Vindication
Authors: Lyndall Gordon
A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
For Siamon
I amâ¦going to be the first of a new genusâI tremble at the attemptâ¦
M
ARY WOLLSTONECRAFT TO HER SISTER EVERINA
, 1787
PLATE SECTION ONE
Mary Wollstonecraft: Private Collection
Gillray cartoon: courtesy of the Warden and Scholars of New College Oxford/Bridgeman Art Library
Margaret King: Houghton Library, Harvard University
George Ogle: Conway Library, The Courtauld Institute of Art, London
Joseph Johnson: By W. Sharpe after Moses Haughton. National Portrait Gallery Henry Fuseli: National Portrait Gallery
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
: Mary Evans/The Woman's Library
Joel Barlow: Houghton Library, Harvard University: Ms Am 1448.2
Ruth Barlow: Connecticut Historical Society Museum, Hartford, CT
Tom Paine: National Portrait Gallery
Helen Maria Williams: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, New York Public Library
The Chinese Baths in Paris: established by Lenoir (w/c on paper), French School, (19th century) / Musée de la Ville de Paris, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, France, Lauros/Giraudon/Bridgeman Art Library
George Caleb Bingham,
Daniel Boone Escorting Settlers through the Cumberland Gap
, 1851â52. Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University in St. Louis.
PLATE SECTION TWO
William Godwin: Private collection
Swedish log: Riksarkivet, Stockholm
Risør: courtesy Knut Henning Thygesen, Risør, Norway
Elbe at Altona, 1790: courtesy of Staatsarchiv, Hamburg
Elizabeth Inchbald: National Portrait Gallery
Amelia Opie: National Portrait Gallery
Mary Wollstonecraft: National Portrait Gallery
Mary Shelley: Private collection
Fables Illustration: title page from Aesop
, Fables, Ancient and Modern
, 1805
Margaret Mount Cashell: by Edmé Quenedey, Paris, c.1801. Courtesy of Pforzheimer Library, NYPL
The Lover's Seat: Shelley (1792â1822) and Mary Godwin in Old St. Pancras Churchyard, 1877 (oil on canvas), Frith, William Powell (1819â1909) / Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library
Claire Clairmont: Mary Evans Picture Library
Byron: Mary Evans Picture Library
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Mary Evans Picture Library
Charlotte Brontë: National Portrait Gallery
Emily Dickinson: The Amherst College Library
George Eliot: National Portrait Gallery
Henry James: Mary Evans Picture Library
Virginia Woolf: Mary Evans Picture Library
I
n December 1792 an Englishwoman of thirty-three crossed the Channel to revolutionary France. She was travelling alone on her way to Paris at a time when Englishmen like Wordsworth were speeding in the opposite directionâback to the safety of their country, in fear of the oncoming Terror. When, at length, Mary Wollstonecraft arrived at a friend's
hôtel
, she found it deserted, one folding door opening after another, till she reached her room at the far end. There she sat by her candle, knowing no one and unable to speak the language. The silence, in contrast to London, was eerie. As she looked up from the letter she was writing, eyes glared through a glass door. Looming through the darkness, bloody hands showed themselves and shook at her. She longed for the sound of a footstep; she missed her cat. âI want to see something alive,' her pen scratched, âdeath in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy.'
*
That day she had seen the King carried past her window at nine in the morning, on the way to his trial. She records the stillness and emptiness of the streets, the closed shutters, the drums of the National Guard, her own assent to the âmajesty of the people', and the sight of âLouis sitting with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach going
to meet his death'. Violence had always roused her. As a child she had witnessed scenes of violence at home; she had heard âthe lash resound on the slaves' naked sides'; and now even Louis XVI called out her tears.
This will be the story of an independent and compassionate woman who devised a blueprint for human change, held to it through the Terror and private trials, and passed it on to her daughters and future generations. âI amâ¦going to be the first of a new genus,' Mary Wollstonecraft told her sister Everina, âthe peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.'
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She combined a dreamy voluptuousness with quick words, fixing brown eyes on her listener. The eyes didn't quite match, as though the right eye lingered in thought while the left drew one into intimacy with that thought. I want to dispel the myth of wildness: her voice was rational, deploring a fashion for âromantic sentiments' instead of âjust opinions'. She wished âto see women neither heroines nor brutes, but reasonable creatures'. An early portrait presents a leader, austere in black, with powdered hair. Later portraits show the writer, her locks bound by a scarf, turning from her book to ruminate; and a sensible wife, auburn hair bundled out of sight, in the new, simple look of white muslin caught up under a rounded breast. She was pregnant at the time, but was always a large woman with a warm physical presence, unlike the bluestocking, the narrow female scholar of the eighteenth century.
Her husband, the philosopher and social reformer William Godwin, called her the âfirmest champion' and âthe greatest ornament her sex ever had to boast'. She was famous, then notorious. For most, her freedom to shape her life as she saw fit had to fade. Our society still repeats stories of doom, as though genius in a woman exacts a terrible end; as though it must be unnatural. Here, we test a different story, stripping the interchangeable masks of womanhoodâqueen of hearts, whore, waifâto seek out the novelty of what a ânew genus' implies: a new kind of creature who found her voice in a brief moment of historical optimism when, as Wordsworth put it, âEurope was rejoiced,/France standing at the top of golden hours,/And human nature seeming born again.' Everything in
Mary's unsheltered life prepared her for the impact of the first heady phase of the French Revolution when all traditional forms of existence seemed ripe for change. At that moment, she stood ready to turn revolution towards a future for âhuman creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties'.
This pioneer of women's rights is even more a pioneer of character: in the secret mirror of her mind, the first of her kind. How did she shed, one by one, the stale plots that leach the âreal life' out of us? A ânew genus' needs a new plot of existence. Mary Wollstonecraft is, in this sense, rewriting her life for lives to come. Though she speaks of âimprovement' in the acceptable terms of her day, it's a grand design and, as such, vulnerable to those with the power to plunge her back into familiar scenes of wasted livesâwasted like her mother, prime victim of violence at home, the person for whom Mary the child felt her earliest, most instinctive and desperate pity. Virginia Woolf pictures a dauntless biographic creator: âEvery day she made theories by which life should be lived; and every day she came smack against the rock of other people's prejudices. Every day tooâfor she was no pedant, no cold-blooded theoristâsomething was born in her that thrust aside her theories and modelled them afresh.' She hails the French Revolution; then hates its bloodshed. She shuns marriage; then marries. We are tempted to criticise her inconsistencyâand then remember that âa foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'. To see Mary as shifting and rash would be to scale her down. Dimly, through the glare of celebrity and slander, it's possible to make out the shape of a new genus reading, testing, growing, but still uncategorised.
Each age retells this story; there have been invaluable portraits, from Godwin's âchampion' at the end of the eighteenth century to Mrs Fawcett's heroine for the suffragist Cause, and from Claire Tomalin's outstanding image of the wounded lover to Janet Todd's moody drama queen as seen through the exasperated eyes of her sisters. All present faces we can't forget. Yet there's also a face few see: that unnamed thing she feels herself to be. This biography will bring out the full genius of her evolving character as she projects from her generation to the next, unfolding with astonishing fertility from one kind of life to another. Each phase of her life
is a new experimentââan experiment from the start', Woolf insists. There is an unprecedented authenticity in her voice and actions that cannot conform to standard scenarios.
Mary Wollstonecraft's unguardedness has made her an easy target. Godwin's
Memoirs
(set down with admiration for her spirit and pity for her sufferings) exposed her to attacks in the late 1790s, sustained through much of the following century, and renewed in our time. Horace Walpole, the gothic novelist, called her a âhyena in petticoats'; John Adams, the second President of the United States, called her âthis mad woman', âfoolish', âlicentious'. It was said that the improper private life of the author of the
Rights of Woman
must discredit the book itself. In the opening year of our present century the
Times Literary Supplement
judged her âlittle short of monstrous'. The time has come to probe the source of the slursâpromiscuity, folly, self-defeatâas we open up what's most enduring in this life: nothing less than a proposal to draw on women's skills in order to realise the full promise of our speciesâa more comprehensive purpose than feminist campaigns for the vote, opportunities and equal pay.
Part of the appeal of Mary Wollstonecraft is that she's fallible. She is proud and self-preoccupied, and does not suffer in silence. Does egotism detract from greatness, and is it more fallible in a woman? Is she too prone to collapse when she fears to lose the character she's bringing into being? What I hope to bring out is how her egotism and despair coexist with a pattern of extraordinary resilience. Ahead is always a new phase of experiment: a single young woman setting up on her own in London, resolved to earn her living by her pen; a journey far north to Norway to confront a captain accused of stealing a cargo of silver; a surprising marriage to a confirmed and cold bachelor. This will not be a story of defeat. She's struck down, it's true, by the counter-revolutionary temper of the 1790s (with the onset of the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars), but her honesty and eloquence, sustained by four women in the next generation, continue to re-emerge.
Though the late nineteenth century brought some revival of public interest in Wollstonecraft, the price paid was suppression of what were regarded as improprieties in her life. Another revival came a hundred years later with a new stage of the women's movement and a spate of biographies
that exposed what was seen as sexual recklessness. Her attachments to men remained an embarrassment to late-twentieth-century feminists. Some discovered signs of prudery, and others saw in her domesticity a betrayal of her case for independence. The aim of her critics was not necessarily to kill her cause, but to appropriate it in limited terms. Scholarly fashion has locked her to the conduct books for girls and ephemeral pamphlets tossed out by the scribblers of the day. The effect has been to obscure what it is in her books that transcends her time.
Many of her issues presage the present: women's need to unfold their faculties as this knocks against the rock-face of their conflicting need for sexual commitment; the problems of communication between the sexes; long-term partnership in place of marriage; economic independence; the freedom to express desires without derision or loss of dignity; and, not least, the problems and triumphs of the single parent in the context of Wollstonecraft's belief that a child should not be left to the care of strangers. Her views on pregnancy, childbirth, breast-feeding and continuous parental closeness, unusual in her day, are strikingly modern. She speaks differently to us in this century, less on women's rights and more on both sexes striving to integrate private needs with family responsibilities. What sort of person is a desirable partner? What sort of arrangement should people devise for living together in a permanent partnership? Wollstonecraft is as interesting for her mistakesâher near-collapse into the familiar roles of unrequited lover, discarded mistress and unmarried motherâas for the imaginative solution she eventually finds.
In the course of an eventful life, on the scene of the most far-reaching revolution in history, Mary Wollstonecraft tried out a variety of roles. There was the constant danger that she would lose her way. In the 1770s, 1780s and 1790s she could have acted out a set of familiar scenarios: the uneducated schoolteacher; the humble governess; the scribbling hack; the fallen woman following a predictable course towards suicide; the practical traveller; the pregnant wifeâyet each time she reinvents the role. How does she find the strength to transform stale plots of existence against overwhelming odds?
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Her cause went back to her improvident and violent father. Mary was born on 27 April 1759 in a tall brick house in London. Master silk weavers, clustering near the Spitalfields market, had developed their skills from French Huguenots expelled a century earlier by Louis XIV. Wollstonecrafts had lived in London from the seventeenth century, though the bulk of the family was based in Lancashire. Mary's home was in Primrose Street, most of it now long flattened to make way for Liverpool Street Station. What was a residential area in the eighteenth century is now a scene of glassy office blocks and gliding cars. All that remains is a remnant of Primrose Street just north of the station; Spital Square with its market; a modest house that was the birthplace of John Wesley's mother Susanna in 1669; a more elegant Georgian house on a dingy parking lot, now headquarters of a society for conservation; and the local Church of St Botolph Without Bishopsgate where Keats was christened in 1795. Back in the 1750s, Wollstonecrafts were members of the church, and on 20 May 1759 Mary was christened there in the established Anglican faith. She was the eldest daughter of Edward John Wollstonecraft who fancied himself a gentleman, but was no gentleman at home. His unfortunate wife was Elizabeth Dickson who came of a family in the wine trade and connected with the landed gentry in Ballyshannon, County Donegal, in Ireland. In 1756 she had married Mr Wollstonecraft, at that time nearing the end of his apprenticeship to his father, a wealthy Spitalfields weaver who specialised in silk handkerchiefs.
Mary was not the favourite of either parent. Mrs Wollstonecraft favoured her eldest son, Edward (called Ned). Mary's first autobiographical novel,
Mary
, presents a heroine who craves an object to love and whose mother disappoints her: âthe apparent partiality she shewed to her brother gave her exquisite painâproduced a kind of habitual melancholy'. A second autobiographical novel,
Maria
,
or the Wrongs of Woman
, labels the eldest brother of the narrator âthe deputy tyrant of the house', the result of his mother's doting. Mrs Wollstonecraft was âharsh' with her eldest daughter, and determined to exact obedience. Lord Kames, a Scottish judge whose views were popular, said that âwomen, destined by nature to be obedient, ought to be disciplined early to bear wrongs without murmuring'. It was not, then, unusual for Mary's early training to silence her voice. She was
made to sit in silence for three to four hours at a time, when others were in the room. Though, as a child, she did question the point of such an exercise, as well as submission to contradictory orders, Mary accepted her mother's reproofs as clues to what might win her love. She was avid for instruction and, given a father she could not respect, all the more attentive to her mother. For Mary to own up to her faults made her feel, she said, restored to her better self.
Mrs Wollstonecraft was softer with her younger daughters, the handsome Elizabeth (known as Eliza or Bess) and the robust Everina who lived to the age of eighty-five. There were three other brothers: James who entered the navy; Charles who emigrated to America; and Henry Woodstock who was apprenticed to an apothecary-surgeon. We can assume that Mrs Wollstonecraft practised wholesome methods since, unusually for that time, none of her children died, and the infant care Mary Wollstonecraft would advance in the 1790s may well have derived from her home. Yet, though the seven children had a good start, later on their morale would falter or fail in various ways. The two eldest were more fortunate: Mary with her irrepressible intelligence, and Ned with his better schooling and prospects as the eldest son.