Joan Smith is a columnist, novelist and critic. She is the author of Moralities and has written columns for The Independent on Sunday and The Guardian.
On 3 July 1797, a Monday morning, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote a short letter to her new husband, the philosopher and novelist William Godwin. It mentioned their plans for the evening and asked him to call on her that morning during his customary walk. Later the same day, assuming that the poor weather had kept him indoors, she wrote again, this time giving details of the supper she intended to provide. The next day she wrote another note, reporting that she was unwell - she was by now in an advanced state of pregnancy - and that his behaviour the previous evening had upset her. The cause was Godwin’s friendship with Miss Pinkerton, a female admirer of whom Wollstonecraft was not unnaturally jealous. The following month, she sent Miss Pinkerton a short note, with Godwin’s prior agreement, informing her that she was no longer welcome at their house.
What is so striking about the couple’s correspondence is its frequency, suggesting that people in Wollstonecraft’s educated circle might dash off notes or write longer letters several times a day, and express disappointment if their concerns were not responded to just as quickly. In that sense, Wollstonecraft’s letters, especially the intimate ones she sent to Godwin and her previous lover, the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, resemble email in their informality and immediacy. But this is not the only feature of Wollstonecraft’s life that strikes the reader, more than two centuries later, as disconcertingly modern. She tried to earn her living by the traditional routes open to single women without resources, setting up a school and working as a governess, but she was also determined to establish herself as an author and journalist. While A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) remains her best-known work, she was also a novelist, a travel writer before the category existed, an innovative thinker on the education of girls (Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1787) and a prolific reviewer.
Throughout her life, she struggled to live as an independent woman, while also acknowledging her longing for intellectual companionship and an emotional connection with a man she could consider her equal; she was still trying not to compromise her ideals in the brief span of life left to her after her marriage to Godwin. (She died shortly after giving birth to their daughter, her second child, in September 1797). Wollstonecraft and Godwin were stern critics of conventional marriage and when they decided to marry, at a time when Mary’s pregnancy was beginning to show, they also agreed to maintain two establishments in London: one of a number of stratagems they adopted in an attempt to avoid the restrictions they feared to encounter in the married state. After their wedding, they moved into the Polygon, a newly-built block of three-storey houses in Somers Town, but Godwin also took an apartment in nearby Evesham Buildings. This circumstance made letters and notes a necessity, and offers modern readers an extraordinary insight into their maturing relationship.
Domestic harmony did not mute Wollstonecraft’s criticisms of marriage, which extended far beyond her famous comparison in her published writings to legalised prostitution. Six weeks after her wedding at the church of St Pancras on 29 March 1797, and on what may have been only the second occasion she signed herself Mary Godwin, she reiterated her objections in a note to her friend, the translator George Dyson. The letter is for the most part a defence of her work-in-progress, the novel Maria or The Wrongs of Woman, against Dyson’s suggestion that the plight of an intelligent woman married to a boorish husband was too slight a subject for fiction. ‘These appear to me (matrimonial despotism of heart & conduct) to be the particular wrongs of woman; because they degrade the mind’, she wrote, admitting that she had found his reaction to her project ‘a little discouraging’.
This is one of many occasions on which Wollstonecraft argues a case with passion and confidence, revealing both her assumption of intellectual equality with other writers in her circle and her regretful recognition that her views were a challenge to some of her fellow radicals. In a speculative reconstruction of one of her letters to the novelist Mary Hays, probably written in April 1797, the following sentence occurs: ‘Those who are bold enough to advance before the age they live in, and to throw off, by the force of their own minds, the prejudices which the maturing reason of the world will in time disavow, must learn to brave censure’. Wollstonecraft certainly had to put up with a great deal of the latter, both for her political views - particularly her sympathy towards the French Revolution, whose turmoil she witnessed for herself from December 1792, arriving just in time to see the King, Louis XVI, pass through the streets of Paris to be tried for treason - and for her unconventional personal conduct. Two women friends, one of them the celebrated actress Mrs Siddons, ended their acquaintance with her when her marriage to Godwin alerted them to the fact that she had never been legally married to the American.
Wollstonecraft was the subject of such slights throughout her life and they caused her a great deal of anguish, even when they came from people who could not match her intellectual gifts. The period she spent in Ireland, working as governess to the children of Lady Kingsborough - one of whom, later to become Margaret Mountcashell and the subject of an early nineteenth century sexual scandal, was Wollstonecraft’s most devoted disciple - put her in an ambivalent position, neither a servant nor a member of the family. Writing to her sister Everina from the family seat at Mitchelstown in 1787, Wollstonecraft responded by referring contemptuously to ‘Ladies [who] put on rouge without any mauvais honte’. Finding herself ‘[c]onfined to the society of a set of silly females’ was torture to her, as was her acknowledgement later the same year that ‘vague professions of friendship are not to be relied on, especially when made to an inferior, in point of rank’. The position of the final comma is revealing, suggesting that Wollstonecraft maintained a healthy resistance, at the age of 28 and after a long series of setbacks, to the notion that she was inferior in anything but the technical sense of social status.
This is not to say that she did not sometimes appear embittered, first by her father’s profligacy, which impoverished the family and forced her to shoulder financial responsibility for her sisters, and then by the sheer difficulty of earning a living. Although she struck sympathetic contemporaries as brilliant and forceful – perhaps even a genius, according to her friend Mary Hays – Wollstonecraft struggled throughout her life with debt, and was still reliant on occasional handouts from her husband’s friends in the months before her death. It is essential to bear this context in mind when reading some of the more self-pitying passages in her letters, as well to acknowledge that Wollstonecraft sometimes felt herself, with some justification, to be isolated and almost entirely lacking in resources, other than her own wits.
In 1787, writing to the Rev Henry Dyson Gabell, a clergyman she had met on her voyage to Ireland but hardly a close friend, she confided: ‘I dare say you have gathered from my conversation, that I have been in every respect very unfortunate: indeed from my infancy I have drank of the bitter cup, my fortune has not been chequered, on the contrary one color has prevailed, and given its tincture to my frame of mind - the tone of melancholy you observed on our first acquaintance’. There can be no doubt that this tendency to melancholy was exacerbated by a series of unhappy experiences, not least Imlay’s prolonged prevarication about their relationship and eventual desertion, which drove her to try to drown herself off Putney Bridge in October 1795. Yet it would be a mistake to overlook her resilience, which came to her rescue time and time again, whether in the form of immersion in a new article or book or the arduous trip she made to Sweden on behalf of Imlay, who wished to pursue a court case there but could not (or would not) go himself.
What is so distressing about her relationship with Imlay is the way in which Wollstonecraft’s personality mellowed, becoming relaxed and even playful, under her first experience of passionate and apparently requited love - only then to suffer pangs of disappointment and wrenching self-doubt. Much later, she would write to Godwin about one of her most painful discoveries: that if she wanted attention, ‘it is necessary to demand it’. In the late eighteenth century, men were simply not used to treating women as equals, and even as formidable a figure as Wollstonecraft was painfully aware of the necessity of having to ask for what she felt was her due. (Her time, she told Godwin tartly in April 1797, ‘appears to me, as valuable as that of other persons accustomed to employ themselves’.) Towards the end of her life, when she achieved an impressive degree of self-knowledge, she would also acknowledge that her intellect was not always able to command her emotions, especially where personal relationships were concerned - a conflict that would also trouble later generations of feminists. ‘I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution!’ she admitted to her publisher Joseph Johnson in 1792. Fours years later, at the time when they first became lovers and she felt at her most vulnerable, she told Godwin that ‘[m]y imagination is for ever betraying me into fresh misery’. Her letters to him reveal both her joy in his affection - ‘there was a tenderness in your manner….that rendered you very dear to me’, she acknowledged four months later - and the anxieties which had first surfaced during her disastrous experience with Imlay.
Neither relationship was able to develop at a leisurely pace. In an age when theories about contraception were unreliable, and condoms were regarded solely as a means of protecting men from contracting sexually transmitted diseases, Wollstonecraft became pregnant quickly with each of her lovers. While she did in many ways welcome motherhood and her letters are full of affectionate references to Fanny, her daughter by Imlay, it opened her to public censure - she was unmarried on both occasions she conceived - and created a financial and emotional dependence that was deeply unwelcome to her. Yet there is no doubt that she was looking forward to the birth of the her second child and the fact that post-natal complications proved fatal, though no fault of her own, has created a myth which is unfair to Wollstonecraft and continues to damage feminism to this day.
In this reading, she is a tragic figure, the prototype of the gifted intellectual woman who is unable to reconcile her personal life with her intellectual ambitions. She is the first of many women who have tried and failed to have it all, and therefore a warning to later generations of the overwhelming difficulties involved in aspiring to more than conventional feminine roles. Her melancholy, her financial problems, her unhappy relationship with Imlay and her suicidal impulses are all treated as evidence that her life was bound to end tragically, making her death at the age of 38 appear predestined. Yet it is clear that Wollstonecraft was writing and working with astonishing self-confidence towards the end of her life, in the context of a relationship that provided the tenderness, passion and intellectual companionship she had craved for so long.
Far from being inevitable, her death was completely unexpected, tragically interrupting what might easily have become the happiest and most productive period of her existence. It came at the moment when she was coming close to the bold prediction she had made in a letter to Everina ten years before, during her trying months in Ireland as a governess, when she disclosed her ambition of becoming nothing less than ‘the first of a new genus’. That ambition was thwarted neither by fate nor an impulse towards self-destruction, but by the ignorance of a doctor who did not appreciate the risk to a new mother of infection - a disaster, in other words, that might have befallen any woman of the period. Wollstonecraft’s final letters confirm the extent to which she had risen above her earlier difficulties, making her death all the more poignant. But what happened to the author of one of the first great feminist texts was an accident, not a judgement.
Further reading:
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
A Short Residence etc
Mary and Maria/Mathilda
Joan Smith, Moralities
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