Sidetracks

by Richard Holmes

  While we lived as near neighbours only, and before our last removal, Mary’s mind had attained considerable tranquillity, and was visited but seldom with those emotions of anguish, which had been but too familiar to her. But the improvement in this respect, which accrued upon our removal and establishment, was extremely obvious. She was a worshipper of domestic life. She loved to observe the growth of affection between me and her daughter, then three years of age, as well as my anxiety respecting the child not yet born. Pregnancy itself, unequal as the decree of nature seems to be in this respect, is the source of a thousand endearments. No one knew better than Mary how to extract sentiments of exquisite delight from trifles, which a suspicious and formal wisdom would scarcely deign to remark. A little ride in the country with myself and the child, has sometimes produced a sort of opening of the heart, a general expression of confidence and affectionate soul, a sort of infantile, yet dignified endearment, which those who have felt may understand, but which I should in vain attempt to portray.

  In addition to our domestic pleasures, I was fortunate enough to introduce her to some of my acquaintances of both sexes, to whom she attached herself with all the ardour of approbation and friendship.

  Ours was not an ideal happiness, a paradise of selfish and transitory pleasures. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to mention, that, influenced by the ideas I had long entertained upon the subject of cohabitation, I engaged an apartment, about twenty doors from our house in the Polygon, Somers Town, which I designed for the purpose of my study and literary occupations. We were both of us of opinion, that it was impossible for two persons to be uniformly in each other’s society. Influenced by that opinion, it was my practice to repair to the apartment I have mentioned as soon as I rose, and frequently not to make my appearance in the Polygon, till the hour of dinner. We agreed in condemning the notion, prevalent in many situations in life, that a man and his wife cannot visit in mixed society, but in company with each other, and we rather sought occasions of deviating from, than of complying with, this rule. By these means, though, for the most part, we spent the latter half of each day in one another’s society, yet we were in no danger of satiety. We seemed to combine, in a considerable degree, the novelty and lively sensation of a visit, with the more delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life.

  Whatever may be thought, in other respects, of the plan we laid down to ourselves, we probably derived a real advantage from it, as to the constancy and uninterruptedness of our literary pursuits. (Chapter 9)

  The open marriage caused gossip among their radical circle, much of it malicious, and several friends hypocritically refused to recognize the couple socially, as Godwin painfully recalls in the Memoirs. The Times noted jocosely in its Court and Social column that ‘Mr Godwin, author of a pamphlet against matrimony’ had clandestinely wedded ‘the famous Mrs Wollstonecraft, who wrote in support of the Rights of Woman’. But the letters that continued to flit between the two addresses show how happy and supportive of each other they were.

  Mary wrote that she did not like ‘to lose my Philosopher even in my Lover’. They read each other’s essays, and criticized each other’s style and arguments. They exchanged books and newspapers, and avidly discussed the Parliamentary debates. They speculated on ideal forms of government, on a system of national education for children (here Wollstonecraft altered Godwin’s views decisively), and on the proofs for the existence of God. At the same time they argued cheerfully about door-keys, dealing with tradesmen, buying each other theatre-tickets, and whether Godwin was spoiling little Fanny by giving her butter on top of her pudding.

  Mary occasionally lapsed into her old gloom and despondency. Once Godwin stayed away too long on an expedition to the Midlands (he stopped to see a carnival with a half-naked Lady Godiva on a horse), and once he was too responsive to the flirtatious attentions of a pretty young blue-stocking, Miss Pinkerton. But these jealousies – quickly patched up – only reflected the sensual vitality of their own relationship. In one note, Mary wrote: ‘I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning when recollections – very dear – called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair.’ In another, shortly before her baby was due, she exclaimed in her forthright manner: ‘I begin to love this little creature, and to anticipate his birth as a fresh twist to a knot, which I do not wish to untie. Men are spoilt by frankness, I believe, yet I must tell you that I love you better than I supposed I did, when I promised to love you for ever … You are a tender, affectionate creature, and I feel it thrilling through my frame giving and promising pleasure.’

  The denouement was tragically brief. Their love-child, the future Mary Shelley, was born five months later on 30 August. Mary Wollstonecraft contracted septicaemia after the delivery, and eleven days later, after much suffering, she died, on 10 September 1797. William Godwin, the unemotional philosopher, quietly wrote, ‘It is impossible to represent in words the total revolution this event made in my existence. It was as if in a single moment “sun and moon were in the flat sea sunk”.’ Struggling to control his grief, he moved his study into Mary Wollstonecraft’s own room at the Polygon, and immersed himself in her papers, and began to re-read all her books.

  In October he began to write like a man possessed, and ten weeks later the entire Memoirs was drafted. He consulted with their old friend Joseph Johnson, and the work was finally published – together with a small four-volume edition of The Posthumous Works – in January 1798. It was the same year that marked the appearance of the Lyrical Ballads.

  II

  ‘A Dead Wife Naked’

  IT IS FAIR TO SAY that most readers were appalled by the Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman. There was no precedent for biography of this kind. Godwin’s candour and plain-speaking about his own wife filled them with horrid fascination. The Historical Magazine called the Memoirs ‘the most hurtful book’ of 1798. The poet Robert Southey accused Godwin of ‘a want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked’. The European Magazine described the work as ‘the history of a philosophical wanton’, and was sure that it would be read ‘with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality, and with indignation by any one who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion’.

  For a start, the book belied its title. It was not a pious family memorial, or a work of feminist hagiography. It was a complete biography in miniature, intimate in detail and often critical of Wollstonecraft’s behaviour, though always understanding and passionately committed to her genius.

  It recounted each phase of her life with complete openness, making no allowance for conventional proprieties. No one had ever written about a woman like this before, except perhaps as the fictitious, incorrigible heroines of Daniel Defoe. Godwin completely rejected the old idea of biography as a tale of ‘success’, or a moral exemplum. He was interested, in an entirely new way, in the manner in which the character was formed by inheritance and circumstance, and in the essential element of struggle against adversity by which real achievements are slowly hammered out of the unyielding conditions of daily life. He saw Mary’s character as dynamic and steadily maturing. He presented her whole career as an inextricable mixture of tragedy and triumph, active, persevering, and heroic, a new kind of independent woman within an old kind of prejudiced society.

  He described her restless and unhappy childhood, dominated by a brutal and feckless father whose hopeless business affairs determined her to seek financial independence in later life. He saw the importance of her ‘fervent’ early friendship with Fanny Blood, which led her to improve her own education, and eventually took her on her first remarkable voyage to Portugal. He showed her growing confidence as a teacher, governess and educational writer, which also took her to Ireland. He emphasized the courage of her decision to seek work as a woman freelance writer in London, and the great help she received from her publisher and friend Joseph Johnso
n. He showed her passionate feminist response to the French Revolution, and the way it produced The Rights of Woman. Then, unflinching, he described an ill-judged affair with the painter Henry Fuseli, her expedition to revolutionary Paris, her falling in love with Gilbert Imlay, and the birth of their illegitimate child, Fanny. He analysed brilliantly how the daring of her solitary voyage to Scandinavia was so closely involved with her intense personal depression and two attempts at suicide in 1795. Finally, with tender simplicity he described their own liaison and marriage, and at great length, and in almost gynaecological detail, her tragic death after bearing her second daughter, Mary.

  It was Godwin’s frankness over Mary Wollstonecraft’s love affairs and suicide attempts that seemed to cause the most immediate offence. Yet it would be impossible to understand anything of her remarkable temperament, that mixture of extraverted courage and introverted melancholy which made her such an original writer, without the fullest knowledge of these. The Monthly Review, previously her supporter, now wrote with hypocritical disapproval in May 1978: ‘blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands if they were forced to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world. The extreme eccentricity of Mr Godwin’s sentiments will account for this conduct. Virtue and vice are weighed by him in a balance of his own. He neither looks to marriage with respect, nor to suicide with horror.’

  It was hypocritical, because Godwin in fact took great care to explain what he and Wollstonecraft sought in a true marriage of real trust, and analyses at length the motives for suicide, and why they are almost invariably mistaken. But his objectivity as a biographer, and his willingness to examine the violence of Wollstonecraft’s emotions and her frequent depressions (which had good cause), merely shocked. This itself is an interesting point of literary history. The biographer had not yet gained his independent status, he was seen simply as an unfeeling husband who betrayed family secrets.

  Godwin’s frankness and sincerity were of course nothing less than revolutionary at the time. They arise directly from the anarchist principles of sincerity and plain-speaking which he enshrined in Political Justice. In literary terms his biography was as courageous an act as his earlier intervention, with a brilliant pamphlet, on behalf of his friend Thomas Holcroft, before the Treason Trials. Both sprang from the same set of convictions, that a writer’s duty was to carry honest feeling from private into public life. But even his friends thought he was naïve, and many thought he was completely inhuman. The lawyer William Roscoe, friend of Fuseli and one of Wollstonecraft’s greatest admirers and warmest correspondents, wrote the following bitter quatrain in his copy of the Memoirs:

  Hard was thy fate in all the scenes of life

  As daughter, sister, mother, friend and wife,

  But harder still, thy fate in death we own,

  Thus mourn’d by Godwin with a heart of stone.

  Godwin’s enemies naturally had a field day. They saw that the revelations of the Memoirs could be used to attack, and finally (as they thought) put to flight the whole monstrous regiment of feminists, free-thinkers and radical reformers. The Anti-Jacobin delivered a general onslaught on the immorality of everything Mary Wollstonecraft was supposed to represent, from independent sexual behaviour and the formal education of young women, to disrespect for parental authority and non-payment of creditors. It implied that the case was even worse than Godwin made out – ‘the biographer does not mention many of her amours’ – and indexed the book under ‘Prostitution: see Mary Wollstonecraft’. It concluded on a note of high sententiousness: ‘Intended by (Mr Godwin) for a beacon, it serves for a buoy, if it does not show what it is wise to pursue, it manifests what it is wise to avoid.’

  The Anti-Jacobin and other magazines kept up these attacks for months, and indeed years, descending to increasing scurrility and causing Godwin endless private anguish. One example, from a poem published in 1801, ‘The Vision of Liberty’, will suffice:

  William hath penn’d a waggon-load of stuff

  And Mary’s life at last he needs must write,

  Thinking her whoredoms were not known enough,

  Till fairly printed off in black and white.

  With wondrous glee and pride, this simple wight

  Her brothel feats of wantonness sets down,

  Being her spouse, he tells, with huge delight,

  How oft she cuckolded the silly clown,

  And lent, O lovely piece!, herself to half the town.

  But perhaps the most damaging, and certainly the saddest, reaction came from those women writers who were essentially sympathetic to Wollstonecraft’s cause, but who were dismayed to see it personalized in the actual details of her life. The facts of Wollstonecraft’s sufferings, and the truths of her difficult personality, frightened them. They felt Godwin had written too much about her emotional life and too little about her intellectual achievement. They thought that the very form of the biography betrayed the ideology of feminism. It made Mary Wollstonecraft seem too romantic and too dangerous a figure.

  Mary Hays, quoted anonymously in the Analytical, regretted the intimate details of Wollstonecraft’s life and criticized what she saw as Godwin’s failure to explain the reasons behind her feminist principles. When, five years later, she compiled her five-volume Dictionary of Female Biography (1803), though she gave extensive entries on Manon Roland, Catharine Macaulay and Mary Astell, she completely omitted Wollstonecraft. The same astonishing omission occurs in Matilda Bentham’s Dictionary of Celebrated Women (1804).

  Wollstonecraft’s young admirer, Amelia Alderson, now married to John Opie, who had painted the celebrated last portrait of Wollstonecraft which always hung in Godwin’s study, radically revised her views. Using Wollstonecraft’s story, she produced a fictional account of a disastrous saga of unmarried love in Adeline Mowbray (1805). (It was this novel that the young Harriet Westbrook sent meaningfully to Shelley before their elopement to Scotland in 1811.) Maria Edgeworth wrote a comic attack on the Wollstonecraft type in the person of Harriet Freke, who appears in Belinda (1801). She observed that ‘women of the Wollstonecraft order … do infinite mischief and for my part, I do not wish to have any thing to do with them’, adding that she was neither ‘a safe example, nor a successful champion of Woman and her Rights’.

  This hostility to Godwin’s revealing portrait still frequently occurs in modern biographers, who draw freely on all its details, but remain uneasy about its placing of feminism within the particular context of Wollstonecraft’s personality. The cause, they believe, must always be greater than the woman who champions it. Even Claire Tomalin, Wollstonecraft’s best modern defender, tends to take this line. ‘In their own way, even the Memoirs had diminished and distorted Mary’s real importance: by minimizing her claim to be taken seriously for her ideas, and presenting her instead as the female Werther, a romantic and tragic heroine, (Godwin) may have been giving the truth as he wanted to see it, but he was very far from serving the cause she had believed in. He made no attempt to discuss her intellectual development, and he was unwilling to consider the validity of her feminist ideas in any detail.’

  In fact the first six of Godwin’s chapters concentrate almost exclusively on Wollstonecraft’s intellectual development, through the particular influence of the radical Unitarian Dr Richard Price, through her experience of teaching at Newington Green, through her journeys to Lisbon and Dublin, through her reading of Burke and Rousseau and translating for the Analytical, and through the ‘vehement concussion’ produced by the general ideas of the French Revolution. It is true that he does not analyse her feminism in any detail, but he makes it clear at every point that he regarded the Rights of Woman as her major work and the one that she was ‘destined’ to write. He regards it as her ‘most celebrated production’ and her outstanding contribution to ‘the public welfare and improvement’. He saw it as the focus of her career, and the passion of her life.

  Never did any author enter into a cause, with a more ard
ent desire to be found … an effectual champion. She considered herself as standing forth in defence of one half of the human species, labouring under a yoke which, through all the records of time, had degraded them from the station of rational beings … She regarded her sex, in the language of Calista, as ‘in every state of life the slaves of man’: the rich as alternately under the despotism of a father, a brother, and a husband, and the middling and poorer classes shut out from the acquisition of bread with independence.

  Though he justly criticizes the literary style and intellectual structure of the Rights of Woman, observing that it was written at white heat in ‘no more than six weeks’, he is more forthright on its historic importance than any other male writer before John Stuart Mill:

  But when we consider the importance of its doctrines, and the eminence of genius it displays, it seems not very improbable that it will be read as long as the English language endures. The publication of this book forms an epocha in the subject to which it belongs, and Mary Wollstonecraft will perhaps here-after be found to have performed more substantial service for the cause of her sex, than all the other writers, male or female, that ever felt themselves animated by the contemplation of their oppressed and injured state. (Chapter 6, second edition wording)

  It is difficult to see how Godwin could have nailed her colours (and his) more firmly to the mast.

  Nevertheless, the symphony of outrage that the Memoirs caused in almost every quarter gave him a profound shock. In no other subsequent work – either philosophical or fictional – did he write again with such daring against the conventions of the age. The veiled and softened portraits that he draws of his wife in the novels St Leon (1799) and Fleetwood (1805) are milky and sentimental by comparison, though in the Preface to the former he freely acknowledges her influence on his thinking.