the most precious thing I possessed.
“It’s marriage I oppose, not men,” I said. “It’s a tyranny of its own for women, who make themselves silly, subservient creatures, the same way we all give away our rights to kings.”
Johnson raised his glass. “You see!” he said. “This is my specialty, finding genius in the making. Just wait for this one. Mary Wollstonecraft will be remembered better than all of us!”
I felt Fuseli’s searing gaze. “A challenge, then,” he said under his breath.
When I lay alone that night, I had a sensation that my body was strange to me. It was frozen in time, while my head had carried on long ago without it. I was a museum piece now, a relic of some sweet past where pleasure was possible. When Fanny died, I’d made a choice to sacrifice my own feelings and comforts, my own pleasure, to what I fancied was purity of conduct, and caring for others. I wouldn’t even read a book except to improve my mind. I thought I could rise above my earthly habitation—that there was no happiness to be had here and now, as Fanny had wished for me. I’d lived my life in my head since then, with straight up-and-down walls, the chairs hard-backed and stiff. Desire had no place at all.
Fuseli and I proceeded from there, fencing with each other on a regular basis. He was a constant at Johnson’s table, wooing me—so often the only woman—in his goading way. I held my ground at first, kept my distance, but we stayed later and later, spinning from one idea to the next, like carding the rough wool of our thoughts, pulling, pinching, twisting them into taut thread.
“I want to paint you,” he said.
“What would Sophia Rawlins say to that?”
“I return to our marriage bed, every night, don’t I? I would call her content.”
He did return to their bed every night, no matter how long we stayed at the table, till the candles burned to nothing, and we whispered in darkness, an intimacy I’d never known with a man, even as I refused his subtle advances. It surprised me when he brought his wife to dinner one night. I wondered if she’d come, according to their rules of engagement, to peruse her competition, or perhaps give her assent. She was much younger than her husband, an amateur artist’s model, a coquettish beauty, the usual spilling breasts, a French silk gown with a hundred pale pink bows to match her cheeks. Her hairstyle was complicated and extravagant, almost an architecture unto itself. Jeweled earrings dripped from her lobes. I expected a Lady Kingsborough when she opened her mouth, but she was not afraid to speak her mind, and had the advantage of an upturned nose that gave her an air of superiority. Sophia Rawlins had come to spar.
“Fuseli tells me you’re a good hater, Miss Wollstonecraft. Very hard on all us women you vilify and ridicule.”
“In fact, I’ve never met a woman so hard on her own sex,” said Fuseli.
“Or hard on novels!” said Johnson. “She dropped a batch on my desk today, asking if I wished her to review any more sentimental trash this month! Why, her pen is as good as a knife. One for gutting a fish!”
Everyone laughed but Sophia. “Why would you deny us the one indulgence that belongs to our sex alone, Miss Wollstonecraft?”
“I hold novels in high regard,” I said, “except those by scribbling women whose tissue of pretty nothings sanctions the libertine reveries of men and makes our sex weak. The same review would do for all of them.”
“Do say!” said Darwin.
“Here are the favorite female ingredients for a novel: ridiculous characters, improbable incidents, vague fabricated feelings instead of opinion, women tremblingly alive all over—freed hair, fevered cheeks—who run, faint, and sigh, blown about by every momentary gust of feeling! Oh, and count on oppression and repression all at the same ball, and virtue rewarded with a coach and six!”
I thought even Sophia stifled a smile.
“Best of all is a sad tale of woe, some dismal catastrophe, with dying for love the favorite theme. Moping madness, tears that flow forever, and of course slow-consuming death!”
The men clinked spoons against their glasses, cheering my performance.
“Yet your book ends in a slow-consuming death,” said Sophia.
I was surprised she’d read it. “My Mary has knowledge of the human heart. She grows through her errors.”
“Then dies pining for the love of her life, who is a dead woman.”
Sophia had put a finger in my wound.
“I believed they could meet in another realm. At least that was my hope.”
“I assumed, with your black worsted stockings and rough wool gown, that you aspired to nun, or milkmaid. But now I see. You’re in mourning, is that it, for the love of your life?”
We sat across from each other, perfectly opposite. The men looked between us, not a muscle moved among them.
“I dress as I see fit,” I said, “and not as some man would have me do.”
“Well, not much danger of a man having you in that getup,” she said, drawing awkward laughter around the table.
I caught a glint in Fuseli’s eyes, a sort of pride at Sophia’s agility. He had brought his wife to show her off, to let her loose, to point and laugh at me. Here was coquetry turned cruel.
I felt everyone watching me, almost pitying the way she seemed to relish eating me alive. Even poor Johnson pushed food around his plate.
“I seek higher things than being had by a man.”
“Spoken as a woman who has never been in love,” Sophia said. “Do tell us what you seek instead.”
Words gathered like a storm in my mouth. “To think and feel for myself. Observation, thought, imagination. A vigorous mind and finely fashioned nerves that vibrate with rapture, and nature.”
I felt the power of my own voice, the men leaning in. Darwin stopped chewing. Johnson set down his silver. Even Fuseli was riveted.
“You say that I am hard on all women. But no harder than I am on myself. I want a serious and thoughtful examination of authentic human emotion and experience, not false sensibility that imprisons us, but a genuine one that empowers us. Not only for me, but for you too, Mrs. Fuseli.”
Fuseli raised his glass. “Well, I for one hate clever women. They’re only troublesome.”
“Here’s to troublesome women! May they long live!” said Darwin, raising his wineglass over the candles.
Johnson joined in, quoting from my novel. “‘Her joys, her ecstasies, arose from genius.’ Like our Mary. The best troublesome woman I know.”
Sophia looked at me squarely, the last to lift her glass. “To troublesome women, then.”
* * *
I had much to occupy my days, writing for Johnson’s new journal, penning essays, reviewing novels by the cartload, but also books about children, education, women, travel, even boxing; translating books from Italian and German, teaching myself along the way, every inch of text a mile. But my nights transpired around Johnson’s table, where I didn’t see Sophia again. Fuseli was there as often as I was; we resumed our wrangling, though perhaps with greater care. He didn’t give up his wooing, nor I my refusing him, but a friendship flowered between us, one closer to that of equals. He told me one night that my “genius and cultivation of mind” roused his curiosity, which was the most Fuseli had ever granted me. How desperate I was for his approval, however determined I was not to show it.
And then everything changed overnight, life as we knew it.
We spilled out of Johnson’s house (after staying well later than we should), the pile of us, still laughing and talking over one another, into the sheer light of a midsummer dawn full of exhilarating expectation. The sky was a painterly wash of lavender, the cool air on our faces bracing and pure. Right away, we saw that the streets were full for the early hour, people huddled in pairs or more, leaning toward some person reading to them from one of the morning papers. Hawkers on every corner yelled out—“Flying Post! Daily Courant! Gazette! Examiner! The World! By express from Paris Saturday evening!”—their voices mingling with the chimes of St. Paul’s, the smell of coffee, and coaches rattling by.
Love and Fury Page 17
