The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  Godwin refused to succumb to despair. Both Fordyce and Poignand came on Sunday; it was Poignand's last visit. He withdrew on the pretext that Fordyce had taken over the case, but he probably knew from experience that it was past cure. Mrs Blenkinsop returned and Eliza Fenwick volunteered to act as nurse. Mary expressed a wish to have Mrs Cotton sent for, but this was not done. Probably the doctors thought she could not arrive in time to be of use. On Monday Mary was able to joke feebly again when puppies were applied to her breasts; Fordyce had ordered the removal of the baby, and she had an overflowing supply of milk. According to Godwin, the puppies were meant to draw off the milk; if so, it was an odd procedure, since milk can usually be expressed quite easily by hand, and the suckling of puppies would stimulate the breasts to produce still more milk. Possibly they were in fact intended to help the womb contract and expel the remaining pieces of placenta. Mary smiled and spoke affectionately to Godwin through these blackly farcical moments, and he clung to such evidence of her resistance to the fever. By now she must have been suffering from the general blood poisoning and possibly the onset of gas gangrene. On Tuesday afternoon Fordyce brought in a colleague called Clarke, a surgeon who was to consider performing a further operation in the hope of removing the rest of the placenta. But it could not have made any difference at this point; the infection was there and there was no treatment for that. In any case Mary was too reduced to stand any more, and the operation was not attempted.

  It was now a whole week since the birth. Godwin knew things were very bad. Carlisle told him to give Mary wine in order to dull her suffering, and from four in the afternoon he sat by her bedside offering her sips from a glass. The baby had been taken to Maria Reveley to join Fanny, so they were alone. At seven, as it began to dusk, Mary's maid came in and Godwin asked her what she thought of her mistress's state. The woman answered that ‘in her judgement, she was going as fast as possible’. This reply sent Godwin into a state bordering on madness; he went downstairs and begged Basil Montagu to go for Carlisle again.

  Montagu fetched him from a great distance – he was dining on the other side of town – and Carlisle from then on became Godwin's best support. He remained in the house until Mary's death, talking with him and doing the little he could to make her comfortable. On Wednesday night she rallied slightly again; on Thursday evening Carlisle warned them to expect her death soon, but still she lived for the whole of Friday and Saturday. Godwin's friends sat dishevelled about the house, eager to go on helpful errands, whilst the terrible slow process dragged on. She was no longer coherent in her expressions, but tried to do as she was told, attempting to sleep for instance, though she could not do more than feign the breathing of a sleeping person for a minute or so. She asked her nurses not to bully her, she did not mention religion apart from one exclamation: ‘Oh Godwin, I am in heaven’, to which he is supposed to have answered anxiously, ‘You mean, my dear, that your symptoms are a little easier.’13 She was not able to discuss the children when he at last approached the subject, but simply said ‘I know what you are thinking of’ and could add nothing.14

  The shivering fits had ceased after Thursday. On Sunday night Carlisle told Godwin to go to bed, at six in the morning he called him, and at twenty to eight she died. ‘She had died a death’ as one respectable clergyman was soon to remark ‘that strongly marked the distinction of the sexes, by pointing out the destiny of women, and the diseases to which they were peculiarly liable.’15

  Her death coincided with the falling-off of many things she had believed in. She had embodied the spirit of the age faithfully, its political optimism, its faith in willpower, self-improvement, education. She had hoped that courage and good intentions might triumph over dead convention, and that the whole structure of society might be reformed and renewed by philosophers. She had imagined generously that what she wanted for herself might be welcomed by all her own sex and at least understood by the other. She had hated prudence, bigotry and cant. Had she lived on, she would have seen plenty of all these; she would have seen the flight to reaction, the apostasy of one after another of her radical friends, and their spiritual decay. In its own way that was to be as painful as her end. ‘I could weep,’ wrote Southey, ‘To think that she is to the grave gone down’; but for her own sake it may have been almost as well.

  [19]

  Aftermath and Debate

  UNABLE to write the fact of her death in his diary, Godwin entered simply the words ‘20 minutes before 8' and filled in three lines with strokes of his pen.

  But then the diary resumed its neat, factual function. The dinner guests for the same day appear: Basil Montagu, Marshal (the old friend who had witnessed the wedding), Hannah Godwin and little Fanny, brought over from the Reveleys to comfort and be comforted as best possible. Carlisle went home for a few hours but soon returned to do what he could for the bereaved, and during the next few days Johnson, Holcroft, Opie and the Fenwicks all came to mourn with Godwin. He began to write letters, some anguished, some hectoring. There was an angry exchange with a friend who felt he could not as an unbeliever properly attend the funeral, since it was a religious ceremony. Godwin, despite his own atheism, was deeply offended, but when the time came for the funeral on Friday (the fifteenth) he was too upset to go himself.

  She was buried in the churchyard of St Pancras, where she had been married five months before. Godwin saw to the preparation of a large, square memorial block of grey stone, inscribed:

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN

  Author of A Vindication of the rights of Woman

  Born 27th April 1759

  Died 10th September 1797

  And presently a pair of weeping willows were planted, one on each side of her grave.

  Godwin was eager to persuade old friends who had broken with Mary at the time of their marriage to acknowledge her virtue again now she was dead. Elizabeth Inchbald received several letters from him, ‘but they are more like distracted lines than anything rational’ she observed coldly, and neither changed her mind nor renewed her friendship with him. To the end of her life she made mocking remarks when his name arose, especially in connection with his matrimonial affairs.1

  Others reacted more kindly. Maria Reveley kept the baby for a few days, then handed her to Elizabeth Fenwick who looked after her for a while longer. Mrs Fenwick also wrote to Everina, hoping to heal the breach there by stressing Godwin's goodness to Mary and her affection for him. Meanwhile Godwin sat in his rooms in Evesham Buildings, trying to read and writing more letters. To Holcroft he wrote:

  I firmly believe that there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again. Do not – if you can help it – exhort me, or console me.2

  And to Carlisle:

  One of my wife's books now lies near me, but I avoid opening it. I took up a book on the education of children, but that impressed me too forcibly with my forlorn and disabled state with respect to the two poor animals left under my protection, and I threw it aside… If you have any… consolation in store for me, be at pains to bestow it.3

  After ten days, when he felt he could bear it, he moved all his things to the Polygon and settled there. First Fanny and then the baby were fetched; henceforth they were to be in the care of a friend of Hannah Godwin's, Louisa Jones, an unremarkable creature who could not replace Mary either with Godwin or with the children.

  Marguerite's name was heard no more. Perhaps she had had enough of upheavals and tears, and wanted to settle into a steady French domesticity and forget the strange ways of English intellectuals. This meant that before she was four, Fanny had lost father, mother and the nurse she had known for as long as she could remember. Godwin loved her dearly and brought her up to think of herself as his eldest daughter, and indeed to call herself Fanny Godwin: so she always signed herself and was addressed by her step-sisters, and one of the British Museum copies of Original Stories has ‘F.
G.’ inscribed in it in large childish letters. Godwin's description of his eldest daughter in St Leon suggests how he studied Fanny's nature, and shows a sad prescience:

  Uncommonly mild and affectionate, alive to the slightest variations of treatment, profoundly depressed by every mark of unkindness, but exquisitely sensible to demonstrations of sympathy and attachment. She appeared little formed to struggle with the difficulties of life and frowns of the world; but, in periods of quietness and tranquility nothing could exceed the sweetness of her character and the fascination of her manners. Her chief attachment was to her mother…

  He was sensitive to her emotions, but quite unable to make up for her losses. Coleridge noted the ‘cadaverous silence… quite catacombish’ prevailing at the Polygon over a year later,4 and the baby quickly grew to dominate her sister and perhaps ride a little roughshod over her.

  A Lavaterian study of Mary's physiognomy, carried out when she was only a few days old, pronounced her the possessor of memory, intelligence, quick sensibility and a certain lack of patience. Like much fortune telling, it turned out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But Fanny remained meek to the point of martyrdom. Her true father was never heard of again.*

  Opie either gave or sold Godwin his portrait of Mary, finished during the last year of her life; it was hung above the desk where he worked. Fuseli had been informed of her death within hours, in a note from Francis Jeffrey: ‘One who loved you and whom I respected, is no more. Mrs G died this morning.’5 And Fuseli in turn wrote to Roscoe, no more than the words ‘Poor Mary’ in a postcript; his sarcasm for once deserted him.6

  Mary Hays contributed an obituary in the Monthly Magazine which extolled her friend's ‘ardent, ingenuous and unconquerable spirit’ and referred to her as ‘a victim to the vices and prejudices of mankind’. Even the Gentleman's Magazine spoke politely of her ‘soundness of understanding and sensibility of heart’. News of her death travelled without further details; several months later Anna Seward reacted with shock and concern and inquired of what disorder she died. Had her question remained unanswered, Mary's posthumous reputation might have stood higher than it did thereafter. But Godwin's reaction to his grief was to write and publish; within two weeks of his wife's death he had begun work on a tribute to her. The Memoirs were fired by the same sort of intensity of feeling that inspired Caleb Williams, and distinguished by the candour that was Godwin's most cherished tenet. It is impossible to read them without being moved by his pain, especially in the last section when he lingers over the days, hours and minutes of her dying: the outpouring of grief is like a belated love offering of the kind he had found hard to make while she still lived, and he seems to be writing in order to fix for himself what he now felt and could not hope to feel again.

  But the Memoirs were written at high speed, and inevitably there were omissions, inaccuracies and misrepresentations. Godwin used a few of Mary's letters, notes made during his conversations with her, a discreet account of her London years from Johnson, some communications from Hugh Skeys and a letter from a young friend of Paine's which gave a very brief sketch of a few meetings with her in Paris. He wrote to her sisters in Dublin – Everina had not stayed long with the Wedgwoods - and in December he received an unhelpful missive from her, withholding the letters in her and Eliza's possession and supplying a tart reprimand instead: ‘I am sorry to perceive you are inclined to be minute when I think it is impossible for you to be even tolerably accurate.’7

  He seems to have made no attempt to approach her father in Wales or her brother Ned in London. Of the Paris circle, Christie had died in Surinam and Rebecca and Jane Christie either were not consulted or kept silent.* The Barlows, Stone and Helen Williams were relatively inaccessible in France, and in any case the continuing war and political climate of England made Godwin reluctant to dwell on her French years, and they were dismissed with a few generalized comments.

  When Godwin applied to Fuseli for her letters, the painter opened a drawer, showed him the packets and then shut the drawer again, saying, ‘Damn you, that is all you will see of them.’8 The two men were never able to speak to one another without falling into ironic tones, and the death of Mary, painful to each in different degree, could not be expected to draw them together. They were as clumsy in distress as they had been in love.

  The Memoirs appeared in January 1798, headed by an etching which gives Mary chubby cheeks and a rosebud mouth; otherwise there were not many concessions to conventional piety. Godwin freely discussed her love affairs, suicide attempts and pregnancies, and praised her (not altogether accurately) for her rejection of Christianity. At the same time he and Johnson brought out four small volumes of her Posthumous Works containing, amongst other papers, her letters to Imlay and the fragments of Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman. Both her personal behaviour and her insistence on the need for divorce reform and the excusa-bility of adultery were thus publicly established through her own words as well as Godwin's.

  The public's reaction was made up of fascination and horror in more or less equal parts. Neither Godwin nor even the careful Johnson had apparently foreseen this. Indeed Johnson, being aware as a magazine publisher of the public's appetite for gossip about the famous, and the readiness of partisan journalists to supply it with titbits, may have encouraged Godwin to give a plain unvarnished version of Mary's life before a scandalously distorted one could appear. But all they succeeded in doing was scandalizing the public themselves, and in the process striking a severe blow at the feminist cause. People who were prepared to consider the doctrines of the Vindication seriously simply could not swallow the account of Mary's character that emerged from the later books.

  Hard was thy fate in all the scenes of life,

  As daughter, sister, parent, friend and wife

  But harder still in death thy fate we own,

  Mourn'd by thy Godwin – with a heart of stone.9

  wrote Roscoe, and there were many others who felt Godwin had done her a terrible disservice in telling the world what any decent biographer would have concealed most carefully.

  Wordsworth, who had called on Godwin in December 1797, wrote in March 1798 to a friend, ‘I have not yet seen the life of Mrs Godwin [sic]. I wish to see it, though with no tormenting curiosity’;10 and in April his sister Dorothy noted that ‘Mary Wollstonecraft's life, etc, came’. Tormenting curiosity or no, Wordsworth was closely involved with those who surrounded Mary at the time of her death, since he and Dorothy were caring for Basil Montagu's child, and cannot have failed to hear of the circumstances from him, even if his conversation with Godwin remained formal. But the poet did not deliver himself of any opinion on Mary's beliefs or her behaviour, absorbed as he was in coming to terms with his own guilt feelings: he was preparing, after all, to behave very much as Imlay had done.*

  Godwin received almost no praise, and soon public attacks began to come in, notably from the ranks of Tory journalists, rallying to their cry of ‘common sense’ against the nonsense of ‘philosophers’. Mary's misfortunes combined with her experience of Godwinian marriage were too good to be missed; she had once defended her friend Mary Hays against the allegation that she was a ‘philosophess and Godwinian’,11 but no one could successfully defend Mrs Godwin now.

  Of the very few attempts to make a fair and serious estimate of her in the light of Godwin's biography, the most interesting appeared in a pair of articles, printed in February and March 1798 in a woman's magazine called The Monthly Visitor, which seem to be the work of a personal friend. The first article was prefaced by an engraving of Mary which the writer declared a better likeness than the etching from Opie: ‘Those who have seen the late Mrs Godwin will be able to judge of the improvements we have endeavoured to effect.’ The article went on to point out how different Mary's ideas were from Godwin's: ‘In soul, in information, in understanding, and in manner, they are eminently distinct.’ What is more, her feelings had not been what he supposed: ‘that she ever loved Mr Godwin, is at least improbable’.


  After these confident assertions, the author continued:

  She had strong passions, and a strong understanding. She was a great genius; but like most great geniuses she was uncommon. Uncommon in her ideas of society and those rules which, for the general good, must be borne with in particular instances… She was… much at variance with your common maxims of prudence; and exclaimed, ‘there are arguments which convince the reason, whilst they carry death to the heart!’ But indeed she was no modern philosopher… And, in all probability, had she been married well in early life, she had then been a happy woman, and universally respected. She was a woman of high genius; and, as she felt the whole strength of her powers, she thought herself lifted, in a degree, above the ordinary trammels of civil communities. She inveighed bitterly against a code of regulations which she deemed derogatory to her sex; nor did she for an instant reflect that unless women were equally qualified with herself to act on the grand principles of all morality, independent of tuition and restraint, the doctrine she inculcated if received, must overturn the basis of every civilized state.12

  Compared with the crude abuse and smoking-room jokes of the Tory press, which enjoyed depicting Mary as a whore and Godwin as a pimp, this was at least considered and well-intentioned, and it is probably representative of the opinion of Mary's Dissenting and radical friends, who admired her for her talent but thought she had in the end gone too far.* At the same time, being aimed at the very audience of literate women who had most to learn from Mary's ideas, the article was damaging, both because it ignored her arguments, and also in its assertion that a demand for sexual equality threatened the very basis of civilization. Some of the next generation of Unitarian ladies paid the price of this dismissal of Mary's feminism on account of her sexual transgression: Harriet Taylor certainly felt obliged to put an extraordinary restraint upon her own sexual behaviour. Harriet Martineau, not herself troubled by sexual problems, simply declared categorically that ‘the Wollstonecraft order do infinite mischief; and for my part, I do not wish to have anything to do with them’.