The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  At the Clares' she had met and fallen in love with a young businessman, Hugh Skeys, who had engaged himself to her on impulse; but now he was frightened of what his parents would think if he married a penniless girl with improvident parents. Fanny's anxieties about the situation left her little to give Mary in return for her devotion.

  Mary was often hurt by the involuntary indifference which these consequences produced. When her friend was all the world to her, she found she was not as necessary to her happiness; and her delicate mind could not bear to obtrude her affection, or receive love as an alms, the offspring of pity.5

  She coped with the situation by assuming her natural dominance; if she could not be beloved, at least she would be the lover. She told herself that the very strength of her feelings gave her the edge over milder, more conventional people. And since Fanny was one of these mild, conventional people, Mary assumed the position of a chivalrous suitor: she worshipped, but presently she began to condescend too, like a Victorian bridegroom. She realized, for instance, that although she lacked accomplishments she was much cleverer than Fanny. She continued to idealize her; she said she cherished her better than anyone in the world; and she began to make plans for living with her – ‘the height of my ambition’.6 But it was clear that the dream rested on Mary's needs rather than Fanny's real qualities.

  All the while the Wollstonecraft family fortunes continued to deteriorate. After two years at Hoxton Mr Wollstonecraft carried his family off once again, this time to Laugharne in Wales, where they were consigned to a farm whilst he spent most of his time in London, ‘on business or pleasure’ as Mary put it. The separation sharpened her feelings for Fanny – it is easier to idealize by post – and when he decided to bring them back she persuaded her father to take a house at Walworth, near the Bloods, instead of the more familiar northern suburbs. On their return Eliza and Everina were sent to a boarding school in Chelsea, perhaps in the hope of making them more marriageable than Mary. At about that time Ned married, set up house in St Katharine's Dock, began to practise law and detached himself firmly from his family's fortunes. Mary was now eighteen. Her plan to set up similarly with Fanny was not very likely of realization but was at least a distraction from envy of Ned and the prospect of her father's repeated cycle of failures. Once Mary threatened to leave home and was dissuaded by Mrs Wollstonecraft's tears, but then she announced decidedly that she was going to work as a companion to a Mrs Dawson, a widowed lady chiefly resident in Bath and Windsor. She had found the job for herself, probably by consulting the Clares, and she was not going to give up the prospect.

  It was an adventure, a way of earning and saving some money for her future with Fanny, and an escape from the oppression of semi-idleness at home; but it was also a brave move for a girl not absolutely obliged to leave home and earn her living. Fanny Burney called the work of a companion ‘toad-eating’ and painted a horrifying picture of the degradation involved in selling oneself to the bidding of a bad-tempered and ill-mannered rich woman.7 It meant the loss of freedom and dignity – a paid companion had to swallow her pride before she took up her post; she had to be entertaining on demand and efface herself when not wanted; she was likely to receive insults from servants and be the butt of gentlemanly witticisms, if indeed she ever came across any gentlemen. But Mary was evidently quite prepared; Mrs Dawson had the reputation of a formidable employer, and she regarded this as a challenge to her own temper.

  And she made a success of it. When she wrote to Jane, with whom she still corresponded intermittently, she mentioned her earlier sufferings at home but sounded cheerful enough about her current life. She described some of the things that amused her: a coach journey with talkative companions, sea bathing at Southampton, the crowds at Bath, and her own sense of superiority over Mrs Dawson's nieces, who thought of nothing but fashion, a preoccupation Mary despised with the confidence of the deliberately dowdy intellectual woman. She was too discreet to comment in writing on her employer, but aimed her satirical touches where she felt free to do so; for instance, at the old maids of Windsor keeping a sharp eye on the Prince of Wales's taste in girls:

  ... all the damsels set their caps at him, and you would smile to hear how the poor girls he condescends to take notice of are pulled to pieces: – the withered old maids sagaciously hint their fears, and kindly remark that they always thought them forward things: you would suppose a smile or a look of his had something fatal in it, and that maid could not look at him, and remain pure.8

  To Jane, Mary also wrote lyrically about her feelings for Fanny and plans for the future with her. ‘The roses will bloom when there's peace in the breast, and the prospect of living with my Fanny gladdens my heart: – You know not how I love her’: perhaps Jane was meant to feel a little jealous. But Fanny herself was pining. Hugh Skeys was now away in Lisbon, increasingly negligent, and her health was beginning to deteriorate. Mary blamed and despised Skeys but profited by his neglect of Fanny to busy herself with her alternative ideas; sometimes these were transformed into accompanying her to Lisbon, but more often she seems to have expected to have her to herself:

  I have now given up every expectation and dependance that would interfere with my determination of spending my time with her. – I know my resolution may appear a little extraordinary, but in forming it I follow the dictates of reason as well as the bent of my inclination; for tho' I am willing to do what good I can in my generation, yet on many accounts I am averse to any matrimonial tie.9

  Not all these accounts were to do with Fanny. Mary brooded over what it meant to be the wife as well as the daughter of men such as her father and Mr Blood, and she also seems to have doubted her own ability to attract a husband. There was a good deal of talk in her letters about wrinkles and prematurely aged appearance, as though she had decided to make a virtue out of her ugliness as well as her plain clothes, proudly disclaiming any wish for what she feared she would not be offered.

  There were also mysterious references to something that had happened to shock her: ‘painful circumstances, which I wish to bury in oblivion’.10 An anecdote taken from her autobiographical novel, Maria, may possibly offer a clue to this remark: a young girl asks a middle-aged lawyer, ‘a man of the world, with rosy face and simpering features’, to assist her in a charitable exercise, and finds herself being kissed and fondled in return for his help, without understanding what he is about. If something of the sort had happened to Mary it doubtless took on a disproportionate importance in her imagination for a while, and confirmed her suspicion that men were more likely to be predators than supports.

  She may have been impressed too, as so many women were, by the elopement of Lady Eleanor Butler with Sarah Ponsonby, in 1779; their behaviour caused a furore of admiration. The strong-minded Lady Eleanor saved her friend from the unwelcome attentions of a male guardian, and the escaping pair set up a temple of friendship for themselves in a Welsh valley, Llangollen Vale; here they received selected visitors in an exquisitely arranged house and garden, and became the envy of many women with no taste for the ordinary arrangements of society. Nobody thought of characterizing their friendship as perverse, in writing at any rate, until the twentieth century. Women of the world knew perfectly well what lesbianism was, but regarded it as a dirty little vice of servant girls, boarding schools and actresses, and did not think of applying it to cultivated women of decent unbringing.* Mothers were warned against allowing their daughters to form such relationships, but they did not associate them with the emotional bonds of friendship; they came into the category of gross behaviour.

  So Mary was perfectly easy about her feeling for Fanny, which ‘resembled a passion’ as she said, and was almost (but not quite) that of an intending husband. She wanted to dominate and monopolize her, and she had begun to feel patronizing towards her. But she also wanted to serve, and not to use her; and at this stage of her life this may well have seemed the crucial difference between men's and women's love.

  In spite of these emotions and
professions, a certain secret disloyalty to Fanny did take place. It is rather a relief to discover it. In Bath a good-looking young Cambridge don called Joshua Waterhouse found Mary, although a mere lady's companion, piquant enough to embark on a flirtation with her. He was a farmer's son who had attended the university and latched on to a rich young baronet with whom he travelled about to smart resorts. Waterhouse turned out to be vain, cantankerous and snobbish, but initially, at any rate, he and Mary appear to have enjoyed one another's conversation. Her admiration tickled his vanity, and she allowed herself to build some hopes on his interest in her. They embarked on a correspondence.

  Her love letters to him were found at the time of his death, many years after hers.* They were destroyed. She never mentioned the affair to Godwin; Waterhouse's character may have been reason enough for wishing to forget that she had dreamed of him as a possible husband, but a more cogent one perhaps was that she preferred to remember herself as entirely devoted to Fanny during these years. In any case, he clearly disappointed her and the correspondence lapsed after a time, though it left her bitter and regretful. In certain moods she expressed to Jane a ferocious rejection of traditional femininity: ‘It is a happy thing to be a mere blank, and to be able to pursue one's own whims, where they lead, without having a husband and half a hundred children at hand to teaze and controul a poor woman who wishes to be free.’11 This is the bitter root of feminism, a determination to reject the other sex, an insistence that one sort of life must be denied if the other were to develop: a woman could not be a free agent and enjoy family life. Later Mary abandoned this position, and specifically rejected it in the Vindication, but for the moment she was driven to assert it.

  Since leaving her own family they had in fact shown little interest in her; and she was hurt by this indifference, as a letter to Eliza from Windsor expressed clearly enough.

  You don't do me justice in supposing I seldom think of you – the happiness of my family is nearer my heart than you imagine – perhaps, too near for my own health or peace – For my anxiety preys on me, and is of no use to you. You don't say a word of my mother. I take it for granted that she is well – tho' of late she has not even desired to be remembered to me. Some time or the other, in this world or a better, she may be convinced of my regard – and then may think I deserve not to be thought so harshly of.12

  The ‘better world’ was often evoked in Mary's letters when she was depressed, and this one seemed to offer no cheerful prospects to those she loved or indeed to herself. She did not intend to stay with Mrs Dawson for ever, and the problem of what to do next must have obsessed her. It was all very well to speak of pursuing one's own whims: a whim did not provide a living. Jane was now a governess and planning to run a school with her sisters; but Mary had not half their qualifications. The questions that mocked every unprovided and intelligent spinster were before her: what can I do with my life? How can I earn my living in a tolerable way? How can I be independent and respectable? To these questions neither Fanny nor Waterhouse could offer answers.

  [3]

  Eliza

  IN the autumn of 1781 the traditional, unpaid labour of a daughter presented itself to Mary again when she was summoned to nurse her ailing mother. The family had moved once more, to Enfield, a Middlesex village some way out of London, and here Mary came to watch over Mrs Wollstonecraft's slow and painful wasting. She died in the spring of 1782 and was buried on the nineteenth of April in the pretty churchyard of St Andrew's.1 Before her death she had at least the satisfaction of seeing a granddaughter and namesake born to Ned's wife at St Katharine's Dock.2 And she could feel some pride in her children: Ned, the darling of her heart, established in his profession and marriage; Mary independent but finally dutiful and affectionate; Eliza pretty, Everina and the boys sturdy. She was young to die, only just into her fifties, but had nothing to live for apart from her children: she had been able neither to manage nor combat her husband; she had no profound religious belief to support her, no intellectual capacity or training to occupy her as she aged. Her whole existence had been bound up in her femininity. Mary retained enough tenderness for her mother to dwell on her last words, ‘A little patience, and all will be over’, and enough residual resentment to write out, five years later, a fictional death-bed scene in which the dying mother is made to apologize for her unfair treatment of her daughter.3

  Mrs Wollstonecraft's death produced an access of grief and remorse in her husband, but in the nature of things this could not last long. For the moment Eliza and Everina went to Ned and his wife; at twenty-one and eighteen they were expected to help in the house and to find husbands. James decided to go to sea. Mr Wollstonecraft left Enfield, taking Charles, and went back to Laugharne, where he had kept a farm. Here he spent the rest of his life, and here he probably married his second wife, Lydia.4 She had no children, and we know little about her but that Mary held her in contempt, using the phrase ‘an artful kind of upper servant’ about her,5 and suggesting in a letter to Eliza that it might ‘blister the tongue’ to name her Mrs Wollstonecraft.6 But Mary's contempt came easily, and Eliza had a kinder word for Lydia; evidently she did her best to be a good wife.

  Mary did not choose to return to Mrs Dawson; instead she went to live with the Bloods at Walham Green, near Fulham, where she spent the next eighteen months. It proved a dreary time. She was living with Fanny at last, but it was no Llangollen Vale dream of friendship and cultural activity. A cramped suburban cottage with too many people crowded into it and not enough money was more like a degraded version of life with the Wollstonecrafts. Mr Blood had to be managed. Mrs Blood was pleasant enough but ignorant, and she and Fanny and Mary would work through the night sometimes at a sewing job to earn a little, till they felt sick and half-blind from stitching. The younger children were not properly educated, Fanny looked ill, and in spite of Mary's remarks to Jane Arden about expecting to go abroad with her, Hugh Skeys seemed ever reluctant to come to the point with Fanny herself, let alone invite her bossy and disapproving friend to join them in Lisbon. Mary had managed to find and read some medical books; she understood enough to realize that Fanny was consumptive and what the outcome of the illness would almost certainly be, but she allowed herself, as most people are apt to do under such circumstances, to know and yet not fully to face the knowledge of the future.

  And Fanny was not at all the companion she had hoped for; their minds were not congenial, ‘nor did she contribute to her comfort in the degree she expected’.7 This too was tormenting. Nevertheless, in their poverty and wretchedness, Mary came to identify herself very closely with the whole Blood family, as is clear from her later letters to Fanny's younger brother George, in which she speaks of Mrs Blood as ‘our mother’.8 This identification and fierce championing had its emotional attraction for her, partly no doubt because both Ned and the Skeys family disapproved of the Bloods so much and regarded them as spongers and generally inadequate; and also because she was to them ‘the princess’9 (George's term, which pleased Mary), bringing them help from a superior position and defending them against the accusations of the world. They were her special, pet underdogs, who depended on her.

  Six months after Mrs Wollstonecraft's death another family event took place, apparently a more cheerful one: this was Eliza's wedding, in October 1782. Mary was pleased with the marriage in spite of some bitter remarks about the institution in general, and told Jane Arden that Eliza had found ‘a worthy man’ with a ‘truly eligible situation’, adding a faintly rueful joke about her younger sister now taking precedence over her as a matron. She did not name the bridegroom or reveal his occupation, possibly for snobbish reasons; none of the sisters ever mentioned it. He was in fact a young boat-builder from Bermondsey across the river from Ned, and his name was Meredith Bishop.10 Ned evidently approved of the match because he was a witness to the wedding at St Katharine by the Tower on 20 October, when the bridegroom nervously (or perhaps tipsily) signed his name ‘Merideth’: an arresting slip which the other wi
tness, who was the parish clerk, left alone.11

  Within a month pretty, ladylike Eliza with her beautiful brown eyes and Chelsea boarding school manners was pregnant. A month later, at Christmas, Mary called on her to borrow £20 from the obliging Meredith to tide the Bloods over the festive season. Perhaps she did not much like what she saw of her brother-in-law on this occasion and prepared to pity Eliza; after a few weeks of marriage, she wrote to Jane Arden, ‘the raptures have subsided, and the dear hurry of visiting and figuring away as bride, and all the rest of the delights of matrimony are past and gone and have left no traces behind them, except disgust’.12

  Meredith however not only lent Mary the money but decided she was a reliable and obliging woman, a decision that probably wrecked his chances of happiness in life for good.

  Ten months after the wedding, on 10 August 1783, Eliza gave birth to a daughter who was christened at the age of one week in Bermondsey parish church.13 There was no question of Eliza herself being allowed up for the ceremony so soon after her delivery, but Mary and Fanny probably came over from Fulham to be godmothers and saw the tiny baby given the names Elizabeth Mary Frances. According to Mary at any rate the child was known as Mary.

  During the months after the birth Eliza suffered some sort of breakdown; no one in Bermondsey seemed able to do much to help. The baby was looked after by a nurse, but Meredith had no women in his family to call on to supervise the house, the care of the child or the management of Eliza. By November he was in despair and sent for his sister-in-law.

  The winter of 1783 was very cold; there were nine weeks of frost in southern England. Life with the Bloods must have become especially grim and monotonous. Mary answered Meredith's summons immediately and left them, never to return. Instead she involved herself in a painful and complicated drama whose outcome was disastrous in one way or another for everyone concerned in it, except perhaps herself. As far as she was aware at the time, her motives were of the highest, but she may possibly have grown uneasy about what happened later, since she never mentioned the affair to Godwin and we know about it only from letters preserved by Everina.14