The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  Another of Mary's Dissenting friends, Amelia Alderson, turned against her with a distinctly malicious enthusiasm. Here there were personal motives at work: in May 1798 she married John Opie, and she may have felt sensitive about the fact that he was a divorced man, that he had once been an admirer of Mary's, and that he and Godwin had also been close friends. At all events, by 1799 Godwin told Holcroft that Opie was ‘no friend of mine’ any longer, and Mrs Opie set to work on a series of novels designed to make her own respectability absolutely clear.13 In Father and Daughter (1800) she showed the ostracism endured by an unmarried mother, a form of cruelty she felt called on to defend:

  It is the slang of the present day, if I may be allowed this vulgar but forcible expression, to inveigh bitterly against society for excluding from its circle, with unrelenting vigour, the woman who has once transgressed the salutary laws of chastity; and some brilliant and persuasive writers of both sexes have endeavoured to prove that many an amiable woman has been for ever lost to virtue and the world, and become the victim of prostitution, merely because her first fault was treated with ill-judging and criminal severity.

  This assertion appears to me to be fraught with mischief; as it is calculated to deter the victim of seduction from penitence and amendment, by telling her that she would employ them in her favour in vain… But it is not to be expected that society should open its arms to receive its prodigal children till they have undergone long and painful probation, – till they have practised the virtues of self-denial, patience, fortitude, and industry. And she whose penitence is not the mere result of wounded pride and caprice, will be capable of exerting all these virtues, in order to regain some portion of the esteem which she has lost.

  This was a direct hit at her old friend's views, and in her next novel Amelia went much further and produced something like a roman à clef: Adeline Mowbray was a travesty of the story of Godwin and Mary, but there is no doubt that it used their experience and held them up to ridicule for their theoretical rejection of marriage. Adeline was made to say, as Mary did, that ‘it is the individuality of the attachment that constitutes its chastity’; both she and her lover, who had written attacking marriage and outlined a plan for an ideal form of society, were hurt and amazed when they found themselves insulted and shunned by respectable people. The superior way of life they had imagined was found to be a chimera, and they experienced nothing but misery and humiliation, especially when Adeline became pregnant. The grand deterrent to behaviour like theirs, Mrs Opie suggested, was the cruel treatment meted out to illegitimate children themselves, as well as their mothers. The length of the book did not prevent it from being widely read at the time, and it is hard to forgive Amelia Opie for the cool way in which she thus made use of the woman who had certainly done her no harm and who had left daughters, legitimate and illegitimate, who could have done with some kindness from their mother's friends.

  A further piece of really malign bad luck offered Mary's detractors fresh ammunition against her. Her old employers, the Kingsboroughs, were involved in a family scandal centring on their daughter Mary and Robert himself. Mary King had been a child of eight when in Miss Wollstonecraft's charge, but ten years later she was able to cause trouble of exactly the kind that allowed people to shake their heads and murmur that she had been corrupted. What happened was this: she had been staying in London with her mother in September 1797 (the time of Mary's death) when she disappeared. The frantic family posted bills and had rivers dragged, but in fact she had eloped with a Colonel Fitzgerald, an illegitimate half-brother of her mother's, brought up at Mitchelstown but now married and living in England; she was pregnant by him and they were planning to escape to America together.

  The subsequent behaviour of the family probably owes something to the fact that Fitzgerald was committing not just adultery but also incest, though perhaps unknown to little Mary, who had grown up in a houseful of near and distant relations and may not have been told the truth about all of them. At all events, she was traced and, after some bizarre episodes, Fitzgerald was shot dead. There can be no doubt that it was murder, but the murderers – Robert Kingsborough and one of his sons – stuck to their version of the story, which made it killing in self-defence. The old Earl died conveniently at this point, so that Robert, succeeding to the earldom, was able to claim a trial in the Irish House of Lords. It turned into a splendid occasion for pageantry. Tickets were sold and there was general sympathy for the accused from the galaxies of peeresses and lords temporal and spiritual who gathered to witness the scene. Robert was acquitted without any witnesses being called. Mary King's baby was disposed of, and the whole affair blew over.* Except in one respect: the coincidence of the trial occurring at the time the Memoirs of Mrs Godwin were circulating had its effect. Bishop Percy took the trouble to send his wife a copy of the shocking book from Dublin, and to repeat the gossip about its subject having been involved with Robert Kingsborough during her days as a governess. Another Irish bishop preached a sermon in which the names of Voltaire and Mrs Wollstonecraft Godwin were linked together in infamy. Only Margaret Mountcashel spoke up in her defence, but since she herself was an outspoken republican and atheist, she only made matters worse and so the Kingsboroughs had their revenge in turn, and contributed to the horror in which the establishment held the memory of their governess.

  Godwin produced a second edition of the Memoirs within months of the first. It contained a few modifications and explanatory passages to appease the public; the Posthumous Works were allowed to rest. 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, he 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. Instead, he stressed the way in which her mind had complemented his:

  One of the leading passions of my mind has been an anxious desire not to be deceived, and as long as I can remember, I have been discouraged, when I have endeavoured to cast the sum of my intellectual value, by finding that I did not possess, in the degree of some other men, an intuitive perception of intellectual beauty… what I wanted in this respect, Mary possessed in a degree superior to any other person I ever knew. The strength of her mind lay in intuition. She was often right, by this means only, in matters of mere speculation… and yet, though perhaps, in the strict sense of the term, she reasoned little, it is surprising what a degree of soundness is to be found in her determination. But if this quality was of use to her in topics that seem the proper province of reasoning, it was much more so in matters directly appealing to the intellectual taste. In a robust and unwavering judgement of this sort, there is a kind of witchcraft.14

  Mary had bewitched the materialist philosopher, it seemed, not only by her sexual appeal but by the very processes of her mind, the traditionally feminine intuition that allowed her to overleap logic. Godwin had nothing to say about her reasonable discussions of the manner in which women's upbringing, social expectations and deprivation of the chance of work affected the development of their natures. In his view, he was devoted to reason and she reliant on a kind of witchcraft. And when the Memoirs were followed a year later by St Leon, in which Marguerite, supposedly a portrait of Mary, appeared as an almost totally passive and dependent wife and mother without a thought or ambition outside the domestic circle, his determination to present the world with an unrecognizably softened Mary, a Mary with her sting drawn, was confirmed. Her memory was to be honoured by effacing and ignoring, not by defending and preaching her ideas; by dwelling on the sad and gentle averted gaze of the Opie portrait, not the fierce and challenging glare of the champion of female rights. But as Condorcet had said, ‘Il est difficile même à un philosophe de ne pas s'oublier un peu lorsqu'il parle des femmes.’15


  But now another voice was raised, concerned neither to explain away Mary's character defects nor establish her as a tragic heroine but rather to keep alive her message. Mary Hays, who had spent many hours in conversation with her friend during the last two years of her life, and who had already made ‘the moral martyrdom of those who press forward’ her theme in a novel, took up her pen briskly and finished the book she had started six years earlier: she called it an Appeal to the Men of Great Britain in Behalf of the Women. Like the Vindication it was a straightforward polemical work, and had Mary Wollstonecraft supplied the second volume she promised, it would probably not have been completed.

  Johnson encouraged Miss Hays, despite his own severe difficulties in 1798; the government finally succeeded in sending him to prison for six months for selling a seditious pamphlet by one of his Dissenting authors, and he was obliged to withdraw his support from the Analytical, which folded almost at once. But he was allowed to entertain as much as usual in prison, Mary Hays was a frequent visitor,16 and her book appeared in print in 1798. It was issued anonymously, something Johnson commonly did to shield authors when in doubt about their reception, and it must have been a very small edition, since no copies appear to have survived. Were it not for the Analytical's summary and review, its contents would be quite lost.*

  Mary Hays made a determined effort to follow up and extend her dead friend's arguments. She began by discussing the way in which agitation for general political reform had led women to consider the particular oppression they had to endure. Although her sex was denied unversity education or a place at any of the academies, it could no longer be denied knowledge because books were now cheaply available to all. There needed to be changes in the law, in property ownership and civil rights. The lack of any decent alternative to marriage, and the hypocrisy of masculine insistence on female chastity, were both deplored. She pointed out that the progress of the human species as a whole must depend on the emancipation of women, on their access to education and careers, and had some sensible things to say about ‘the tacit acquiescence of the injured party’ in the sex war and the importance of women being charitable towards one another. Once again she raised the cry that ‘mind is of no sex’ and that the inculcation of a sly submissiveness in girls from early childhood was equally harmful to both sexes.

  One quotation will show the tone and spirit of the book well enough:

  You may talk to woman to eternity of the supreme felicity of pleasing you, though at her own expence, at the expence of her liberty, her property, her natural equality; at the expence of almost every gift with which God may have endowed her, and which you pretend to prune, to garble or to extirpate at will; I say, you may preach thus to eternity, but you will never convince… while the voice of nature pleads within us, and clearly intimates, - that a greater degree, a greater proportion of happiness might not be the lot of women, if they were allowed as men are, some vote, some right of judgement in a matter which concerns them so nearly, as that of the laws and opinions by which they are supposed to be governed. And of which it is but reasonable to suppose that they themselves must be very competent judges.

  This was fully worthy of her predecessor; it was also exactly what should have been expected from intelligent women brought up in Dissenting circles at that date. But, except in the Analytical, she found no support at all. Her friends were silent, and she became another butt for Tory sarcasm:

  This is one of the impertinent effusions of modern theorists and visionary reformers, who, instead of attributing the miseries and distresses of life to the real causes, the wickedness and mischievous passions of human nature… ascribe them to the incorrect organization of society, and the abuses of established institutions.17

  It was by now the stock all-purpose response to any suggestion that living conditions were less than perfect for any section of English society. When the Lady's Monthly Museum reviewed the Appeal it went a stage further and produced a perfectly circular anti-feminist argument: the author, it suggested, might lose any hope of winning a husband if she continued to advocate ‘unqualified equality’ between the sexes.18

  There may have been an element of malice here; Mary Hays did make life difficult for herself by putting into practice her belief in sexual equality in a way that rendered her vulnerable to ridicule. She pursued men noisily, persistently and (worst of all) unsuccessfully. She had lost a fiancé who died suddenly when she was twenty, grieved for him painfully – she said she felt like a widow – and longed to find another; she harried both the Cambridge radical William Frend and later the young poet Charles Lloyd, much her junior. For this lack of delicacy she was mocked. Time-honoured terms of abuse reserved for plain, pushing women were brought out, and even Coleridge was unable to express his dislike for her views without automatic reference to her ugliness and her petticoats, for neither of which could she be held responsible. And it was doubly unfortunate that Mary Wollstonecraft's one ardent female disciple should have been vulnerable to mockery in this way, because it lent weight to generalizing arguments about the sort of women who took up feminism, and their motives in doing so.

  After the Appeal, Mary Hays published her second feminist novel, and then wilted; her six-volume Female Biography (1803) was written in a much less polemical spirit. She lived on to see the ascendancy of almost every idea she had castigated in her Appeal, but her own fighting spirit had been defeated long before her death in 1843.

  The wave of defection from revolutionary ideas of any kind built up until it swept along almost everyone in England. It was to be expected, perhaps, that men would brush aside women's claims and dismiss Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays as graceless, grabbing creatures who had preached to their intellectual and social superiors about matters they could not understand.* But the steady campaign of denigration from women writers, who might have seen their own interest in supporting the Marys, is harder to explain. Of those women who took it upon themselves to lay down standards for their own sex, one after another approached the question of women's rights, examined its various aspects, and retreated with expressions of disapproval or contempt. Amelia Opie's contribution to the debate has already been discussed; other apparently sensible and well-educated women produced comparable stuff. Maria Edgeworth, for instance in her Practical Education, published (by Johnson too) in 1798, stressed the need for passivity in girls:

  In the education of girls we must teach them more caution than is necessary to boys… they must trust to the experience of others, they cannot always have recourse to what ought to be, they must adapt themselves to what is.19

  Far better to fit girls to existing conditions than to encourage them to discontent or rebellion which might expose them to disappointment or disgrace. The message was repeated many times:

  We cannot help thinking that their happiness is of more consequence than their speculative rights, and we wish to educate women so that they may be happy in the situation in which they are most likely to be placed.

  Girls must very soon perceive the impossibility of their rambling about the world in quest of adventures.

  A just idea of the nature of dignity, opposed to what is commonly called spirit, should be given early to our female pupils.

  So much depends upon the temper of women, that it ought to be most carefully cultivated in early life; girls should be more inured to restraint than boys, because they are more likely to meet with restraint in society.

  Miss Edgeworth's attitude was to some extent politically inspired: the demand for rights, whether by men or women, terrified her because of the terrible examples of France and Ireland (where she witnessed some violent revolutionary activity in 1798). She blamed Madame Roland's tragic ending on her deficient education, and went on to write several fictional attacks on women who made claims she thought dangerous. Madame de Fleury showed a good French girl assisting her aristocratic patroness during the Revolution whilst her thieving and lying cousin Manon (actually given Madame Roland's name) believes in the rights of man
and woman, and becomes the mistress of an ex-hairdresser turned revolutionary leader. Belinda, written at the same time (in 1801), contained a character called Harriot Freke who advocated women's rights, encouraged her friends to adultery and female duelling, and behaved so indelicately altogether that she disgusted the heroine with the whole idea of such rights. And the principal character of The Modern Griselda, an argumentative and dissatisfied wife, after insisting on a divorce, was made to complain that all she had really wanted was for her husband to master her.*

  Much later in her life, in 1834, when she published Helen, Miss Edgeworth did speak up for a slightly amended point of view:

  Let me observe to you, that the position of women in society, is somewhat different from what it was a hundred years ago, or as it was sixty, or I will say thirty years since. Women are now so highly cultivated, and political subjects are at present of so much importance, of such high interest, to all human creatures who live together in society, you can hardly expect, Helen, that you, as a rational being, can go through the world as it now is, without forming any opinion on points of public importance. You cannot, I conceive, satisfy yourself with the common namby-pamby little missy phrase, ‘ladies have nothing to do with politics’.

  But of course there had been some women forty years since who had taken a lively interest in politics. It was one of the things Miss Edgeworth's equally influential contemporary, Hannah More, particularly objected to in her Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799) in whose opening chapter on ‘Influence’ she was at pains to express her horror of ‘female politicians’ and her conviction that women should use their powers only to improve the general moral tone of society, and not to meddle in public matters. This led her quite naturally a few paragraphs further on to attack Mary Wollstonecraft for her direct vindication of adultery… for the first time attempted by a woman, a professed admirer and imitator of the German suicide Werter. The Female Werter, as she is styled by her biographer, asserts in a work, intitled ‘The Wrongs of Woman,’ that adultery is justifiable, and that the restrictions placed on it by the laws of England constitute part of the wrongs of woman.