The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

This was all the christening Fanny ever had. Her lay-godparents were of no more use to her in life than anyone else who might have taken responsibility for her welfare; after Mary left France they were heard of no more. It is clear from this document that Imlay found it convenient to say he was married, or embarrassing not to be, and although Mary boasted to Ruth Barlow about not having ‘clogged her soul’ by promising obedience she was not prepared to insist on her unmarried status amongst comparative strangers.

  She wrote to Ruth about the baby now, how big her head was, how tenderly she and Gilbert loved her, how much milk she took, sucking so vigorously that her father said she would soon be writing the second part of the Rights of Woman: it was Gilbert's only recorded joke. Perhaps Mary seemed less formidable with a baby at her breast.

  The French women who attended Mary were surprised at her determination to be up and about again so quickly. A month was the usual lying-in-time, but she went for a walk on the eighth day: ‘my mind has always hitherto enabled my body to do whatever I wished’. (In this instance her instinct was of course correct, and far in advance of medical opinion.) Soon she was being urged to breed more children for the Republic, although some of the women of Le Havre had their doubts about her: she told Schlabrendorf that they called her ‘the raven mother’ and said she did not deserve her splendid child. Perhaps she expressed in their hearing the forebodings and gloominess that came so easily to her, which were certainly out of key with the resolute optimism required of good republicans.

  Still, the three months that followed were largely happy. They were also comparatively idle ones for Mary, with nothing to distract her from the enjoyment of the baby, whom she continued to feed herself, and the pleasure of Gilbert's presence. There was still talk of settling in America, accompanied perhaps by the Barlows and even the Stones: yet another ideal community in prospect; but the prospect came no closer.

  In July – Thermidor – the Terror ended with the death of Robespierre and the prisons began to empty. Gilbert, unable to settle and eager to see what was happening in Paris, returned there in August and then announced he must go on to London; he told Mary he would send for her and the baby within a few months. There is no doubt he was in genuine difficulties over money, but equally he had already taken full measure of his unwillingness to live with his ‘wife’. Whatever he had enjoyed in her company at first, he was now indifferent to, or even disliked. It takes a brutal man to announce such a fact; Imlay adopted the more usual course of disappearing and hoping something would happen to release him without the necessity of a display of cruelty on his part. He was in London throughout September. It was the same month Coleridge also lingered in town to avoid an unloved woman; the poet spent his evenings with a young man who tried to sell him land beside the Susquehanna, and naively assured him that ‘literary characters make money there’.14 He must have known Imlay.

  But Imlay was failing to make money himself, either by literature, which he seems to have abandoned, or business. Instead he spent what he had on girls, or at any rate one girl who took a less lofty view of love and its sacred responsibilities than Mary (and did not allow herself to become pregnant either). Meanwhile Mary, having nursed Fanny through an attack of smallpox, decided to return to Paris. The journey was almost unbelievably unpleasant, as the coach overturned four times, and she had with her not only the baby but a young maid whom she had offered to take on in spite of (or perhaps even because of) the girl's pregnancy. The gesture was well meant but turned out more disastrously than the coach ride, since the girl had neither Mary's constitution nor her willpower and proved worse than useless. She had to be sacked, after Mary had discovered for herself what it was to be a ‘slave’ (her word) in charge of a small and active baby. By seven months Fanny was trying to stand, wanting to be danced, and cutting a tooth, which meant she would have to be weaned soon. Mary decided she needed two nurses, perhaps as a result of trying to manage on her own.

  All the winters of the early Nineties were harsh, but the one that now set in was the coldest of the century; rivers and canals froze for weeks at a time, and in Paris particularly conditions were very bad. The harvest had again been poor, Robespierre's policy on prices had made the country people unwilling to sell to the towns while it lasted, and when it was reversed in December things grew even worse for a time because prices shot up. There was famine in Paris, wood and coal were almost unobtainable, and Mary was short of money and reduced to chopping her own wood for a fire. Still there were a few friends left to comfort her: the Schweitzers, Schlabrendorf and a new member of the expatriate group, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, a gentlemanly United Irishman in flight from British justice. After his first amusement at Mary's brazen appearance in public with a maid en cortège carrying the baby, he grew extremely fond of her.

  Several men evidently found Mary attractive at this time. In spite of Imlay's neglect, the birth of her child had put a bloom on her. Schlabrendorf eulogized her face which, ‘so full of expression, presented a style of beauty beyond that of merely regular features. There was enchantment in her glance, her voice, and her movement.’ Hamilton Rowan, missing his wife and children, whom he saw no prospect of rejoining, was comforted by Mary's feminine presence and willingness to talk about his family. She did not mention Rowan in her letters to Imlay, but made a faint attempt to arouse his jealousy by telling him of flirtatious conversations with Rouget de l'Isle, the composer of the Marseillaise, and an anonymous French judge. But neither this, nor accounts of Fanny's playfulness, nor even her most heartfelt pleas made him show any signs of either wanting to leave London or sending for her to join him.

  He had written to Eliza in November, in answer to a letter she sent via Johnson, saying that ‘dear Mary’ was unlikely to be coming to London for some while, and that he himself was on the point of leaving town. The lie was larded with assurances of vague good intentions, and followed by silence. Mary also received evasions and lies, and the letters that reached her were few and short. By Christmas she was certain that he had been unfaithful to her; her first assertion that she could never forgive such an action gave way to a miserable tolerance as long as it was merely physical infidelity. Soon her pride and ferocity were brought down to an abject readiness to endure every slight and humiliation he chose to inflict, partly for Fanny's sake and partly because she could not bear to acknowledge that she had been wrong about him.

  It was impossible for her to accept that he was simply not interested in her sorrows. ‘I have got a habit of restlessness at night… I sink into reveries and trains of thinking, which agitate and fatigue me’ she wrote; later she spoke of having a ‘galloping consumption’. She expressed pity for Fanny for being a girl, since the world was run by men, ‘systematic tyrants’; she still dreamt of the farm (in January); in February he dealt her another blow (a further confession of his affair perhaps) and she answered ‘my soul is weary. – I am sick at heart… I consider your requesting me to come to you, as merely dictated by honour.’ She decided, once again, that she would support Fanny, but it was not so easy in a foreign country, with no Johnson to be her patron. She ended a letter: ‘Perhaps this is the last letter you will ever receive from me.’ The very next day she sent another, saying she was giving up the company of Americans and moving in with a German woman friend. Paris was still in a period of barbarity and misery, she said, while he could only think of eating, drinking and women. She felt deeply the humiliation of going to ask for money from his friends, and told him she had once set off and gone home six times without the courage to go in and ask the man she so much disliked for it.

  Imlay now answered that she should come to London. Perhaps he thought she would have a better chance of earning money there; perhaps even he had a flickering wish to see her and his daughter again. She wrote back: ‘England's a country, that has not merely lost all charms for me, but for which I feel repugnance that almost amounts to horror… why is it so necessary that I should return? brought up here, my girl would be freer.’ All the sam
e, he did persuade her presently to come back to London; he had been seeing her brother James, who wrote to Eliza describing him as ‘a fine handsome fellow’.15

  Early in April she was in Le Havre again, preparing to return, but in no very hopeful spirit. From now on the idea of suicide recurred whenever the cycle of her emotions touched its low point. Fanny's helplessness and need were her chief deterrent, she said; however, she was becoming less necessary to Fanny. She had found an efficient and lively new maid, Marguerite, and Fanny was weaned. The absolute dependence of a nursling baby is tiring but also comforting, and the moment of weaning brings grief to the mother, leaving a sense of purposelessness and emptiness. ‘I am nothing’ wrote Mary to Imlay soon afterwards. All her life until now she had been actively pursuing some work, but now she was exhausted and everything seemed to be behind her.

  He did not come to Brighton. She wrote to him to suggest a meeting at an hotel. A gap in the letters follows: apparently she went to London and settled at his suggestion in some furnished lodgings at 26 Charlotte Street.* Her old home in Store Street was no longer available, since Johnson had put the furniture into storage. There is no indication of what he thought of Imlay and Mary's new status; perhaps Mary felt or imagined a certain coolness. In any case, he had political difficulties of his own. The Christies were also back in London, but short of money and low-spirited, living quietly in Finsbury Square and not in much of a position to help her; besides, he was Imlay's friend and in business with him. Apart from this, Imlay was thoroughly involved with his young woman and though he seems to have been nervous, apologetic, vacillating where details were concerned and even affectionate at moments, he was stubborn in his basic determination not to set up house as a husband and father.

  Mary could never turn to her sisters for comfort; she, the dispenser of help and advice, could not bear to appear vulnerable in their eyes. Had she been able to unbend a little from this position, it might have been better for her, and would have spared them pain too; for two weeks after her arrival in London she made no attempt to communicate with them at all.

  In her sense of loneliness and nothingness (‘I am nothing’) she made a half-hearted suicide attempt, swallowing enough laudanum to frighten her companions – probably Marguerite in the first instance, who may have called in Rebecca Christie. There was a bustle, Mary was roused, urged to think of her child, to look ahead; a woman of her capacities must have something to live for; and so on. Representations were probably made to Imlay too, and he came up with a curious half-solution to the situation. Would she be willing to undertake a business trip to Scandinavia on his behalf? There is an almost sublime effrontery about sending off a discarded mistress, newly recovered from a suicide attempt and accompanied by a small baby, on a difficult journey into unknown territory, to recoup your financial disasters for you and leave you free to enjoy the company of her rival without reproach: in his own way, Imlay was a man of resource.

  Mary recovered and expressed herself willing to fall in with Imlay's plan. Meanwhile, she began to see friends again. Mary Hays welcomed her very eagerly, and the painter John Opie, who was going through the long process of divorcing his wife, was pleased to renew his friendship with her. She did not see Fuseli, but Johnson gave her work for the Analytical and another task to take to Scandinavia.* He remarked, rather surprisingly, that he had never seen her looking better than she did in June that year, just before she sailed. She also wrote to her sisters, apologizing for her silence and promising them future financial assistance from herself and Imlay. She made no attempt to describe the true situation, and gave a stiff and awkward explanation of the fact that she did not wish to see them or invite them to live with her and Imlay because ‘the presence of a third person interrupts or destroys domestic happiness’. In view of Mary's earlier opinions about wives and sisters, this did look like a shabby betrayal of her theories, and Eliza, bitterly hurt and indignant, returned the letter to ‘Mrs Imlay’ announcing to Everina that she would settle in her ‘mother country’, Ireland, and expect nothing more of the famous author of ‘Rights of Women’. Had Eliza known the depths of Mary's distress she might have been able to forgive her; on the other hand, she must have remembered the earlier occasions when she had been shunted here and there to suit Mary's ideas, and this latest dismissal off-stage, as though she were merely a prop in her sister's more important drama, was not to be borne meekly. Everina seems to have kept up some contact, though she did not approve of anything she heard of Mary's behaviour after her departure for France, but Eliza, after one more pathetic letter, severed all communication with her.

  For a third time, now in the interests of his business affairs, Imlay committed himself to a sworn statement that Mary was his legal wife – ‘my best friend and wife’ – and dispatched her northwards to straighten out the affair of cargoes gone astray in Sweden and Norway. He remained in London, supposedly thinking up a solution to his personal problems.

  In one respect he had judged Mary aright: she did enjoy travelling and was not in the least daunted by a prospect most women would have refused to contemplate. She set off for Hull with Marguerite and Fanny, and soon Fanny had learnt to imitate the sound of the post-horn. At Hull there was a tedious delay whilst cold north-east winds made the June days chilly and departure impossible. Mary brooded, wrote too many letters to Imlay, and received one in return in which he reproached her for having written disrespectfully about him to some common friends at the time of her suicide attempt. She apologized meekly:

  … the regard which I have for you, is so unequivocal to myself, I imagine that it must be sufficiently obvious to everybody else. Besides, the only letter I intended for the public eye was to —, and that I destroyed from delicacy before you saw them, because it was only written (of course warmly in your praise) to prevent any odium being thrown on you.

  Her only other distraction was a visit to Beverley, not far from Hull, which seemed to her adult eyes much scaled-down in size; and she noted the advance of Methodism and political reaction (‘fanaticism and aristocracy’) in Yorkshire with dismay.

  Finally, on 21 June, the ship was able to sail. To go north at midsummer is exhilarating; and the facts behind Mary's Scandinavian journey show just how tough, businesslike and resilient she could be. They also put Imlay in a worse light than ever, as a man who would use a woman he was deceiving and preparing to abandon to sort out his slippery financial and legal problems. What he had done was this. In the summer of 1794, just after the birth of Fanny, he had bought a French cargo ship, La Liberté, at Le Havre. He renamed her the Maria and Margaretha –the allusion being presumably to Mary and her maid Marguerite – and appointed a Norwegian sailor, Peder Ellefson, as captain. He also reregistered the ship as a neutral vessel, describing her as a Norwegian cargo ship based in Kristiansand on the Norwegian coast, carrying ballast to Copenhagen; this was to deceive the British navy blockading the French ports.

  The ship set sail in August 1794. Imlay was then told it had been sunk; but later he heard that Ellefson had turned up at his home town (Risør), and that the ship had been ‘given’ to its English first mate. Imlay applied to the Danish courts for justice. He had the strongest of motives for doing so, since the real cargo of the ship was not ballast but 32 bars of silver and 36 pieces of plate, some said to bear the Bourbon arms, and worth a fortune (they were valued at £3,500).

  Mary must have known all this. During her trip she visited at least one of the judges looking into the case, and went to Risor, the home of Ellefson; and by the time she got back to England the ship had been reregistered at Gothenburg. So it looks as though she had some success in her negotiations. But the book she published later says nothing of these matters. All we can glean from Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark is that she was travelling on behalf of her lover on unstated business; that she was unhappy, and hoped to be reunited with him. The charm of the book lies in its melancholy tone, its fine, sometimes lyrical descriptive passage
s, mixed with acute observations of people and institutions. On the one hand she is a sensible and informative writer, on the other the book is personal in a way that is sometimes startling. Few travel writers and still fewer business investigators have taken a small child with them on their journey; the tenderness with which she writes of Fanny, ‘my little frolicker’, ‘my little cherub’, now ‘hiding her face in my bosom’, now running about on the seashore, ‘the rosy down of health on her cheeks’, and leaving her ‘tiny footsteps on the sands’, is the most touching feature of her narrative.

  When Johnson published the Letters they found an enthusiastic public, not least among young poets. The wording of her description of the waterfalls she visited at Frederikstad and Trollhättan appears to have played a part in inspiring Coleridge's description of the sacred river Xanadu;16 and the theme of the book – a solitary traveller wandering through wild, rugged and remote places, and suffering from the absence and indifference of a lover – helped to set a fashion for questing romantic journeys. Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley and Mary's as yet unborn daughter Mary, who sends her Frankenstein north at the end of his story, all read and followed in Mary Wollstonecraft's footsteps.

  At the time of her journey, Scandinavia was hardly known even to the English traveller in search of the picturesque. Her first reaction to the rocky shores of Sweden was to fall in a faint upon them, but she found her physical health improving as she progressed, now by boat and now by coach, and often venturing on foot, amongst the small coastal towns of Norway and Sweden. She was observant, curious about the customs of the people, the relations between men, women and children, and also the status of servants, the educational institutions, and the organization of legal punishment and prisons. She found herself an object of curiosity and admiration too, as a woman traveller accompanied only by a baby and a maid, or even alone, for she left Marguerite and Fanny at Gothenburg for a few weeks while she travelled about, visiting Laurvig, Strömstad and Oslo (then called Christiania) and admiring the freedom of the Norwegians under their Danish monarch. She also met convinced republicans and found they were not disposed to believe her account of Robespierre as a monster at all.