Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  This simple, almost naïve, idea radically altered the path of my own research. I now became interested in the way earlier biographers had undertaken their work, and the feelings and emotions that had propelled them. I also saw that my attraction to lonely, extreme, isolated figures – often on the edge of madness or suicide – produced a very partial account of Romanticism. What of Romantic friendship, what of Romantic couples, what of Romantic love? In Footsteps I had touched on the early story of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and I now found that her husband, the philosopher William Godwin, had written her biography as a memorial to their own brief but passionate marriage.

  Here my two themes were wonderfully combined: biography and love. I convinced Penguin Classics to republish Godwin’s Memoir, alongside a forgotten Scandinavian travel book by Wollstonecraft. The essay that follows is an expanded version of my Introduction. It is, I suppose, what the eighteenth century would call a study in sentiment. I now see it was also partly inspired by the earlier piece about John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor and the nightingales. It held out the possibility that the Romantic spirit was not necessarily doomed to obsession and solitude, an important idea for me personally. It was, after all, my first attempt to write a love story.

  THE FEMINIST AND THE PHILOSOPHER: A LOVE STORY

  I

  ‘Fire and Ice’

  WHAT FOLLOWS is a love story, set in England at the end of the eighteenth century.

  But it is much else besides. It is the story of an ‘experiment in living’, an attempt to liberate the conditions of daily life from the restrictions of convention, in a way that may still concern us today. It is the story of a struggle for self-expression, a search for new literary forms in the art of ‘life-writing’, which has helped us define our modern ideas of biography and autobiography. And it is, finally, the story of a treasure-hunt.

  These elements combine to produce a rich human testament, capable of varied interpretation, but whose appeal will last as long as men and women strive to live happily – or shall I say, to live less unhappily – together, and seek to tell the truth – the inward, difficult truth – about themselves and their experiences of the heart.

  Writing as an experimental biographer myself, fascinated equally by lives as they are lived, and lives as they are told (which is not of course the same thing), I have chosen to present this love story from a number of different angles. The reader must be patient if it does not unfold with the satisfying simplicity of a Romantic fairy-tale.

  The true chronology of the heart is complex. The past tense shapes the present tense. Our memories alter our future hopes. The very act of telling our lives seems to redefine the way we once lived them. Death, especially, is a Grand Reinterpreter of History, and profound loss can paradoxically give back what once seemed unattainable, in a different form.

  Bearing all this in mind, I have worked back and forth through the story somewhat in the manner of a literary detective, pursuing the evidence along several lines of inquiry. I have combined historical research with literary criticism. But above all I have concentrated on the two remarkable books in which my protagonists speak most openly for themselves: A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman. These are two largely forgotten classics of English eighteenth-century non-fiction, and if I have done nothing else, I will at least have found them the new European readers they so wonderfully merit.

  The first is a travel book, which tells of a solitary journey, undertaken in mysterious circumstances, through Scandinavia. The second is a life-history of the extraordinary woman who made that journey (and many others), as seen by the man who subsequently became her lover, and then her husband. They were written within a few months of each other, in the closing years of the 1790s, that great decade of revolution in human affairs throughout Europe, when the possibilities of happiness and justice seemed for a moment infinitely extendable, and then in another moment, infinitely remote.

  Both works are short, factual, readable and, in different ways, intensely passionate. Both are oddly untypical of their authors, or at least of the stereotypes by which they are known to history: the Feminist and the Philosopher. Yet, as literature, these are arguably the best books that either wrote.

  Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin first met at a publisher’s dinner-party in London on 13 November 1791. It was given in honour of Tom Paine, the best-selling author of The Rights of Man, to celebrate his imminent departure for Paris. He was going to take up his seat as the delegate for the Pas de Calais in the French Revolutionary Convention. Their host was Joseph Johnson, the leading radical publisher of the day (his list would include Paine, Priestley, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Blake). The atmosphere was heady with the talk of rights, revolution and reform, and the Golden Age of Liberty which had dawned across the Channel.

  Wollstonecraft and Godwin were the junior members of the party. She was thirty-two and he was thirty-five, and neither had yet published the works that were to make them famous, The Rights of Woman (1792) and Political Justice (1793). Both were known as reviewers and essayists for Johnson’s magazine, the Analytical Review (a sort of New Statesman of its time), and had reputations for advanced political views within the small circle of North London radicalism. But neither was a national figure like Paine, and by normal standards of behaviour they should have taken a back seat in the evening’s proceedings, listening politely as the master expounded the cause of Liberty.

  However, normal behaviour – by eighteenth-century standards – was never to be their forte. Indeed, they promptly dominated the dinner-table with a series of noisy and increasingly angry arguments, which seem to have ended by practically reducing Paine and Johnson to silence. Whatever else it suggests (and to my mind it suggests a great deal), this incident shows that nothing so ordinary as love at first sight could ever be expected of these two remarkable authors.

  Godwin presents this memorable evening with almost disconcerting candour seven years later in the Memoirs. He makes no sentimental attempt to disguise the clash of characters that occurred. He lists the subjects discussed, the grounds of disagreement, and his own growing irritation.

  The interview was not fortunate. Mary and myself parted, mutually displeased with each other. I had not read her Rights of Woman. I had barely looked into her Answer to Burke, and been displeased, as literary men are apt to be, with a few offenses against grammar and other minute points of composition. I had therefore little curiosity to see Mrs Wollstonecraft, and a very great curiosity to see Thomas Paine. Paine, in his general habits, is no great talker, and, though he threw in occasionally some shrewd and striking remarks, the conversation lay principally between me and Mary. I, of consequence, heard her, very frequently when I wished to hear Paine.

  We touched on a considerable variety of topics, and particularly on the characters and habits of certain eminent men. Mary, as has already been observed, had acquired in a very blameable degree the practice of seeing every thing on the gloomy side, and bestowing censure with a plentiful hand, where circumstances were in any respect doubtful. I, on the contrary, had a strong propensity to favourable construction, and particularly, where I found unequivocal marks of genius, strongly to incline to the supposition of generous and manly virtues. We ventilated in this way the characters of Voltaire and others, who have obtained from some individuals an ardent admiration, while the greater number have treated them with extreme moral severity. Mary was at last provoked to tell me, that praise, lavished in the way that I lavished it, could do no credit either to the commended or the commender. We discussed some questions on the subject of religion, in which her opinions approached much nearer to the received one, than mine. As the conversation proceeded, I became dissatisfied with the tone of my own share in it. We touched upon all topics, without treating forcibly and connectedly upon any. Meanwhile, I did her the justice, in giving an account of the conversation to a party in which I supped, though I was not sparing of my blame, to y
ield to her the praise of a person of active and independent thinking. On her side, she did me no part of what perhaps I considered as justice.

  We met two or three times in the course of the following year, but made a very small degree of progress towards a cordial acquaintance. (Chapter 6)

  The whole scene serves to suggest the lack of conventionality, and the passion for sincere feeling, which was to be the hallmark of their lives. They were both clever, difficult, highly original people, and this is partly what gives their writings such lasting fascination and intellectual bite. It also demonstrates why their friends thought them such an unlikely combination: feminist fire in hissing contact with benign but philosophical ice.

  They were not to meet again for another four years, until the spring of 1796. A great deal had happened to them, and to the world, in the intervening period. They had matured, but they had also seen their political hopes darken.

  After the publication of her great work on women’s rights and education, Mary Wollstonecraft had herself gone to Paris for over two years, and witnessed the trial and execution of the French king and the coming of the Terror. She had seen many of her close friends among the Girondists, including Manon Roland, guillotined, and Tom Paine imprisoned under sentence of death and reduced to alcoholism. She had had a love affair with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, conceived and borne his illegitimate child, and returned to London only to find their relationship slowly and agonizingly collapse, amidst her recriminations and his betrayal of her with another woman. She had subsequently travelled in Scandinavia, twice tried to commit suicide, and somehow managed to write the account of her experiences that is central to our story. She had become famous and, as is the way of the world, she had suffered deeply for it. Everything she believed in, and above all her vision of woman’s independence and equality, had been tested to breaking point.

  William Godwin’s career had run a smoother but no less demanding course. Political Justice, his millennial work attacking oppressive government and advocating an anarchist society based on absolute reason and sincerity, had brought him to what Hazlitt later called ‘the very zenith of a sultry and unwholesome popularity’. His novel Caleb Williams (1794), dramatizing the same issues in the form of a political thriller, had broadened his reputation. But his brave intervention before the Treason Trials of the same year, in favour of his friends, the defendants Thomas Holcroft and Horne Tooke, had made him a marked man for the gathering forces of political reaction. He lived an isolated, scholarly bachelor’s life in Somers Town, North London, varied only by dining out and theatre-going. While he flirted ineffectually with the blue-stocking ladies of his narrow circle (Mary Hays, Mrs Inchbald, Amelia Alderson), his fame only brought him increasing loneliness and anxiety, and a strange lack of emotional commitment. He took pupils, kept a meticulous diary, and sometimes wore racy yellow waistcoats. But he felt himself to be an unlovable man: childless, stiff in company, and uneasily dependent on his old mother, who still lived far away in Norwich. It was only when Mary Wollstonecraft returned to England and published A Short Residence in January 1796 that a new light seems slowly to have risen over his cool, rational, philosophical horizon.

  Godwin vividly describes his reaction to the work in Chapter 8 of the Memoirs, making perhaps the best of all introductions to it.

  The narrative of (her) voyage is before the world, and perhaps a book of travels that so irresistibly seizes on the heart, never, in any other instance, found its way from the press. The occasional harshness and ruggedness of character that diversify her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, here totally disappear. If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration.

  It was, characteristically, Mary Wollstonecraft who now took the decisive step to renew their acquaintance, by calling uninvited and unchaperoned (another breach of eighteenth-century proprieties) at Godwin’s house in Chalton Street, near the present site of St Pancras railway station and the new British Library, on 14 April 1796.

  Godwin found himself gazing on a mature woman of thirty-six, her face fuller and softer than he had remembered, but with the same large brown eyes and striking mass of auburn hair worn short, unpowdered, and falling carelessly over her left brow. Wollstonecraft found a stocky, energetic, balding man whose eyes sparkled behind round gold spectacles, and whose manner had grown patient, humorous and surprisingly tender. They now instantly accepted each other as fellow authors and intellectual colleagues.

  Neither thought initially in terms of love, let alone marriage. Godwin had written scathingly of matrimony in Political Justice, adding a long appendix against what he called ‘the most odious of monopolies’. He analysed the evils of ‘cohabitation’, seeing it as a Romantic delusion, in which true friendship and sincerity were inevitably compromised in an unequal relationship based on transient physical passion. He proposed the abolition of ‘the system of marriage as it is at present practised in European countries’. Instead he discussed at length a free and open relationship based on intellectual parity and mutual respect. ‘So long as I seek, by despotic and artificial means, to maintain my possession of a woman, I am guilty of the most odious selfishness … No ties ought to be imposed on either party, preventing them quitting the attachment, whenever their judgement directs them to quit it … The mutual kindness of persons of an opposite sex will, in such a state, fall under the same system as any other species of friendship … I shall assiduously cultivate the intercourse of that woman whose moral and intellectual accomplishments strike me in the most powerful manner’ (Political Justice, Book 8, Chapter 8, Appendix). It is evident that, at long last, Mary Wollstonecraft was this woman.

  Wollstonecraft herself had bitterly attacked the injustices of marriage in The Rights of Woman. She particularly exposed the fashionable Rousseauist view of women as children of nature, Romantic playthings equally exploited by indulgent or tyrannical husbands. She argued that if women were not educated as men’s equals, and treated as genuine partners, they would always be oppressed within the social system. She had bitterly experienced the inequality of this relationship in her affair with Imlay. She too clung to the ideal of an attachment ‘founded on esteem’, and mutual independence like friendship. ‘Friendship is a serious affection, the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented in time. The very reverse may be said of love’ (The Rights of Woman, Chapter 4). A lively and familiar correspondence sprang up between them during the early summer. Godwin was sensitive to her sufferings and violent swings of mood, while Mary Wollstonecraft instinctively understood his fear of emotions that might get out of hand and compromise him. They complemented each other, and they reassured each other, until they found, quite simply, that they were well matched.

  Godwin embraced the language of love, by making it both funny and sincere, playful and adult, with surprising ease. He wrote in July: ‘I love your imagination, your delicate epicurism, the malicious leer of your eye, in short every thing that constitutes the bewitching toute ensemble of the celebrated Mary … Shall I write a love letter? May Lucifer fly away with me, if I do: No, when I make love, it shall be with the eloquent tones of my voice, with dying accents, with speaking glances (through the glass of my spectacles), with all the witching of that irresistible, universal passion. Curse on the mechanical icy medium of pen and paper. When I make love, it shall be in a storm, as Jupiter made love to Semele, & turned her at once to a cinder. Do these menaces terrify you? … Or shall I write to citizeness Wollstonecraft a congratulatory epistle upon the victories of Buonaparti?’

  In Chapter 9 of the Memoirs Godwin tenderly describes the growth of their intimacy, though scorning any idea of a conventional courtship. ‘It grew with equal advances in the mind of each … One sex did not take the priority which long-established
custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed.’ Instead, in a passage of remarkable sensuousness, he tells how they secretly became lovers.

  It was friendship melting into love. Previously to our mutual declaration, each felt half-assured, yet each felt a certain trembling anxiety to have assurance complete … Mary rested her head upon the shoulder of her lover, hoping to find a heart with which she might safely treasure her world of affection – fearing to commit a mistake, yet, in spite of her melancholy experience, fraught with that generous confidence, which, in a great soul, is never extinguished. I had never loved till now, or, at least, had never nourished a passion to the same growth, or met with an object so consummately worthy. We did not marry.

  It is a most striking paragraph for the chilly philosopher of absolute reason to have written. In fact it indicates a revolution far deeper than politics, and in the end, far more influential.

  Godwin’s diary shows that they were lovers by August 1796. But both held strong views on practical independence, and Mary Wollstonecraft took a separate flat for herself and her child (little Fanny Imlay, now two years old) at 16 Judd Place West, near Chalton Street, so that both could continue their literary work. They met in the evenings, and Fanny would anxiously ask after ‘Man’, as she called Godwin, who quickly became fond of her. In the winter Mary Wollstonecraft became pregnant, and after much discussion, the two antimatrimonialists were finally married at Old St Pancras Church on 29 March 1797. They moved into 29 The Polygon, Chalton Street, but continued to work and often dine out independently, determined to avoid what they saw as the evils of ‘cohabitation’, while exploring the novel delights of domesticity.