Vindication (14 page)

Ogle's understanding encouraged her to say more, so she took the risk of exposing her sense of purpose.

‘The same turn of mind which leads me to adore the Author of all Perfection–which leads me to conclude that he only can fill my soul, forces me to admire the shadows of his attributes here below; and my imagination gives still bolder strokes to them. I know I am in some degree under the influence of a delusion but does not this strong delusion prove that I myself “am
of subtiler essence than the trodden clod
”: these flights of imagination point to futurity; I cannot banish them.'

In
Mary
, Ogle appears in passing as a middle-aged man of ‘polished manners, and dazzling wit' whom ‘Mary' meets when she is sunk in grief after her dearest friend dies in Lisbon. She is cheered by his attempts to draw her out; he, struck by her location of genius in the soul's power to speak truly.
Mary
offers an idealised self-portrait seen through his eyes: ‘She glanced from earth to heaven, and caught the light of truth. Her expressive countenance
shewed what passed in her mind, and her tongue was ever the faithful interpreter of her heart; duplicity never threw a shade over her words or actions.' He is forced to question his lightweight opinion of women.

Ogle was married to a benign woman, Elizabeth Moore, who greeted Mary with a smile when they met at the castle. They were accompanied by her sister Miss Moore. She, too, appeared friendly, with sense as well as beauty. Mary learnt that this sister-in-law had inspired Ogle's more recent song, ‘Molly Asthore'.

There must have been a distant connection between his branch of the Ogle family and Caroline King's stepgrandmother, Dame Isabell Ogle. Mary noticed that Lady Kingsborough took a possessive view of George Ogle, and that he pleased the women in the castle with expected gallantries. In his company Mary felt her faculties unfold, while others played cards. Their talk went unmarked, for there was nothing of gallantry in Ogle's address to her, and nothing alluring in the clothes and manners of the governess–her intent face, unstudied gestures and seriousness had no part in a lady's repertoire. In Mary's cool view, a ‘fine lady' like Caroline King had no idea how to interest a thinking man.

 

Ogle's admiration did Mary no harm with the King family: on the contrary, the Irish regard for what Mary called ‘genius'–the ferment of the mind, in which the governess was seen to hold her own–warmed the castle to a degree she had not thought possible. ‘The whole family make a point of paying me the greatest attention,' she wrote to George Blood on 4 December, ‘–and some part of it treat me with a degree of tenderness which I have seldom met with from strangers.' And yet, she continued to feel alien: ‘a strange being'. Her strangeness was not so much a difference of class or nationality; rather, she sensed some quickening in herself without having words to explain it. Seen by her own light as a mutation of sorts, a creature in the making, it's inevitable that, lacking the companionship of a like creature, she should ‘vainly pant after happiness', lose hope, and expect to end the experiment.

Fixed still on Fanny's death, she begged Fanny's brother George to
supply, if he could, a similar support. ‘About this time last year I closed my poor Fanny's eyes–I have been reviewing my past life–and the ghost of my former joys, and vanished hopes, haunted me continually–pity me–and excuse my silence–do not reproach me–for at this time I require the most friendly treatment.' Her breaths are palpable: ‘I want the tender soothings of friendship–I want–' she cried to Everina, ‘you must read my heart…–it is not to be described…' It's this inexpressible ‘want' between the words that others, locked in custom, could not be expected to hear.

‘I have no just cause for complaint,' she had to acknowledge. ‘Everything which humanity dictates is thought of for me–.'

Help could only come through the warmth of friendship, and friendship was what she could not expect from the castle–had it seen any sign of her sufferings. It never did. Mary performed her daily tasks with outward verve, while privately she took the measure of her performance, encouraged a little by her appeal for the children: ‘I am some times so low spirited, I think anything
like
pleasure will never revisit me–I go to the nursery–
something like
maternal fondness fills my bosom–the children cluster about me–one little boy who is conscious that he is a favorite, calls himself my son–At the sight of their mother they tremble and run to me for protection–this renders them dear to me–and I discover the kind of happiness I was formed to enjoy.'

Thoughts of Fanny led her to visit Fanny's uncle, aunt and cousins in Tipperary, not far off to the north, across the Galtees, a country town that reminded Mary of Beverley. As a child Fanny had lived there during Mr Blood's first financial setbacks. Fanny's aunt had a look of Mrs Blood, but her husband, Archdeacon Baillie, was coldly correct. Their silent daughter was highly cultivated like Fanny, but in too strained a way. After a few days of disappointing cordialities, Mary returned to the castle.

There, she found herself in a position of trust. Lady Kingsborough's stepmother Mrs FitzGerald wished to consult Mary about her only son, lazy, violent Gerald, who at fifteen was close in age to Margaret. So intractable was Gerald FitzGerald that school was out of the question. He was hanging about the castle during this term. His father had left him a
fortune of his own, and his mother was ready to offer £100 a year to a tutor, preferably a married clergyman, who would house the boy and improve his temper. At about this time, Mary received ‘a very civil note' from her publisher with a gift of his new volume of Cowper's poems. She now wrote to him to ask, with a view to Gerald, if Mrs Barbauld and her clergyman husband were taking pupils, as planned, in Hampstead, and if the Revd Mr Hewlett was succeeding with his school in Shacklewell. Lady Kingsborough requested Hewlett's new
Introduction to Spelling and Reading
for the children; and Mary added requests of her own for Hewlett's
Sermons
, for Charlotte Smith's
Elegiac Sonnets
and for her own ‘little volume' (
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
) due out early in the New Year. Nothing further is known of Gerald, except that, later, he ran through three wives and distinguished himself as begetter of ten sons.

Trust in Mary's methods was heightened by her skills in the sickroom. Soon after she arrived, an epidemic had swept the castle: all the children fell ill. Their mother's visits, Mary noted, were awkwardly formal: the girls lay silent under their covers while her ladyship babbled to her pets. Then, towards the end of December, Margaret's temperature rose frighteningly. ‘My poor little favourite has had a violent fever–and can scarcely bear to have me a moment out of her sight,' Mary wrote to Bess. It must have been a disease of the lungs–pleurisy or pneumonia–for Mary feared Lady K's strenuous commands would drive her daughter ‘into a consumption'. Mary was able to soothe the mind of her patient. She had an instinctive understanding of the interdependence of physical and mental wellbeing. Her
Education of Daughters
advocates the study of ‘physic', for soothing without knowledge, she believed, could do more harm than good.

There came a moment when Margaret's life was ‘dispaired of', and the result of this crisis, when she began to recover, was to ‘produce an intimacy' between this governess and her employers which ‘years of toil might not have brought about'. Within two months, the enemy who had entered the castle was now, she could not deny, ‘a GREAT favourite in this family'.

T
he court case Ned Wollstonecraft had brought against Roebuck went in the Wollstonecrafts' favour. At first Mary rejoiced: her share would enable her to pay off her debts after another half-year. Then, in the course of the early months of 1787, Ned's silence bore it home that he would retain all gains for himself, apart from a small annuity for Everina–not enough to keep her, but an incentive to leave his home. Mary and Bess got nothing whatever. Nor was any explanation forthcoming. Mrs Burgh urged Mary to contact her brother, but she could not bring herself to plead.

‘It is so severe a disappointment,' Mary said, ‘I endeavor not to think of it.' What she could not face was the prospect of going on indefinitely in her present post. Yet, as always, blows to an unwanted way of life were not wholly unwelcome. They prompted shoots of a different kind to push out in other directions. One is just visible at the close of Mary Wollstonecraft's letter to Joseph Johnson in December 1786: an apparent afterthought about her ‘state of dependance'. Its luxury, she tells her publisher, could never outweigh her loss of liberty, and without liberty, she would die.

By the end of January, Mary had been almost immured within the castle walls for three months. Then came orders to join the family in Town for the season: she was to go on ahead with the children. Her thoughts at once turned to the prospect of reunion with her kind. ‘Is Neptune in
Dublin?' she asked George Blood. She had not forgotten this Irishman who had made up to her in London.

While she readied herself for the move, Mary warmed to a French novel
Caroline de Lichtfield
that offered an alternative to traditional marriage. It starts out as a Beauty and the Beast story of a teenage heiress whose father marries her to a disfigured favourite of the Prussian King. On the day of her wedding, she writes her new husband a letter, asking to be allowed to return to her surrogate mother until she feels mature enough to enter on the duties of marriage. A sensitive reply from her ‘monster' husband, Waldstein, frees her to do so. She learns that he is a man of generous character, and as time goes by he becomes less hideous: his disfigurements heal; he walks more upright. Love stirs when Caroline and Waldstein start living in the same house, though not as man and wife. Slowly, they come to know each other as Caroline shares her artistic skills, while her husband introduces her to studies ‘which are too generally neglected in the education of women'. He reads to her, watching as her face ‘assumed the passion or imbibed the wisdom of the writer'. This is a man to draw out a woman's character.

For all her independence, Mary Wollstonecraft at twenty-seven had led a life of total chastity. No man, apart from Neptune Blood, had sought her out, partly because she had no dowry and partly because she took a bleak view of marriage. She had long ruled out the terminations of the wedding-bell plot, but a form of love where mutual education begins with marriage took her back to it.

 

In the first week of February, she and the children settled into Lord Kingsborough's redbrick townhouse at 15 Merrion Square on the south side of the River Liffey. Mary had ‘comfortable' apartments and a ‘fine' schoolroom, and was invited to use the main drawing-room–the one with the harpsichord and long windows on the first floor. ‘Here is no medium!' she had to concede. In addition, she was assigned a parlour for receiving her ‘
Male
visitors'. But no male came. The Ogles called to welcome her, as did the Bloods' friend Betty Delane whose lively conversation, Mary said, ‘diverted–nay, charmed my little Margaret'; but the private
parlour stood empty. Neptune Blood was known to be in Dublin. She had sent him word (through George) of her arrival, but the days went by and Neptune made no move. Mrs Blood said she never saw him–despite the hospitality he had enjoyed in London.

It came to Mary's ears that Neptune had enquired after her, yet still he did not call. The weeks passed. Then, one evening early in May, after three months in Town, Mary spied him at the Rotunda, a charitable concert hall at the corner of Sackville and Great Britain Streets. Neptune looked startled to see her in the party of ‘a Lady of
quality
'–not the neglected governess, and still less the penniless lodger with the Bloods who'd helped out as seamstress three years before. Here was a handsome young woman who had submitted to the attentions of hairdresser and milliner, and was mingling with fashion in pleasure grounds similar to London's Vauxhall. As Neptune approached with new-found alacrity, Mary stepped back in sudden revulsion: this was the snob who, after all, had left her in London; who in the past three months had not found the time to visit. Face to face, she turned her head and looked past him, flashing a look of ‘ineffable contempt' from the corner of her eye. The snub sufficed. When they saw each other again in the Green Room at the playhouse, Neptune did not attempt to speak.

The social strata of Dublin, with a population of only 180,000, struck Mary as simpler than those of a metropolis: ‘there are only two ranks of people'. A governess, with her ambiguous status, was bound to shift up or down. Mary's standing with the King family–signalled by their invitation to join them in their drawing-room–drew her, now and then, into high society. Years later, when she was travelling in Scandinavia and could look back on life in Paris as well as in London and Lisbon, she recalled Dublin as the most hospitable city she had known. The strength of the Ascendancy lay partly in its willingness to co-opt brains in the form of lawyers and other professionals, but it did look down on trade. Mary–and her sister Bess too–shared this prejudice. As children they had learnt this one lesson from Mr Wollstonecraft: to scrape off the taint of trade. Mary's letters from Ireland never speak of her mother's kin in the wine trade. There were kin in Cork, not too far from Mitchelstown Castle, but she did not contact
them. Her visible connections were with the Church of Ireland–the impeccable Archdeacon Baillie–in Tipperary. In Dublin, she was prickly about her status, and resented her dependence on Lady K whose grand manner reminded her how precarious was her social position. A signal from Lady K could banish her to the underclass.

Mary consoled herself with the company of Betty Delane, whose quickness matched her own. Betty lived with her tubercular eldest sister Susanna and rather snaky brother-in-law, the English painter Robert Home, at 48 Little Britain Street, a few doors from George Blood at 96 (the home of his employer, Brabazon Noble). When the two women talked of Fanny, it was a comfort to share their tears. Mary was pleased, too, by a gift from George Blood, a newly published set of Shakespeare's plays edited by Dr Johnson.

Books alone spoke to her secret self: ‘I commune with my own spirit–and am detached from the world–I have plenty of books,' she told Everina. ‘I am reading some philosophical lectures, and philosophical sermons–for my own
private
improvement. I lately met with Blair's lectures on genius taste &c &c–and found them an intellectual feast.' Hugh Blair was Professor of Rhetoric at Edinburgh University, and in 1785 had published his
Lectures in Rhetoric
in three volumes. It was to be another hundred years before universities in England opened their doors to women, and several more decades before some could take degrees; for Wollstonecraft, avid for higher education in the 1780s, Blair provided a first-rate substitute. During long winter nights in her room she put herself through his rigorous course in literature, genre and style. ‘Genius' is the word echoing in her thoughts in 1787 as she gazed from Blair into the mirror of Rousseau. ‘
L
'
exercice des plus sublimes vertus élève et nourrit le génie
,' she noted, and ‘a genius will educate itself'. Blair's distinction between genius and taste confirmed her own distinction between the power she sensed in herself and Fanny's refinement. Genius, Blair assured her, was the higher power, a flair that might be improved by art and study, but not attainable by art and study alone. Enlightenment rules of correctness, regularity and accuracy were not enough. ‘The rays must converge to a point, in order to glow intensely,' Blair urged. The result will be a simple, rapid, ‘torrential' language, close to oratory.

 

The grandparents of the King girls, the Earl and Countess of Kingston, still lived on the other side of the Liffey in the north-east quarter of Dublin at 3 (now 15) Henrietta Street, the home of Robert and Caroline King during the fraught early years of their marriage. Here their daughter Margaret was born and stayed for spells till she was eighteen months. It was a double-fronted house, the first on the left as the family coach turned into a short street, sixteen houses in all, rising up a hill towards the Primate's garden (the site for Kings Inn, now the Law Library). The Kings' house had been built in about 1740 at the height of the street's Georgian grandeur. Earls and other grandees of the Protestant Ascendancy lived there behind tall, black ‘pigiron' railings. Across the road was John Ponsonby, one-time Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and still influential in political society. The dark doors and the windows painted a creamy Portland stone colour faced one another across the unpaved street. In a reception room on the ground floor of no. 3, Shakespeare and Milton (in papier-mâché mouldings) looked down on the heir and his wife, the grandchildren and their governess, from either side of the ceiling, while the four seasons held their own in each corner. From the top of the house was a spreading view of Dublin: St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin Castle, the law courts, and the hills beyond.

In the wider society of Dublin, Mary's manners appeared ‘gentle, easy, and elegant, her conversation intelligent and amusing, without…apparent consciousness of powers above the level of her sex'. At one large gathering a lady singled her out, and entered into a long conversation. Afterwards the lady, curious about this eloquent young woman, enquired about her–and found, to her mortification, that she was only ‘Miss King's governess'. That this aristocrat did not detect Mary's status tells us she could pass as part of Lady Kingsborough's circle. It tells us too that Mary's English accent, with a dash of Yorkshire, was close to the received registers of metropolitan or regional pronunciation. Mary later related this story as a joke; at the time, though, she fumed inwardly at women who looked down on one who worked. Ideas of equality took root in this semi-silent rebellion against her subordination, the sap of her superiority rising in a ferment of suppressed rage or depression.

It sometimes happened that Lady Kingsborough ordered Mary to appear
in the drawing-room, and Mary would try to excuse herself. She could not bear to ‘stalk in to be stared at', and Lady K's ‘
proud
condescension' added to her discomfort.

‘I begged to be excused in a civil way–but she would not allow me to absent myself–I had too, another reason, the expence of hair-dressing, and millinery would have exceeded the sum I chuse to spend in those things. I was determined–.'

Lady K, equally determined, offered Mary a poplin gown and petticoat, which she refused. This made Lady K ‘very angry'.

Calm was restored when Mrs FitzGerald came to Mary's rescue. Lady K had to ask Mary's pardon, and consent to her staying, if she chose, in her room.

To some extent she contrived to keep herself warm with small triumphs and self-congratulation. When the company of lords and viscounts was unavoidable, she queried what happiness was for one endowed like herself with ‘a greater refinement of mind' and ‘a keener edge to the sensibility nature gave me–so that I do not relish the pleasures most people pursue–nor am I disturbed by their trifling cares'. Her proximity to a cliff-edge of contempt made it hard to keep underground. She felt a rising in the throat; she suppressed her ‘starts'; and then one Sunday in February, when she was in church with the family, her ‘starts' became visible. Something in the service ‘hurried' her emotions. They broke through her clamp on public conduct. Lady Kingsborough led her out of the family pew, and directed the coachman to Mary's friend in Little Britain Street. Once in the house, Mary fell into an uncontrollable ‘fit of trembling as terrified Betty Delane–and it continued in a lesser degree all day'.

Lady Kingsborough resolved to consult the family physician when he came to examine the lingering effects of Margaret's illness. Mary, who knew her own problem was mental not physical in origin, resisted; she feared too the cost of a consultation with a fashionable doctor. Her ladyship, alert enough to the wants of peasants but unfamiliar with Mary's middle-class cares, would have taken this resistance to be a creditable show of stiff upper lip. In the event, her ladyship had her way, and the physician diagnosed ‘a constant nervous fever'. It was necessary, of course, for Mary
to restore her clamp in company. There was always a danger that truths would burst out at some unguarded moment, if only through Margaret whose outbursts against her mother were raising the temperature at home. Margaret, by now, had gone over to the radical camp, and was venting her young steam. What could rise only halfway in Mary's throat, Margaret could utter with increasing fearlessness.

Letters alone freed Mary's voice. She corresponded with her sisters, Mrs Burgh, Mrs Prior, James Sowerby, and ‘poor Mason' whose situation was ‘truly deplorable'. She asks repeatedly for news of Newington Green, Dr Price and ‘poor dear Hewlett'. Her misery in the surviving letters is insistent, yet her manner remains dignified: not the assumed dignity of rank, but that of a person who respects the dignity of every creature. She used humour (‘I am worried to death by dogs') to deflect fury at the skewed model of a mother nursing her Irish wolfhounds.

She was still confounded to find how sensibility plus ‘genius' produced ‘misery'. To hold to ‘genius' before it had yet been of ‘use' often required more courage than she could find. This she confided to the Revd Henry Gabell (having sent him a copy of her book). Misery of this kind can appear self-indulgence, though it's more like the self-doubt that can kill imagination when it sends out roots in the parching soil of incomprehension. Wollstonecraft prayed to ‘the Searcher of hearts' to balance her ‘
peculiar
' wretchedness with something else.