Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
Acclaimed as “the father of the book trade,” for he was the first to commission books, rather than serve as a printer for
those who wished to publish, Johnson became both a mentor and a friend. Mary bragged to Everina in a letter: “I am . . . going
to be the first of a new genus,” adding, “You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track—the peculiar bent of my nature
pushes me on.”
Publishers were aware that women made up a large part of the reading public, and women like Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Ann
Radcliffe, and Hannah More were well known for their novels that dealt with women’s interests. The bestsellers of the day
included two genres of particular appeal to women—the novel of sentiment and the Gothic novel. In some ways, these reflected
opposite sides of female personality. Novels of sentiment celebrated delicacy of feelings, and even fostered the practice
of weeping in public. Such works praised women for their purity of refinement and moral superiority, exalting the traditional
roles of mother, wife, and loyal sister. Gothic novels, on the other hand, looked into darker corners. Often set in exotic
locales, the Gothics dealt with fear and the irrationality that lies beneath the surface of so-called normal life. Women writing
in the Gothic genre discovered they could explore emotions and daring actions outside the norms regarded as “proper” for women.
(Men were often fans of the Gothic genre too; the young Lord Byron read Ann Radcliffe’s novel
The Mysteries of Udolpho,
and modeled part of his own soon-to-be-famous persona after one of its characters.)
Johnson suggested that Mary try her hand at writing books in the new field of children’s fiction. His neighbor John Newbery
had made a good living at it. (Today a children’s book award is named for him.) In 1788, Mary’s
Original Stories
appeared, depicting women in many different roles—single, married, widowed, working, and at home. It showed Mary’s concern
for the condition of the poor by portraying the suffering of unmothered children, victims of bad housing and corrupt landlords.
For the second edition of the book, Johnson hired William Blake to illustrate it. The eccentric Blake was then an unknown
artist and Mary found in him a friend as well as a collaborator who shared her social concerns. Soon Blake would be illustrating
his own poems rather than acting as a collaborator for others’ work.
Mary found a new intellectual circle opening to her. She wrote to Fanny Blood’s brother George, “Whenever I am tired of solitude
I go to Mr. Johnson’s and there I meet the kind of company I find most pleasure in.” Johnson hosted afternoon dinners where
he entertained many of the leading writers, philosophers, and artists of the day. With time, Mary became one of the regulars,
whom she called “standing dishes”—the only woman so honored other than the writer Anna Barbauld. Besides Blake, the guests
included the painters John Opie and Henry Fuseli; the political philosophers Thomas Paine and William Godwin; the American
poet Joel Barlow; radical reformer Horne Tooke, who had actually raised money in Britain to support the American colonies’
struggle for independence; and Thomas Holcroft, who went from peddler’s son and stable boy to become one of England’s leading
dramatists, just to name a few. Many of those in Johnson’s circle were free thinkers, English versions of the French
philosophes
who were then challenging people to use rationality rather than religious faith to guide their lives. Mary found herself
in the midst of daring discussions that challenged and encouraged her.
All of these people appealed to Mary’s mind, but the artist Henry Fuseli stoked the fire in her heart. Mary was approaching
thirty, and she longed for a great passion. In Fuseli she thought that she had found the “soul mate” she had dreamed of. Born
Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich in 1741, he had come to England in the 1760s, where he adopted his new name. He was the oldest
son of a painter who insisted that he become a minister, so as a child he had painted only in secret. He became ordained when
he was twenty, along with his best friend Johann Lavater, who would later become famous as the founder of physiognomy, a method
of determining character through the examination of facial features. The two men had an intense relationship that may well
have been sexual. Fuseli wrote in a letter to Lavater, “I grow too excited, I must stop here—O you who sleep alone now—dream
of me—that my soul might meet with yours.” When Lavater married, Fuseli wrote that a disembodied spirit would be around the
lips of him and his bride.
Fuseli was a brilliant scholar who knew eight languages and wrote essays about painting, sculpture, art history, and Rousseau.
When he came to England, a meeting with the painter Joshua Reynolds set him on the road to his true calling and he spent some
seven years in Italy studying art. In 1782, he completed his most famous painting,
The Nightmare,
which caused a sensation. Bizarre, erotic, and emotional, it was reproduced many times in prints, and became an icon of Romantic
art. The work portrays a sleeping woman lying across a bed, arms open as if filled with erotic desire. Looking through the
window at her is a ghostly horse—a symbol of sexuality—with bulging, pale eyes. Seated on the sleeping woman’s chest, staring
out at the viewer of the work, is a grinning incubus, a male demon who had sexual intercourse with women as they slept. For
a while the painting hung in Joseph Johnson’s home as a token of the two men’s close friendship. As guests engaged in the
intellectual conversation of Johnson’s dinner parties, they could enjoy a little erotica at the same time. (A century later,
Sigmund Freud also displayed a print of this painting on the wall of his office.) And the image of the woman in the painting
would much later become an inspiration for Wollstonecraft’s daughter, when she wrote her famous novel.
When Mary met Fuseli she was twenty-nine and relatively inexperienced; he was a worldly-wise forty-seven. The short, lecherous,
vain bisexual was a walk on the wild side for Mary, but unfortunately he was not a person capable of the kind of attachment
she wished for. She was fascinated by his paintings and drawings, and loved listening to him discourse authoritatively on
many subjects. His descriptions of the seamier side of life engrossed her too. He spoke openly of frequenting prostitutes;
some of the drawings that he showed her were pornographic. All this—novel, daring, on the edge—was stimulating to Mary, in
a way that the high-toned conversation of the crowd at Johnson’s was not. She plunged into a love affair, meeting Fuseli at
her own flat as well as his studio. At his urging, she changed her appearance. Before meeting him, she had dressed in a plain,
almost careless, manner in coarse clothes, black worsted stockings, and beaver hat with her hair hanging loose about her shoulders.
The fastidious Fuseli showed her how to dress more fashionably, and she now pinned up her hair.
As Mary’s ardor increased, however, Fuseli’s interest in her cooled; his friendship for her, he claimed, had been strictly
intellectual. As Mary tried more desperately to call attention to herself, writing feverishly and often, Fuseli withdrew from
her. He would pointedly allow her letters to remain unopened for many days. For a sexual partner, Fuseli preferred another:
he married Sophia Rawlins, one of the models he used for his paintings. Ironically, she would burn her husband’s more explicit
drawings after his death.
I
t took a revolution to distract Mary from her unrequited passion for Fuseli. The French Revolution, which began in 1789 when
a mob stormed and captured the Paris prison known as the Bastille, was the central event of the time. Its rallying cry of
“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which proclaimed all citizens were
equal under the law, not only electrified the French but inspired many Britons as well. Mary and her friends who gathered
at Joseph Johnson’s house cheered what was happening in France, for they felt it heralded a new day for all mankind. The young
poet William Wordsworth summed up the feelings of many with the couplet: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to
be young was very heaven!” In October, Joseph Priestley predicted that revolution would spread to other countries—something
that did not thrill Britain’s upper classes. Indeed, after Mary’s old mentor, Reverend William Price, gave a public sermon
praising the revolution, saying, “I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading,” a prominent member of Parliament,
Edmund Burke, felt compelled to reply. Though Burke had earlier supported the American Revolution, his
Reflections on the Revolution in France
condemned the destruction of French aristocratic society and government. Burke used the language of a Gothic novel in his
metaphor for the revolutionary forces: “Out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous,
unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination.”
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the first answer to Burke in her vigorous defense of the French Revolution,
Vindication of the Rights of Man,
which was published anonymously in December 1790; the first printing sold out in a month, and the next printing had her name
attached to it. Overnight, Mary became a heroine to English supporters of the Revolution. William Roscoe, a friend of Fuseli’s,
wrote a ballad satirizing Burke in which this stanza appeared:
And lo! an Amazon stept out,
One WOLLSTONECRAFT her name,
Resolv’d to stop his mad career,
Whatever chance became.
The Revolution radicalized a number of women writers, who began to critique the role of women in society and the family. The
revolutionary emphasis on the rights of
man
gave Mary the opening to write about the other half of the human race. She may have been inspired by a dinner at Johnson’s
house in September 1791, where Thomas Paine, the firebrand whose pamphlet
Common Sense
had helped spark the American Revolution, was a guest. Among those present was William Godwin, who had been looking forward
to meeting Paine and was annoyed when, he felt, Mary monopolized the conversation.
Of course, Mary needed no other goad than her intelligence and social conscience, for the real-life circumstances of women
were reason enough to protest. Women had very restricted opportunities. Indeed a married woman had
no
rights after her wedding; her very being and legal existence was incorporated into that of her husband. Britain’s Matrimonial
Act of 1770 called for the prosecution as witches “all women . . . that shall . . . impose upon, seduce, and betray into matrimony
any of His Majesty’s subjects by means of scent, paints . . . false hair . . . high shoes, or bolstered hips.” Many people
had little sympathy for the cause of women’s rights, for they saw the humiliations inflicted on them as the will of God.
Socially, women were hemmed in by the customs and standards society set for the “Proper Lady,” as a twentieth-century scholar,
Mary Poovey, has called the ideal woman of that time. Etiquette books, intended for the young and for those who wished to
“improve” themselves, described precisely how women should act. Women of the aristocracy were not limited by these values,
but for the rest of women—particularly the middle class—they were essential to respectability. The ideal of the Proper Lady
strongly handicapped ambitious women like Mary, for it ranked the virtues of modesty and moderation higher than any talent
or ability. It even held in low esteem women who indulged in vigorous activities; sports of any kind were denied to them.
The Proper Lady could only entertain herself by activities such as sewing, piano playing, singing, needlework, and painting.
Modesty was carried to extremes, for no proper woman could admit to sexual urges. The double standard of sexual morality was
everywhere the norm; for a woman to lose her virginity outside of marriage was equivalent to dishonor—but men were expected
to seduce them if they could. In the words of an eighteenth-century text for the education of young women: “This [virginity]
lost, every thing that is dear and valuable to a woman, is lost along with it; the peace of her own mind, the love of her
friends, the esteem of the world, the enjoyment of present pleasure, and all hopes of future happiness.”
Encouraged by Joseph Johnson, Mary used her newfound fame to take up the cudgels for her sex. Thoughts rushed from her brain
as she wrote her magnum opus in just six weeks. Mary handed
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
to the printer in January 1792. In it, she launched a frontal attack on the Proper Lady and defined as “negative virtues”
such Proper Lady ideals as patience and docility. She urged women to demand their rights and declared that she wanted to “rouse
my sex from the flowery bed, on which they supinely sleep life away.” Wollstonecraft declared that women were human beings
before they were women, and they were entitled to equal civil and political rights as well as opportunity for education and
economic advancement. “I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves,” she wrote. She boldly criticized no
less an exalted personage than Rousseau for his notions of female inferiority.
Mary asserted that the differences between men and women were mainly the result of upbringing and education, not of biology.
She insisted that women had the same capacity for learning that men did and she wanted girls to have equal opportunity for
learning and education, preferably in coeducational schools outside the home. Recognizing the connection between equality
and becoming financially independent, she insisted that girls be encouraged to aim for success in the professions.
Perhaps because of her own mixed feelings, Mary played down the importance of sexual relations, advocating friendship between
men and women, rather than passion. (She was soon to change these views.) She constantly struggled with the conflict between
her need for love and her desire to dominate —“to be first.” Moreover, she wanted the respect and rewards that society gave
to the Proper Lady, though she refused to abide by the standards that society demanded in return. In short, she wished to
have it both ways.