After anxious discussions with Joseph Johnson, Godwin decided to issue an amended second edition of the Memoirs, which swiftly appeared at the end of 1798. He made many small, discreet changes of phrase, and deleted some personal references (such as that to the powerful Wedgwood family) which had caused offence. He also sensibly changed phrases that were taken (to his pain and surprise) as sexually ambiguous, such as the ‘particular gratification’ Wollstonecraft found in her friendship with the revolutionary Irishman A. H. Rowan during the dark days in Paris. But the second edition is very far from being a biographical retreat or betrayal, as has frequently been suggested. In fact Godwin added many new, crisply analytical paragraphs which increase our understanding of Wollstonecraft’s impetuous character, and show the sensitivity with which Godwin pursued his task and responsibility as a biographer. Indeed some of these additions, such as his reflection on the bitter irony of Wollstonecraft’s suicide attempt at Putney Bridge, suggest that new levels of feeling and eloquence had been released in him:
It is sufficient to say that the wretchedness of the night which succeeded this fatal discovery of Imlay’s unfaithfulness, impressed her with the feeling, that she would sooner suffer a thousand deaths, than pass another of equal misery.
The agony of her mind determined her, and that determination gave her a sort of desperate serenity. She resolved to plunge herself in the Thames, and, not satisfied with any spot nearer to London, she took a boat and rowed to Putney. Her first thought had led her to Battersea-bridge, but she found it too public and accordingly proceeded further up the river. It was night when she arrived at Putney, and by that time it had begun to rain with great violence. The rain suggested to her the idea of walking up and down the bridge, till her clothes were thoroughly drenched and heavy with the wet, which she did for half an hour without meeting a human being. She then leaped from the top of the bridge, but still seemed to find a difficulty in sinking, which she endeavoured to counteract by pressing her clothes closely round her. After some time she became insensible, but she always spoke of the pain she underwent as such, that, though she could afterwards have determined upon almost any other species of voluntary death, it would have been impossible for her to resolve upon encountering the same sensations again. I am doubtful, whether this is to be ascribed to the mere nature of suffocation, or was not rather owing to the preternatural action of a desperate spirit.
How strange is the condition of our nature! The whole scene of human life may at least be pronounced a delusion! Speculation for ever deceives us, and is the appropriate office of castle-builders, but the active concerns of life cheat us still more! Mary was in the first instance mistaken in the object of her attachment, imputing to him qualities which, in the trial, proved to be imaginary. By insensible degrees she proceeded to stake her life upon the consequences of her error, for the disappointment of this choice, for a consideration so foreign to the true end of her powers and cultivation, she was willing to consign those powers and that cultivation, pregnant as they were with pleasure to herself and gratification to others, formed to adorn society, and give a relish the most delicate and unrivalled to domestic life, as well as, through the medium of the press, to delight, instruct, and reform mankind – she was willing, I say, to consign all these to premature destruction! How often is the sagacity of our moral judgment reserved for the hour of meditation, and how little does it sometimes bestead us in the time of our greatest need!
After having been for a considerable time insensible, she was recovered by the exertions of those by whom the body was found. She had sought, with cool and deliberate firmness, to put a period to her existence, and yet she lived to have every prospect of a long possession of enjoyment and happiness. It is perhaps not an unfrequent case with suicides, that we find reason to suppose, if they had survived their gloomy purpose, that they would, at a subsequent period, have been considerably happy. It arises indeed, in some measure, out of the very nature of a spirit of self-destruction, which implies a degree of anguish, that the constitution of the human mind will not suffer to remain long undiminished. This is a serious reflection. Probably no man would destroy himself from an impatience of present pain, if he felt a moral certainty that there were years of enjoyment still in reserve for him.
It testifies greatly to his courage as a biographer that, despite all protests, he removed nothing of real significance from Wollstonecraft’s story, and made no attempt to modify his account of her social or political beliefs.
Of the three short passages (they total less than four pages) which he subsequently rewrote, the first concerns her friendship with Henry Fuseli (in Chapter 6), the second describes his own view of marriage (Chapter 9), and the third consists of a final summary of Wollstonecraft’s ‘intellectual character’ (in Chapter 10). The basic effect of these revisions was to replace Godwin’s usual bold, clear-cut handling of issues with a more tentative, obfuscating style of explanation. But they are understandable, given the antagonisms he had aroused, and, except in one place, they are hardly crucial to his interpretation.
In the Fuseli passage, the first edition had allowed the casual or hostile reader to suppose that Wollstonecraft had a sexual relationship with the painter; she ‘conceived a personal and ardent affection for him’, and she ‘made light’ of the circumstance that he was already married. This was not only untrue, but it weakened Godwin’s marvellously perceptive account, in Chapter 7, of how she later became infatuated with Gilbert Imlay. In the second edition Godwin clarifies the sexual situation, and adds a long explanation of Wollstonecraft’s scornful attitude to the social proprieties. But the revision is rambling and retreats to generalities, and one is left with the intriguing impression that Godwin himself was slightly at a loss to explain the exact nature of their friendship.
In the matrimonial passage, Godwin was largely concerned to palliate his own, evidently naïve early views on the desirability of avoiding wedlock. He also wished to distinguish them from Wollstonecraft’s much more searching critique of contemporary marriage as an institution of social oppression. Nevertheless, he also deleted several fine sentences about the early, premarital stage of their love affair, and it is evident that he had given way to the well-meaning but cautious advice of his friends. For once he seems to have found a private truth that it was prudent to disguise from the public gaze. Yet the fact of their unorthodox love affair – ‘we did not immediately marry’ – still stands, daring and provocative. And their ‘experiment in living’ is still celebrated as the crown of life together.
The third passage that Godwin rewrote occurs at the very end of the Memoirs. In fact both versions are strangely unsatisfactory, and they for once clearly reflect Godwin’s emotional state at the time he wrote. To ‘summarize’ Mary Wollstonecraft’s mind in the way he attempted was a curious reflex of the philosopher, and I shall return to it in a moment.
No changes or explanations, however, could make the biography more popular or more acceptable to contemporary opinion.
It remained a work of astonishing outspokenness, revolutionary in its implications. As such, it was inevitably condemned to obscurity. Though translations appeared in Germany (1799) and France (1802), no new English edition was published for over a hundred years. Even in America, beyond two small editions in 1700 and 1804, there was silence. Not until William Clark Durant’s scholarly reprint and supplement, a labour of love, appeared in New York in 1927, was there the slightest recognition of what Godwin had achieved.
III
‘Fervent Friendships’
THE MODERN READER is immediately struck by two outstanding qualities of the Memoirs: their coolness of tone and their authority of judgement. Though composed at a time of passionate grief, the portrait is lucid and thoughtful at every point. Here is a detached biographer, who has meditated deeply on his subject, and who is quietly intent on showing how such a remarkable character and mind was formed. His view of Wollstonecraft’s psychology is complex, without lacking a moral discrimin
ation which is sometimes Johnsonian in its weight. In common with a modern biographer, Godwin sees Mary Wollstonecraft’s strengths as inextricably involved with her weaknesses of character, the one growing out of the other, as he makes explicit in a sentence from Chapter 9 of the second edition: ‘She had errors, but her errors, which were not those of a sordid mind, were connected and interwoven with qualities most characteristic of her disposition and genius.’ The slight shock of surprise with which we register the use of that dispassionate phrase ‘sordid mind’, and then its utter rejection, is typical of the effect of Godwin’s bold and unflinching style. It keeps us continuously alert and engaged.
Godwin’s very modern interest in the psychology of Wollstonecraft’s personality is evident throughout. He was fascinated by the way character was shaped by early environment. ‘The writer of this narrative, when he has met with persons, that in any degree created to themselves an interest and attachment in his mind, has always felt a curiosity to be acquainted with the scenes through which they had passed, and the incidents that had contributed to form their understandings and character. Impelled by this sentiment, he repeatedly led the conversation of Mary to topics of this sort, and, once or twice, made notes in her presence.’ In this way (in Chapter 1) he shrewdly deduced the troubled relationship between her parents – the bullying, violent, erratic father and the over-submissive, son-worshipping, Irish wife – and found in it the source of Mary’s later outlook on life, divided between driving idealism and disabling depression.
Mary experienced in the first period of her existence, but few of those indulgences and marks of affection, which are principally calculated to soothe the subjection and sorrows of our early years. She was not the favourite either of her father or mother. Her father was a man of a quick, impetuous disposition, subject to alternate fits of kindness and cruelty. In his family he was a despot, and his wife appears to have been the first, and most submissive of his subjects. The mother’s partiality was fixed upon the eldest son, and her system of government relative to Mary, was characterized by considerable rigour. She, at length, became convinced of her mistake, and adopted a different plan with her younger daughter. When, in her novel the Wrongs of Woman, Mary speaks of ‘the petty cares which obscured the morning of her heroine’s life, continual restraint in the most trivial matters, unconditional submission to orders, which, as a mere child, she soon discovered to be unreasonable, because inconsistent and contradictory, and the being often obliged to sit, in the presence of her parents, for three or four hours together, without daring to utter a word,’ she is, I believe, to be considered as copying the outline of the first period of her own existence.
But it was in vain that the blighting winds of unkindness or indifference, seemed destined to counteract the superiority of Mary’s mind. It surmounted every obstacle, and by degrees, from a person little considered in the family, she became in some sort its director and umpire. The despotism of her education cost her many a heart-ache. She was not formed to be the contented and unresisting subject of a despot, but I have heard her remark more than once, that, when she felt she had done wrong, the reproof or chastisement of her mother, instead of being a terror to her, she found to be the only thing capable of reconciling her to herself. The blows of her father, on the contrary, which were the mere ebullitions of a passionate temper, instead of humbling her roused her indignation. Upon such occasions she felt her superiority, and was apt to betray marks of contempt. The quickness of her father’s temper, led him sometimes to threaten similar violence towards his wife. When that was the case, Mary would often throw herself between the despot and his victim, with the purpose to receive upon her own person the blows that might be directed against her mother. She has even laid whole nights upon the landing-place near their chamber-door, when, mistakenly, or with reason, she apprehended that her father might break out into paroxysms of violence.
From this early experience of sexual warfare, she emerged a natural fighter: ‘Mary was what Dr Johnson would have called, “a very good hater” ‘ (Chapter 1). Godwin sees the formative significance of her intensely emotional friendship with Fanny Blood, and the way the balance of the relationship slowly altered, with Wollstonecraft emerging as the dominant partner:
But a connection more memorable originated about this time, between Mary and a person of her own sex, for whom she contracted a friendship so fervent as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind. The name of this person was Frances Blood, she was two years older than Mary. Her residence was at that time at Newington Butts, a village near the southern extremity of the metropolis. The acquaintance of Fanny contributed to ripen the immature talents of Mary.
The situation in which Mary was introduced to her, bore a resemblance to the first interview of Werther with Charlotte. She was conducted to the door of a small house, but furnished with peculiar neatness and propriety. The first object that caught her sight, was a young woman of a slender and elegant form, and eighteen years of age, busily employed in feeding and managing some children, born of the same parents, but considerably inferior to her in age. The impression Mary received from this spectacle was indelible, and, before the interview was concluded, she had taken, in her heart, the vows of an eternal friendship.
Fanny was a young woman of extraordinary accomplishments. She sung and played with taste. She drew with exquisite fidelity and neatness, and, by the employment of this talent, for some time maintained her father, mother and family, but ultimately ruined her health by her extraordinary exertions. She read and wrote with considerable application, and the same ideas of minute and delicate propriety followed her in these, as in her other occupations.
Mary, a wild but animated and aspiring girl of sixteen, contemplated Fanny, in the first instance, with sentiments of inferiority and reverence. Though they were much together, yet the distance of their habitations being considerable, they supplied the want of more frequent interviews by an assiduous correspondence. Mary found Fanny’s letters better spelt and better indited than her own, and felt herself abashed. She had hitherto paid but a superficial attention to literature. She had read, to gratify the ardour of an inextinguishable thirst of knowledge, but she had not thought of writing as an art. Her ambition to excel was now awakened, and she applied herself with passion and earnestness. Fanny undertook to be her instructor, and, so far as related to accuracy and method, her lessons were given with considerable skill.
Godwin traced with delicate tact the development of this passionate female friendship. He described how Mary began as Fanny’s younger pupil, and then became her intimate companion and confidante. Together, they set up a school for young children in Newington Green, a first decisive step of independence. Later, when Fanny became weakened by consumption, Mary selflessly encouraged her to marry, and travel with her young husband to seek health in the warmer climate of Portugal. When Fanny’s health was further threatened by her pregnancy, Mary unhesitatingly abandoned her school and her professional prospects in London, and journeyed alone to Lisbon to nurse her friend in November 1785.
Fanny Blood’s death in childbirth was a formative (as well as a prophetic) tragedy. It resolved Mary’s spirit, rather than weakening it. She returned to England in 1786 more than ever intent on pursuing an independent professional life, working first as a tutor and governess in Ireland, and then as a freelance journalist in London. She told Joseph Johnson that she would be ‘the first of a new genus’. She published the earliest of her ideological works, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1788), and from then on determined to fight in whatever way she could for women’s rights. She also became increasingly aware of her own powers and inward strength.
The first feeling with which Mary had contemplated her friend, was a sentiment of inferiority and reverence, but that, from the operation of a ten years’ acquaintance was considerably changed. Fanny had originally been far before her in literary attainments; this disparity no longer existed. In whatever degree Mary might endeavour
to free herself from the delusions of self-esteem, this period of observation upon her own mind and that of her friend, could not pass, without her perceiving that there were some essential characteristics of genius, which she possessed, and in which her friend was deficient. The principal of these was a firmness of mind, an unconquerable greatness of soul, by which, after a short internal struggle, she was accustomed to rise above difficulties and suffering. Whatever Mary undertook, she perhaps in all instances accomplished, and, to her lofty spirit, scarcely any thing she desired, appeared hard to perform. Fanny, on the contrary, was a woman of a timid and irresolute nature, accustomed to yield to difficulties, and probably priding herself in this morbid softness of her temper.
This tenacity of purpose and ‘firmness of mind’ emerges as one of Wollstonecraft’s greatest virtues as a woman. Godwin identifies it in many telling instances: dealing successfully with a difficult employer Mrs Dawson, in Bath, when she was still only nineteen; persuading the captain of a British ship to change his mind, off Lisbon; disciplining the hitherto ungovernable Kingsborough children in Dublin; exclaiming against the savagery of the guillotinings in Paris so as to endanger her own life; and completing the journey through Scandinavia at a period when she was almost disabled by suicidal thoughts.
At the same time he gives us a penetrating and tender account of her emotional vulnerability, most especially in the affairs with Fuseli and Imlay. The masterpiece of his analysis occurs in a long passage in Chapter 7, going right back again to her childhood, and then retracing her emotional development in terms of her relations with her father, with Fanny Blood, with Fuseli, and finally with Imlay himself. This is indeed a ‘romantic’ interpretation – he calls her, in a phrase that became notorious, ‘a female Werther’ – yet to my mind it carries extraordinary conviction. It ends with a celebration of her full sexual awakening, in beautiful pre-Freudian imagery:
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