Vindication (44 page)

‘I am pained by the recollection of our conversation last night,' he wrote to her from his rooms next morning. ‘The sole principle of conduct of which I am conscious in my behaviour to you, has been in every thing to study your happiness.' He reminded her how hurt she had been when they met, and the care he had taken. Some return was due to his distress. ‘Do not let me be wholly disappointed.'

Mrs Inchbald's snub had been predictable, and the quieter withdrawal of Mrs Siddons was accepted with resignation. The very visibility of an actress made it difficult for her to present the acceptable image of retiring womanhood. Those who were mistresses, like Dora Jordan and Mrs Robinson, were thought of as loose. This meant that respectable actresses (like Mrs Siddons and Mrs Inchbald) guarded their reputations with extra caution.

Mary remarked: ‘Those who are bold enough to advance before the age
they live in…must learn to brave censure. We ought not to be too anxious respecting the opinion of others.'

Snubs and jeers from other quarters were not wanting. Godwin patiently explained himself to those who accused him of inconsistency. Here is one such reply to a reader:

This rationalisation, on 9 May 1797, conceals the increasingly obvious fact that Godwin's inner and more private feelings were opposed to the supposed gist of his doctrines.

One friend remained staunch. To Mary Hays, Wollstonecraft's manners when she unbent in private conversation ‘had a charm that subdued the heart'. Hays had visited her friend almost daily during her bad times, and promoted this marriage, by inviting her to the Godwin tea-party in January 1796 and also by prompting a change of name. Like Wollstonecraft, Hays looked on female desire as a trait in its own right,
not as current piety would have it, called out only in answer to male instinct. Hays's passion for Mr Frend was a lone thing. Her recent novel
Memoirs of Emma Courtney
, much discussed early in 1797, scandalised conventional readers when Emma dares to declare her love to the politely indifferent Mr Harley, and though this heroine suffers an excess of sensibility, she never loses her self-respect. Unrequited love, what Emma Courtney calls ‘the deceitful poison of hope', bonded Hays and Wollstonecraft more closely than shared ties to Johnson (reinforced by Wollstonecraft's resumption of her assistant-editorship of the
Analytical
, with Hays amongst the reviewers she commissioned). They joined in resisting the marriage market, the mis-education of women and the glorification of war. Soldiers, in Emma's terms, are thugs: ‘their trade is
murder
, and their trappings but the gaudy pomp of sacrifice'. Worse than common ruffians and housebreakers, they ‘cut down millions of their species, ravage whole towns and cities, and carry devastation through a country'. She echoes Wollstonecraft when she says the Romans ‘had in them too much of the destructive spirit'. Godwin was the kind of man Hays upheld; in the character of her ‘good' mentor Mr Francis, his eyes pierce the soul.

 

A longer outcome of the marriage was its release of Imlay from obligation. In legal terms marriage meant economic support. If ‘Mrs Imlay' was now Mrs Godwin, she had no further claim on Mr Imlay, and this was to have consequences for blithe little Fanny, aged three. By now, a year had passed since Mary had discussed provision for Fanny as she walked with Imlay along the New Road, and as yet he had sent nothing. Mary was beset with debts and could not expect Godwin to help. He lived in a small way on advances for successive books, with nothing to spare. It would have been painful for a woman as scrupulous as Mary to bring burdens with her into a marriage that was not what Godwin had wanted. Over the last year her power to write had faltered. It may seem strange that this should have happened after the success of her
Travels
, but strong characters like Mary Wollstonecraft are often able to sustain an effort in the heat of crisis, only to sink when the heat is off. She owned something of this to Everina. ‘My
pecuniary distress arises from myself, from my not having the power to employ my mind and fancy, when my soul was on the rack.'

Since the pregnancy was still a secret, she could not explain herself to Johnson who, understandably, was not disposed to support her indefinitely. Mary was obliged to fund their father, who over the last two years had received only £35 from Ned Wollstonecraft's administration of the Primrose Street property. Ned by now was sunk in debt. Their brother James was equally useless. He had given up his lieutenancy, lost his money, and leant on Mary to open a path to Paris. While there, he was arrested for spying and turned to Joel Barlow to bail him out. Barlow, who obliged for Mary's sake, was not repaid. Eventually, Barlow let loose a bellow of fury with James Wollstonecraft's ingenious excuses. Mary, who had long given up on Ned, blamed Charles for his continued silence on the subject of their father. She was forced to confide in Johnson, on whom her debts fell, and as her pregnancy advanced he took it upon himself to approach Charles once more on her behalf.

Johnson asked Charles in vain to return a sum of money lent to him when he had sailed for America in 1791, adding with civil irony: ‘You will add interest or not at your own pleasure.' Charles preferred to take the line that Johnson had profited so greatly from Mary's publications that he really owed
her
money. It's a measure of what she had to shoulder that mild, benevolent Joseph Johnson eventually lost patience with her family.

During February and early March 1797, Everina had stayed with Mary,
en route from Dublin to a temporary post with Josiah Wedgwood II near Stoke-on-Trent. It was a strained visit. The sisters had little to say to each other. After Everina left, her seamstress came to the door, pleading her poverty. Mary had to pay the debt of three pounds and four shillings. Another caller was the brother of Everina's friend Miss Cristall, who prevailed on Mary to give him all her ready cash.

‘I am continually getting myself into scrapes of this kind,' she groaned to her sister. ‘I must get some [money] in a day or two, Johnson teazes me, and I will then send you a guinea'–for Everina herself was making some claim. ‘I did imagine that Mr Imlay would have paid, at least, the first half-year's interest of the bond given to me for Fanny. A year, however, is nearly elapsed, and I hear nothing of it, and have had bills sent to me which, I take it for granted, he
forgot
to pay. Had Mr Imlay been punctual, I should, after the first year…have put by the interest for Fanny, never expecting to receive the principal, and not chusing to be under any obligation to him.'

In the end Godwin rescued her by an appeal to Wedgwood for £50 (despite her protest) in January, and then £50 more on 19 April. In the midst of her troubles, Mary took pity on her servant's boy, who had nowhere to stay. She took him in, ‘poor fellow', and sent him to school.

 

‘Let my wrongs sleep with me!' Mary Wollstonecraft had declared to Imlay on 10 October 1795 when she had thought to end her life.
The Wrongs of Woman
was to be an ambitious novel uniting the particular wrongs of the Wollstonecraft sisters with a wider spectrum of wrongs inflicted on the defenceless poor, from pressing unwilling men into service in the navy to the sexual abuse of servant-girls. Following
The Rights of Woman, The Wrongs
is a sequel on legal wrongs in fictional form. Wollstonecraft began the book with help from Godwin in the second half of 1796, at the time of her delayed recovery from Imlay, but it was not until February 1797 that she explored a setting for her drama: a madhouse. There, a wife called Maria is imprisoned–inexplicably, since her sanity is as clear to the reader as it is to herself. Her challenge is to sustain her sanity as the weeks pass, surrounded as she is by all-too-real gothic scenes: the howls of mental agony and the
shrieks of passions run out of control, which she pities but distances by day. By night, however, in her sleep, the horrors penetrate her mind.

These were horrors Mary Wollstonecraft saw for herself. On 6 February, Godwin and the novel's publisher, Johnson, accompanied her to Bedlam Hospital for the insane. Johnson's support for the subject of
Wrongs
went back to the anonymous book he had published long before, in 1777, on
The Laws Respecting Women
, which looks at ‘cases upon Women being confined in private Madhouses on the Plea of Insanity'. Before 1700 few were confined in this way, but in the course of the eighteenth century private ‘madhouses' became profitable. They were unregulated by law until 1774, and, even after, were as unsupervised as Wollstonecraft reveals. In February 1797 she asked Godwin for the second volume of
Caleb Williams
, where Caleb is unjustly imprisoned and then meets the thieves, who see themselves as the mirror image of their social superiors who thieve within the law.
*

Everina's visit that February gave another stir to the brew. Mary complained of her sister: her peevishness, her silence. Embarrassing evenings at home ticked by. Why was Everina Wollstonecraft glum? This was unlike the Everina whose light spirits used to cheer Mary at Newington Green, even if they could not dispel the autumnal moodiness of Bess. It's true that Everina caught a cold in London, but there was another reason for gloom. Everina and Bess had not communicated with Mary for a year and a half, not since May 1795 when Mary had concealed the fact that she and Imlay were unmarried and at breaking point, pretending instead that they were too intimate to take Bess into their home. Bess had copied this humiliating letter to Everina, who shared her dismay. In addition, Mary had promised her sisters that Imlay would take on a husband's obligation to help them, but this was always deferred. In
Wrongs
Maria asks her husband to give £1000 to each of her sisters, and his answer is ‘have you lost your senses?'

So it was that Everina sat glum and wordless when she stayed with Mary, who had arranged a post for her with Godwin's friends, the high-minded
and generous Wedgwoods. The post was too advantageous to turn down, or Everina would not have left Bess (who had joined her in Ireland). As the clock ticked through these tense evenings, the moans of the unfortunate third sister hover in the air of Everina's silence. Bess is present, whether the sisters discuss her or not, for scenes with Bess flood back in Mary's memory–back to 1782 and her escape from the misery of the Wollstonecraft family into the worse misery of marriage; the merchant bridegroom, satisfied to have performed his part in conferring his goods on a wife; her deteriorating state of mind after childbirth; the dark of winter in January 1784, the flight to Hackney, the closed, rocking coach, and Bess bewailing her separation from her baby; Bishop's punitive refusal to send word of the child; then months later, the sad death of little Elizabeth Bishop cut off from her mother in her father's unyielding custody.
Wrongs
conjures up the bereaved mother who ‘looked like a spectre', whose ‘eyes darted out of her head' as the news is brought, and who asks to be alone, ‘hiding her face in her handkerchief, to conceal her anguish'. Her sister's story is central to Wollstonecraft's exploration of psychic damage.