A woman of some importance
Jane Gardam
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: A NEW GENUS by Lyndall Gordon LittleBrown, £25, pp. 576, ISBN 0316728667 ✆ £23 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 The writer William Mayne has said, ‘I don’t know why there are supposed to be only two sexes. I can think of at least eight, even before you get to women.’ Mary Wollstonecraft, though no wit, would have been pleased with this. She saw herself as neither male nor female but ‘a new genus’, one who must always ‘follow her own track’, and be ‘tender’ but intransigent. She could not see herself as of the same species as other girls who seemed to live for marriage — any marriage — to escape the shame of poverty and spinsterhood. She herself had been the child of a terrible marriage; her father a violent drunk and her mother a passive depressive. She burned with zeal to change things.
This painstaking, full and very readable biography with 100 pages of notes and bibliography looks a great block of a book for a life that lasted only 37 years, but Wollstonecraft, or ‘Wt.’, as her second husband, the philosopher William Godwin, called her, lived a sensational life, as peripatetic as her predecessor in feminism, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 70 years earlier. She was involved in the politics of America, travelled in France, Ireland and Norway and was brought up in England north and south. She wrote on education, morality and the French Revolution and lived for a time in Ireland. After an emotional scandal with the artist Fuseli, a dreadful-sounding man, she took off to Paris to view the Revolution first-hand at exactly the time when most English intellectuals were hurrying home. She saw the king on the way to his execution and the streets running with blood. Her travels to Norway in search of the Bourbon treasure reads like a crazy mystery story. Her time as an Irish governess connects with the last section of the book on her posthumous influence on women. Her pupil, the 12-year-old aristocrat Elizabeth King, who adored her, was to become virtually the first woman doctor.
Wt. had no normal education but had the knack of picking up aging learned men, usually clergymen, to direct her reading. She ran a school. After being a governess where she felt patronised — though the Kings sound very nice and as turbulent as she was — she began to write, and had the supreme luck to find the publisher Joseph Johnson, who spotted her genius and gave her a room in his house. She wrote novels, letters, travels, The Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Man. She was penniless but frugal, healthy and beautiful (no make-up, no hair powder), large and forthright with strange eyes. She kept her Yorkshire accent. At her very lowest times she blazed with confidence for her cause on behalf of women. The first time she met Godwin, who was not interested in the subject and wanted to listen to the other dinner guest, Tom Paine, he couldn’t get a word in.
Her feminism was different from today’s. Until this book I had imagined Wt. as heavily masculine, an atheist and a believer in free love and she was none of these things. Although she often made an ass of herself and was as embarrassingly innocent as Germaine Greer, she admits it. She ‘constantly re-invents herself’. Unlike today’s feminists she adored children and considered them to be the heart of a woman’s life.
She insisted on breast-feeding and education at the mother’s knee. Two centuries before Boulby she had invented the Attachment Theory and believed that the mother should be in charge of childhood illnesses. Doctors had dirty hands. She nursed her daughter, Fanny, successfully through smallpox entirely with mother love, soap and water. Long before Florence Nightingale she had spotted the connection between dirt and disease.
She was always in love. In the arms of her first husband Gilbert Imlay she found ‘exstacy’. Imlay was an American entrepreneur, knew Daniel Boone and was probably a part-time spy for George Washington. He owned great tracts of land in America where Wt. at one point longed to live with him in a brave new world. Instead he pushed her off to Norway in search of 36 platters of Bourbon silver that had come his way and disappeared. This section of the book is full of revelations and the map of her journey up and down the coast of a country with no roads, alone except for her young child and a seasick maid, is marvellous. It ends mysteriously in Hamburg, where silence falls. Wt. was seldom silent but still in love with Imlay. Where was the treasure? Not at the bottom of a fjord in the ship Imlay had hired. Did it ever leave France? Or Imlay? Unless I’ve missed something I’d guess it is now somewhere on the banks of the Mississippi, brought out at Thanksgiving to serve the pumpkin pie.
Imlay was a snake. While his wife and child were on the waves he took up with other women and other shady deals. On Wt.’s return, penniless again, he ignored her and his child, wrote some slimy letters and faded from her life, and from history. She made two serious attempts at suicide. But she survived, lived by her pen, Johnson’s faith in her and her own intellectual and physical energy. Meeting Godwin again kindled a new but by no means cerebral devotion. In no time they were running up and down the street leaving notes for each other (‘like e-mails’) several times a day. One hundred and forty-six survive, written over only weeks. The nights they spent together, and soon she was pregnant. Sulkily, and surprisingly since they still believed marriage to be an impossible ideal, they married. Seven months later the child who was to become Mary Shelley was born and her mother died in childbirth at the hands of several different doctors.
Lyndall Gordon blames Godwin for what happened next. Far too soon he wrote a memoir of his wife and, ever truthful, he describes her marriage to Imlay as the rapture of ‘a virgin of 34 panting for a man’. He goes on to say that her love was ‘always sacred, imaginative and intensely loyal’, but the damage was done and for generations she was regarded as a ‘wanton’, brash and unintelligent. Not until Virginia Woolf were we persuaded to look again.
This biographer is a fine champion, too, especially good on the early life with the ungrateful feckless family Wollstonecraft never abandoned. One thanks God she never knew that her elder daughter Fanny, the ‘little lark’ who went to Norway, committed suicide at 17 or that the baby Mary took up with Shelley and Byron to wander Italy where they managed between them to let five children die along the way. It was Elizabeth King, by then a doctor in Pisa, who took in the footloose poetical group in Wollstonecraft’s place.
What would Wollstonecraft have made of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein whose influence, like her own books’, goes on and on? She would certainly have understood the dangers of creation.
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