Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
With the publication of
Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
she reached the height of her fame. It became an immediate bestseller and made Wollstonecraft one of the most famous women
in Europe. French, German, and Italian versions appeared. (The sister-in-law of Abigail Adams, wife of the man who would become
the second president of the United States, demanded that Abigail buy her a copy when she accompanied her husband to London.)
Not all the attention was favorable. Hannah More, a prolific writer of pious plays, stories, and poetry, wrote to Horace Walpole:
“I have been much pestered to read the
Rights of Women
[
sic
] but am invincibly resolved not to do it . . . there is something fantastic and absurd in the very title. How many ways there
are of being ridiculous! I am sure I have as much liberty as I can make a good use of, now I am an old maid, and when I was
a young one, I had, I dare say, more than was good for me.”
By 1792 Wollstonecraft had changed her appearance again, allowing her hair to assume its natural curl and cutting it in a
fringe in the latest French style. Her new relaxed clothing reflected French revolutionary sensibility, as well as medical
approval: Erasmus Darwin had written that less restrictive clothing styles were good for one’s health, prompting many relieved
Englishwomen to cast off their stays.
Mary’s newfound fame had not lessened her obsession with Fuseli. In a desperate move, she went to his home and asked his wife
to allow her to live there in a kind of ménage à trois. Despite Mary’s willingness to take second place for once in her life,
Sophia rejected her offer and warned her never to visit the house again.
Crushed, Mary wrote to Joseph Johnson, “I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! . . . There is certainly a great
defect in my mind—my wayward heart creates its own misery—Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea
of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child—long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon
as I get it.” Ironically, Mary’s daughter would have to suffer the same “threesome” problem with her husband, Percy Shelley.
M
ary escaped this humiliation by going to France in December 1792, arriving as the Revolution was entering a new, more radical
phase: France was now at war with Prussia and Austria, and by a narrow margin the Revolutionary Convention had sentenced King
Louis XVI to death, something that shocked even many of the original revolutionaries. Yet publicly, the situation seemed calm,
even joyous. The common people felt they had triumphed. Dr. John Moore, an Englishman who lived in Paris at this time, reported,
The public walks are crowded with men, women, and children, of all conditions, with the most gay, unconcerned countenances
imaginable. A stranger just come to Paris . . . would naturally imagine from the frisky behaviour and cheerful faces of the
company he meets that this day was a continuation of a series of days appointed for dissipation, mirth, and enjoyment. He
could not possibly imagine that the ground he is walking over [had been] . . . covered with the bodies of slaughtered men;
or that the gay lively people he saw were so lately overwhelmed with sorrow and dismay.
Mary’s fame preceded her, and she soon made friends among the small English community in Paris, where she found many involved
in love affairs. A freer attitude toward sex was part of the spirit of the revolution. Nuns and priests were encouraged to
marry, for celibacy was regarded as unhealthy; unmarried mothers were helped rather than blamed; women argued for their right
to divorce their husbands. Mary also found kindred spirits among the Girondists, members of the more moderate revolutionary
faction who often met at the Jacobin Club, particularly the wife of a Girondist government minister, Madame Roland, who was
one of the social and intellectual leaders of revolutionary Paris.
But danger loomed. In January 1793, the king was guillotined, an act that led to a declaration of war from England and Spain,
countries whose monarchs felt their own necks threatened. In France, foreigners now began to encounter hostile stares; the
government told landlords and innkeepers to report any suspicious activity, especially by English and Spanish residents. Mary’s
friends whispered stories of people being taken from their homes by revolutionary guards in the middle of the night. She slept
with a burning candle in her room, fearful of what might happen.
In these tense circumstances Mary met the American Gilbert Imlay, who would bring a personal revolution into her life. Mary
was thirty-three and Imlay a bachelor of thirty-nine. Born in New Jersey, he had fought in the American Revolution and was
now a businessman and writer. Tall, handsome, and skilled at seduction and flattery, he could claim literary kinship with
Mary, for he was the author of a book,
A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America,
and at the time she met him, he was completing a novel, later published as
The Emigrants
. He told Mary openly that he had lived with other women and that he intended never to marry. Mary’s fame as well as her attractiveness
and lively spirit were attractions that led him to court her.
As Mary learned more about his business interests, Imlay took on a romantic image. He was involved in a shady project to organize
a French expedition against the Spanish colony in Louisiana, and he may also have been engaged in smuggling goods through
the blockade that Britain, now openly hostile to the French government, maintained off the coast of France. Mary began to
idealize him as a model of Rousseauian simplicity, as Europeans liked to imagine Americans (a pattern set by Benjamin Franklin’s
wearing animal skins and posing as a frontiersman during his visits to France). Besides, she was growing older and the humiliation
she suffered over Fuseli led her to overlook Imlay’s faults. By April, the two were always together and they soon consummated
their love. According to her, she experienced orgasm—what she called “suffusion”—for the first time.
The pace of events in France pushed the relationship along. After the king’s head fell, no one was safe, and the Revolution
began to turn on its own. In May and June, the Girondists were rounded up; Mary’s close friend Madame Roland was among those
arrested. To protect herself, Mary moved to the Parisian suburb of Neuilly. Here, in the summer months of 1793, she and Gilbert
enjoyed the height of their affair. Now infatuated, Mary wanted to make the relationship permanent, but Imlay suddenly departed
for the port of Le Havre to carry out one of his shady business deals. Not wishing to be alone, Mary moved back to Paris,
where conditions were even more dangerous than before. Robespierre, the most radical French leader, had come to power and
instituted the phase of the Revolution known as the Terror. Madame Roland was one of thousands of former supporters of the
Revolution who now went to the guillotine. All British citizens fell under suspicion, and to protect Mary, Imlay had registered
her as his wife and an American citizen. In October, the English who had remained in Paris—including many of Mary’s friends—were
placed under arrest, but Mary was protected by her new status.
Imlay was still spending much of his time in Le Havre, and Mary now realized she was pregnant: “I have felt some gentle twitches,”
she wrote Imlay, “which make me begin to think, that I am nourishing a creature who will soon be sensible of my care.—This
thought has . . . produced an overflowing of tenderness toward you.” Meanwhile Mary worked on a new book,
A Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution,
further endangering herself, for even her new citizenship status would not protect her if the work were to be discovered.
She walked to the Place de la Revolution daily and witnessed the guillotine in action. When she expressed her horror at the
gruesome sight, others in the crowd warned her to be silent.
Her days were taken up with writing: in her letters to Imlay she poured out her feelings: “I do not want to be loved like
a goddess; but I wish to be necessary to you.” She hinted that she wished an invitation to join him in Le Havre. Receiving
none, she acted on her own, finding a carriage and driver to make the journey. There, on May 14, she gave birth to a daughter.
Mary named the girl Fanny after her closest friend, Fanny Blood. Imlay signed the birth certificate, still claiming he and
Mary were married.
They spent the next three months together, happy ones for Mary as she basked in the feeling of being wife and mother. She
and Imlay talked of settling in America, but by this time he was growing tired of playing at marriage and his finances required
attention. He told Mary he had to go to London on business. She returned to Paris, which was safer now that Robespierre had
himself become a victim of the guillotine and the Terror was over.
Mary suffered through a very cold winter, waiting for Imlay to return but receiving nothing but excuses. Her own letters became
more insistent, and she wrote to him much as she had earlier to Jane Arden. On January 9, 1795, she told him, “I do not chuse
to be a secondary object.” Little Fanny was a demanding child, although caring for her distracted Mary from allowing despair
to overwhelm her. Finally she decided to return to England, writing Imlay from Paris, “My soul is weary,—I am sick at heart.”
When Mary reached London in April, she and Fanny and a French maid moved into a house Imlay rented for them, but he was cold
to her; he had taken a new mistress, a pretty actress. After he told Mary frankly that he did not want to live with her and
Fanny as a husband and father, Mary attempted suicide by taking laudanum. It was a cry for help, for she had sent suicide
notes to both Imlay and her mentor Johnson. In Mary’s novel
Maria,
when the heroine is deserted by her lover, she also takes laudanum, but a vision of the fictional Maria’s baby girl makes
her vomit the poison. In real life, Imlay, who had received Mary’s suicide note in time, came to revive her.
As in her affair with Fuseli, Mary was blinded by her passion, still hoping to save her relationship with Imlay despite all
indications that it was over. He was planning to go on a business trip to Scandinavia and she volunteered to take his place.
Perhaps wishing to get rid of her, he agreed, giving her some assignments to carry out. She set off with Fanny and her nursemaid,
visiting Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and then continuing on to Germany. During this trip she kept writing to Imlay, hoping
to revive his feelings for her. At the same time, she analyzed herself keenly:
Love is a want [need] of my heart. Aiming at tranquility, I have almost destroyed all the energy of my soul. . . . Despair,
since the birth of my child, has rendered me stupid . . . the desire of regaining peace (do you understand me?) has made me
forget the respect due to my own emotions—sacred emotions, that are the sure harbingers of the delights I was formed to enjoy—and
shall enjoy, for nothing can extinguish the heavenly spark.
When she returned, she found Imlay was now openly living with another woman. Mary’s humiliation was now both complete and
public. She again sought escape through suicide—this time with more determination. She wrote to Imlay, “I would encounter
a thousand deaths, rather than a night like the last. I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my
being snatched from the death I seek.” On a rainy afternoon in October 1795, Mary carried out her plan. She rented a boat
and rowed herself up the Thames to the Putney Bridge, which she had learned was less crowded than Battersea Bridge, the closest
span to her flat. Leaving the boat, she walked back and forth along the bridge in the pouring rain to make sure that her clothes
were so wet that she would sink under the waters. As she threw herself into the dark cold river, she expected death to embrace
her kindly, the way Goethe had described it in
The Sorrows of Young Werther:
“I do not shudder to take the cold and fatal cup.” (
Werther
was a bestseller that had prompted many suicides throughout Europe and was later to be one of the books that the monster
reads in
Frankenstein
.) But as water filled Mary’s lungs, she began to choke and was in pain before losing consciousness. A man who had seen her
leap off the bridge jumped in and saved her. He took her to a tavern, where a doctor revived her. Death, apparently, would
not accept her sacrifice.
Imlay offered financial help but Mary was too proud to accept it. She saw Imlay for the last time in 1796 and wrote to him
the next day, “I part with you in peace.” She resumed her writing career to earn her keep and get on with her life. From the
Scandinavian trip came a charming book,
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark.
The act of writing it gave her some respite from the turmoil that raged within her, and she began to come to grips with Imlay’s
true character, realizing that the relationship could never have worked out the way she had wanted. Perhaps most importantly,
Letters
won the heart of William Godwin, whom Mary would meet a second time, with happier results than the first.
W
illiam Godwin described himself accurately as “bold and adventurous in opinions, not in life.” Though not as well known today
as he once was, Godwin was one of the most important radical thinkers of his time. His courage did not extend to his relations
with women, and it was only after becoming involved with Mary that he explored the intricacies of love. Their short life together
provided for each of them the emotional and intellectual companionship that they had lacked. For their daughter Mary Shelley,
who never knew her mother, their mutual affection was an ideal that continually inspired her fiction and her own desires.
Godwin was born March 3, 1756, in Wisbech in the Cambridgeshire Fens—a bleak area where the North Sea constantly threatens
to overwhelm the land. He was the son and grandson of clergymen—so-called Dissenters who were stricter in their beliefs than
the members of the Church of England. This devout religious background created an emotional rigidity that made William more
comfortable with books than with the love and affection of other people. It fostered his shyness and coldness and did long-term
psychological damage that he would pass on to his daughter.