Mary, quite contrary
Margaret Drabble The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Claire Tomalin (Weidenfeld and Nicolson
£4.75)
The name of Mary Wollstonecraft is familiar enough: it is one of those names that crops up constantly in the footnotes and sidelines of other people's lives, associated with the Shelleys, Godwin, and the birth of feminism. Perhaps her greatest claim to fame, of late, has been that she would (had she lived) have been Shelley's mother-in-law. In her day, however, she was famous, distinguished, even notorious, in her own right, and it is one of the ironies Of history that the nineteenth century extinguished and dismissed her, leaving the twentieth century to reinstate her. Claire Tomalin, in her biography, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft has done an excellent job in setting Mary firmly in the centre of her own stage, and in explaining the reasons for her Posthumous eclipse. It is an interesting and topical story, well told and moving, and one that should be read by anyone with any interest or stake in the women's liberation movements today. One would have thought that the odds were heavily stacked against Mary from birth. Her family was poor and struggling, despite a wealthy manufacturing grandfather somewhere in the background. Her father Was violent and drank, her mother was lazy, and Mary no doubt rightly felt herself neglected in favour of her brothers. But she was an emotional, intelligent, ambitious child, and she found education where she could, and took the only sensible way to better herself in the world: she became a governess. With a spirit and enterprise that make the Brante sisters look timid, she attacked the problem of supporting herself; she opened a school in Newington Green, she travelled to Ireland where she had the highly educational experience of working for a lady who bathed in asses' milk, she wrote an educational treatise, then a novel, then a reply to Burke, and then, in the work which made her famous, she published in 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
From total obscurity, with no assets but her own wits and a persuasive manner, she made herself one of the most famous women in England, a woman who could hold her own in conversation with any man, who could choose company of her own intellectual level, who could earn her own living. It would have been an achievement in any age. (In fact, perhaps It was slightly easier for her than it would have been for the Brontes: after her death, as Claire Tomalin documents very persuasively, a century of hard reaction set in, of which the Brontes were classic victims). Not everybodY liked her: she could bully and self-dramatise, she was full of self-pity at times, and on her first meeting with Godwin, her future husband, she talked too much. But she was Somebody. The picture of her circle, and of the London she lived in, is drawn with knowledge and affection: Newington Green was in her day a centre of radical Dissent, and some of the more obscure areas of North London are brought to life, This was the age of radical dinner parties in Hackney: there Talleyrand, cut by the court, came to meet Mary, accompanied by his friend Madame de Geniis, who wore a real stone from the Bastille, set in gold, around her neck. (A° example of radical chic, the author notes). But Mary, though she spent most of her life in London, was also an intrepid traveller: she visited Ireland, Lisbon, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and, most significantly, France. POlitical France was a natural goal for people of her views: Bliss was it in that dawn to be as Wordsworth remarked and, like wordsworth, off she went to see the dawn for herself, alone, in the December of 1792. She had an interesting time there. She made the acquaintance of Girondists like Manon Roland, ;''Yhip was guillotined while she was there; she ilved through the Terror: and she had her first affair and her first child. As Claire Tomalin Points out, until her visit to France she had n somewhat careful about her remarks 4b0ut sex, and rather strict and British in her attitudes. In Paris, she found a true revolutionarY situation, where sexual freedom as well as ritical freedom was widely acclaimed. Mary had suffered from unrequited passions for both Men and women before, but now she found herself confronted with the real thing, and she embraced it without hesitation. The man, G llhert Imlay, seems to have been rather a disappointment finally, but the experience self was deeply significant. At the age of thirty ve, she had crossed a dangerous frontier: she ,was no longer an abstract preacher of women's "ghts, she was a woman with a child to rear, ricl no husband. Had she stayed at home, safely 11 love with the unresponsive painter Fuseli, her life might have ended very differently. One cannot help comparing her experience with Wordsworth's: he too has his first experience of .,e,xtial love in France, and fathered a child "'ere, but he left both child and beloved behind and went back to England. Wollstonecraft, on the other hand, -"nrned to England with her baby, attempted Sluicide once or twice, was finally deserted by GrnlaY, had an affair with Godwin, married t(3dwin, died in childbirth, and became a name r, sc,are young ladies with. It is during this part ni` the story that Claire Tomalin's narration 2ves into the major key. Hitherto she is "rdrably restrained and objective: eloquent S_nout the plight of the single woman, she does 129t condone her subject's occasional outbursts su,; melodramatic self-pity, and writes a very. 1,"arP account of her feminist interference in ',!er sister's marriage. But as Mary's life draws to ns end, it is impossible to remain unmoved. The Price 0 fa„ f love was death. Here was the woman's te, Clearly revealed in its all too familiar horror. Mary died of septicaemia, caused by the retention of the placenta, and the doctor's th orts to remove it: an unneccessary death these days, but then inevitable. The tragedy is at her attitude to childbirth had been so 0,nycisitive, so healthy and practical: after her first, 0,1 confinement in France, she had refused to h` to bed for a nionth, as was the custom, but dad got up and walked around on the eighth __ay, saying she felt perfectly well. She had been qh° enterprising mother; the baby accompanied 1,,r on her jaunts round Scandinavia. Evident
she took to the business naturally, and 2,uld have been able to combine her two little
her husband, her writing and her travels gluaitte „ competently, if death had not intervened. A, "re, as the nineteenth century was to see it, and punished her. She had broken the she paid the price. suatre Tomalin has read widely round her Ject, and her book is full of illuminating ernnents on the history of birth control and leaanging attitudes to female sexuality. She
ves the conclusions to her readers, but it is 0"tvePossible to read this book without feeling an
rvvhelming sympathy for the suffering — not °nIY the mental, but the sheer physical sufferin
Th, g that generations of women endured. Is is a well-balanced book, by no means Partisa
stri, n in spirit, and the force of its story g on'," one all the more for its restraint. It was „---e-■ to s—, == amongst the acknowledgments, n, .author's thanks to those who held the baby r„IT-Ide she worked. ',.argaret Diabble has most recently written nold,Bennett, a critical biography.
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