Vindication (74 page)

destruction of GI's silver ship
: Nyström,
Scandinavian Journey
.

another story
: For the Barlows' later adventures, see the Internet site accompanying this book.

‘malicious calumnies'
: Houghton: b MS Am 1448 (529).

‘wild ambition'
: KP, i, 286–7.

WG's letter to JJ
: Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.

height of crack-down in 179
7–
8
: Butler,
Romantics
,
Rebels & Reactionaries
, 83;
Austen
, 116–17, 121.

WG's obituary for JJ
: Tyson,
Joseph Johnson
, 215–16.

Edgeworth's eulogy for JJ
: Ibid., epigraph to ch. 1.

‘Of Posthumous Fame'
: Essay VIII,
The Enquirer
, in
Political Writings
, v, 204.

the ‘self-centredness of the dying'
: Todd,
Wollstonecraft
, 456.

Hays's obituary for MW
: ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft'.

intolerance of homosexuality
: Fiona MacCarthy,
Byron
, 37, gives a useful summary as background to Byron's ‘mingled fascination and revulsion' while he was at school.

MW's correspondence with Fuseli
: Their letters were subsequently lost to sight, thought to have been destroyed by her grandson, Sir Percy Shelley.

Kegan Paul's letter to Browning
: Beinecke. Kegan Paul uses the word ‘slander' (‘for such I believe it to be') in the course of the letter. He is, however, mistaken in thinking the slander originated in an anonymous ‘Defence of the Character and Conduct of the late Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin' (1803), which mingles defence ‘with a good deal of venom', KP, i, 206). He believed it written by Mrs Inchbald, ‘who hated Mary like poison', he told Browning. Of WG's odd statement that if HF had been free, he would have been the man of her choice, Kegan Paul says convincingly: ‘It is probable that he had only heard of the more unfavourable version of the story at second hand.' Browning's reply (15 Jan. 1883) is in Wellesley College.

Browning not deterred
: Kegan Paul wrote back on the same day, 15 Jan. Browning's second reply is now lost, but happily Mr Michael Meredith of Eton College, the general editor of the
Poetical Works of Browning
, has recovered part of the letter from North's catalogue (Nov. 1906). He warns that he can't vouch for the accuracy of the transcript. Browning dismisses his three-stanza poem as unimportant, ‘the merest trifle in the world', and seems to argue that it is more impersonal than it may appear, ‘containing no word of reference to either of the persons in question'. (This is rather disingenuous, for the names appear in the poem's title, as Kegan Paul delicately pointed out on 15 Jan.: ‘I regret just a little the names put to it, as giving some, faint, colour to a story which I think mythical.') Browning went on to summarise his approach: ‘It is simply an attempt at expressing some such thought as: “I (presumably a woman of genius) could have done and suffered anything to please you–and this, in spite of whatever the weakness in me: while, in order to please you, my utmost has been exerted, and precisely by the real strength in my nature–and yet with no effect at all.” I hope this hasty scribble will answer its purpose
…
'.

Blackwell and Garrett
: Crawford,
Enterprising Women
.

Sophia Jex-Blake
: Virginia Woolf,
Three Guineas
(Penguin Books, 1977), 74–6.

women members refused
: Burdet, ‘Schreiner's Wollstonecraft'. Details about the club in Judith Walkowitz,
City of Dreadful Night
(Virago, 1992), ch. 5.

‘She fancied…amorous'
:
Anti-Jacobin Review
, i, 94–102.

detraction
: Amusing wisdom in Dr Johnson's essay ‘On Detraction'.

16
CONVERTS

Curran on MM
: 8 June 1800. Abinger: Dep. c. 507/1. KP, i, 363.

WG's first encounters with MM
: WG to Marshall (2 Aug. 1800). KP, i, 368–70.

‘In what you say…
': MM to WG (8 Sept. 1800, 6 Apr. 1801, 6 Aug. 1801). Abinger: Dep. c. 507. Extracts in KP, i.

‘my peculiar good fortune'
: MM to WG (8 Sept. 1800),
SC
, i, 84.

marriage a bar to improvement
: Chapter on matrimony,
Education
, 31.

Moore Park near Kilworth
: Young,
Tour
, ii, 394. Young visited the estate in 1776. The owner at that time, Stephen Moore's father, was celebrated in Ireland for ‘his uncommon exertions in every branch of agriculture'. Principally cattle: ‘beautiful cows', rams, stallions, a Craven bull imported from England. He was especially proud of his turnips–30 acres of them.

‘
silliest project'
;
other comments about the marriage
: Revelations of her past for her daughters (1818).

a United Irishwoman and republican
: Power,
White Knights
, 52.

‘born with the dead'
;
‘tongued with fire'
: T.S. Eliot:
Little Gidding
, I and V.

francophilia as ‘radical chic
': Foster, ‘Remembering 1798'.

on Fitzgerald O'Connor
,
and francophilia
: Foster,
Modern Ireland
, ch. 12.

MW's copy of
The State of Ireland: Remains amongst the Irish books in the nineteenth-century library of MW's present-day descendants, the Dazzi family of San Marcello, Pistoiese.

fear of massive casualties
: Tillyard,
Citizen Lord
, 266.

Big George's atrocities
: Power,
White Knights
, 56–7.

‘As a gentleman of respectability…'
: Francis Plowden,
An Historical View of the state of Ireland
,
from the invasion of that country
,
under Henry II to its union with Great Britain
(London, 1801). Quoted by Power,
White Knights
, 53–4, 57.

‘only had two Maidenheads'
: Ibid., 39.

dooming Ireland to impotence
: Tomalin, intro. to MWS,
Maurice
, 19.

MM's pamphlets
: MM was proud of the quoted passage. She copied it to the Shelleys at the start of their friendship in the winter of 1819–20. Abinger: Dep. c. 517.

‘set hard'
: Foster,
Modern Ireland
.

alternative to ‘dominant history'
: Foster, historiographical intro.,
Irish Story
, xvi–xvii. The idea of counter-history goes back to Virginia Woolf, particularly her treatment of the Wars of the Roses in ‘The Journal of Mistress Joan Martyn' (1906), and more explicitly in the way she casts Trevelyan's history into question in
A Room of One's Own
(1929).

Bible Stories: Parts of preface quoted in St Clair, ‘Godwin as Children's Bookseller'.

‘driving at full speed'
: Miss Wilmot's travel letters to her lawyer brother, Robert Wilmot.

‘It would give me great pleasure…'
: 6 Aug. 1801. Abinger: Dep. c. 507.

shady history of ‘Mrs Clairmont'
: Thoroughly researched by St Clair,
Godwins and Shelleys
, and a summary may be found amongst the fascinating notes to Marion Kingston Stocking's edition of
The Clairmont Correspondence
(
ClCor
), 42–3. Her father appears to have been Peter (Pierre) de Vial, a French merchant who settled in Exeter. The family originated in the south of France, and in the eighteenth century migrated to Geneva.

WG on the similarity of Mrs Clairmont's letters to MW's
: 2 Apr. 1805. Abinger: Dep. c. 523.

HMW in 1801
–
2
;
MM as
‘
frosty moon'
: Wilmot,
Irish Peer
, 27, 38–9.

‘very thick together'
;
‘most excellent woman'
: 31 May and 24 July 1802. Houghton.

stays in Bond Street
…: To RB (16 July 1802). Ibid.

‘He is an aristocrat…'
: 24 July 1802. Ibid.

cross-dressing in Paris
: Wilmot,
Irish Peer
, 42–3, 50–1.

‘
Talleyrand as cormorant
': Ibid., 47.

‘republican homage'
: Ibid., 20.

Mrs Opie's
Poems
given to MM
: Information from Cristina Dazzi. Cini–Dazzi Collection.

‘The glare of the arts…'
: To RB (20 July 1802). Houghton.

ballets of Vestris
;
‘moderation of grace'
: Wilmot,
Irish Peer
, 19.

Tighe's background
: Pf: Cini Papers, folder 26, and Burke's
Landed Gentry of Ireland
. An ancestor, Richard Tighe, had been Mayor of Dublin in the 1650s, and Member for Dublin in Cromwell's Parliament of 1656. He was one of many in the Civil War generation who saw it as politic to shift sides. The family continued to serve in the Irish Parliament. They were not titled, but married into the peerage. George Tighe's grandmother on his father's side had been Lady Mary Bligh, daughter of the Earl of Darnley and Lady Theodosia Hyde who was the daughter of the 3rd Earl of Clarendon.

‘very handsome'
: Mrs Latouche (formerly Miss Tottenham) in conversation in 1837 with Laurette, the daughter of MM and Tighe, in Rome; reported by Laurette to her father shortly before his death that same year. Pf.

ardent poems
: Cini–Dazzi Collection, San Marcello. Tomalin selected apt quotations in intro. to MWS's
Maurice
, 21.

discreet adultery almost
de rigueur: MacCarthy,
Byron
, 165, pictures the cynical sexual networks of adultery. Hufton,
History of Women
, 145, says that ‘no group, unless it was the very poor, so held in contempt the rules laid down in prescriptive literature concerning marital chastity than the European aristocracies'.

‘days of adversity'
: To Scully (27 July [1806]), from Munich. Scully,
Papers
, 131–5.

mother's right to keep child to age seven
: Extended to the age of fourteen by law in the Divorce Act of 1857, too late for the mother in Anne Brontë,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
(1848), who has to go into hiding under an assumed name if she is to rescue her son from an abusive father.

‘I am resolved…'
: Scully,
Papers
, 133.

3rd Earl
: Succeeded his father who died in 1799, a year after his trial.

‘his character'
: Scully,
Papers
, 133.

Another ‘Yes
,
Laura' poem
: ‘Palinode', n.d., Cini–Dazzi Collection.

‘Let us cease…'
: poem (untitled), dated 1808. Ibid.

‘Fall of Jena'
: Alongside Tighe's poem on the battle, MM wrote about ‘The Lost Boy'
who is separated from his family as people flee from an embattled town.
Stories of Old Daniel
.

MW on women as physicians
:
RW
, ch. 9.

‘In one thing alone…'
: Scully,
Papers
, 133.

MM disguised as a man
: CC to Silsbee c. 1875. Silsbee Papers, box 7, file 2. Cited in
ClCor
, i, 135.

travel notes of a Frenchman
: Undated. Discovered and transcribed by Cristina Dazzi, Cini–Dazzi Collection. English translation (by Sandrine Sanos) is on the Internet site accompanying this book.

MM's income
: Supplemented by Tighe, who had a small estate in County Westmeath. His father had left the estate in debt, but he still had £200 a year from his Irish rents, and in 1815 he also acquired an annual Civil List pension of £400. So, together, he and MM had £1400 a year. Contrast with the £40 a year middle-class women like the Wollstonecraft sisters could earn as governesses.

‘Mrs Mason'
: It should be noted that Tighe did not consent to her being known as Mrs Tighe, unlike the willing way GI conferred his name on MW.

‘that middle rank'
: Revelation for her daughters (Apr. 1818).

decline of English society in Pisa
: In an 1819 letter to the Shelleys, MM notes that the number of English families had fallen to five. MW's letters to the Shellys are in the Abinger: Dep. c. 517.

books taken to Italy
: Inherited by Nerina Tighe. Listed in Pf: Cini Papers, folder 23.

‘extravagant political notions'
…: Sadleir's ignorant preface to Wilmot,
Irish Peer
, vii–viii.

‘religion';
‘my medical studies'
: To MWS (18 May [1826] and 29 Sept. [1823]). Abinger: Dep. c. 517

Stories for Little Boys and Girls: Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. With thanks to curator Karen Kukil to whom I wrote on the offchance of finding so rare a book.

‘Memorandums'
: Pf: Cini Papers, folder 17. Amongst Tighe's papers, but the content looks like MM's. The hand remains to be ascertained. A note here from the 1950s by her biographer, McAleer, shows him uncertain.