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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon

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BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women

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With his inherited money, Mary’s father decided to pursue the life of a country squire, moving the family out of London to near Epping Forest in Essex. While he was good at spending, he had no skill at farming. As the years passed, the family slowly slid down the social ladder. They moved from Epping to Yorkshire and then back to London again. Her father began to drink heavily as his fortunes dwindled. His only talent was for beating his wife. Mary tried as much as possible to protect her mother, sometimes even sleeping outside their room. Despite her intervention, Mary was not loved for it. From that point on, Mary began to despise her father and pity her mother.

Even as a young girl, Mary wore her heart on her sleeve. She was a woman of tempestuous emotions, given to self-pity and depression, huge resentments, and a habit of impulsive and sometimes imprudent attachments. “I will have the first place in your heart or none,” she told a female friend at the age of fourteen. She suffered from what they called “an excess of sensibility”; in other words, she was a bit intense. Although it was the fashion to conceal emotion, Mary rejected that notion completely. She never hid behind a mask of polite indifference or protected herself from getting hurt. She threw herself wholeheartedly into her friendships and love affairs and couldn’t understand when the feelings were not returned with equal fervor.

She had decided against marriage at the age of fifteen, seeing how trapped her mother was, and she had no dowry even if she had been so inclined. Nothing she had seen of men had endeared them to her. Not her brother, Ned; her father; or her brother-in-law Meredith Bishop. But she also doubted her ability to attract a husband. Handsome rather than beautiful, Mary cared nothing for fashion, and while she was tall, with lovely fair hair and hazel eyes, she also had a sharp tongue. Mary’s own courage and determination often made her impatient and short with those who lacked her drive and energy.

Mary’s feelings about marriage seemed to be confirmed when she was summoned by her brother-in-law to help her younger sister, Eliza, after she gave birth. Eliza, who was probably suffering from a bad case of postpartum depression, convinced Mary—or was it the other way around?—that her only chance to get better was to leave her husband. Worried for her sister’s sanity, and appalled by her brother-in-law’s unsympathetic attitude, Mary decided to rescue her, making all of the arrangements for them to flee. When Eliza, missing her child, began to waver, Mary made her stand firm. Her actions not only deprived Eliza of her child, who died before she was a year old, but with no support from her husband, she now had no choice but to work for a living, leaving her resentful and bitter of Mary’s later success.

In order to make a living, Mary, her sisters, and her best friend Fanny Blood set up a school together in Newington Green. Despite her lack of formal education, Mary had developed radical ideas about teaching. She believed that children shouldn’t learn by rote or be disciplined by the rod. The residents of the town were Dissenters,
¹³Jews, and others who had supported the Americans in the recent Revolutionary War, including the Reverend Richard Price. Although not a Unitarian, Mary went to hear his sermons, finding that his ideals appealed to her. This was the beginning of her political education. Mary found the Dissenters that she met hardworking, humane, critical but not cynical, and respectful toward women; they proved kinder than her own family.

Initially a success, the school failed after Mary left to go to Lisbon in 1785 to nurse Fanny, who had married and was expecting her first child, but she didn’t survive. Depressed and distraught over her friend’s death in childbirth and the closure of the school, Mary took a job in Ireland working for the Viscount Kingsborough and his wife and their brood of children. Her inability to hide her emotions would get her into trouble during the year that she worked for the Kingsborough family as a governess. She found it hard to hide her contempt for the useless lives of the aristocracy, and the family alternated between treating her like an equal or like a servant, depending on their whims. She ended up in a power struggle with Caroline, Lady Kingsborough, over the affections of her daughters and she made the mistake of starting a flirtation with George Ogle, whom Caroline had marked out for her own. While traveling in England, Mary was fired by Lady Kingsborough.

With no money and no references, Mary had few options. She was saved by Joseph Johnson, a publisher she had become acquainted with when she lived in Newington Green. He had agreed to put out her first book,
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
, for ten guineas before she left for Ireland. Now she made the impetuous move to make her living solely by her pen. This was a radical and daring choice since few women, or men, for that matter, could support themselves solely by writing.

Johnson put her up in a house and hired her to edit and write reviews for several of his publications, primarily the
Analytical Review
. He became much more than a friend; Mary described him in her letters as a father and a brother. He also agreed to publish her novel, entitled simply
Mary: A Fiction
, encompassing her experiences in a thinly fictionalized version of her life, and set her up in rented lodgings. She taught herself French and German and translated texts. Johnson asked her to attempt Italian but it gave her a headache. Mary soon began writing a monthly column in which she criticized, with humor and disdain, novels that she felt had weak female characters. She tartly dismissed one work, calling it “Much ado about Nothing”: “We place this work without any reservations, at the bottom of the second class.” She wrote to a friend that she was soon making almost two hundred pounds a year by her writing. She was finally able to pay her debts and to help her sisters financially.

In between all her other work, Mary found the time to write
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
. In it she demanded “Justice for one half of the human race.” Mary did no special research for the book. She didn’t need to; she lived it. Mary had experienced firsthand the plight of poor, respectable women who were forced to earn a living. She advocated training single women for adequate employment and was the first to call marriage “legal prostitution.” Mary deplored the relegation of women to a state of ignorance and dependence. She was the first to propose that women were taught to be superficial and simpering; they weren’t born that way. In her book, she wrote that men and women were human beings before sexual beings, that psychologically they were both the same. She courted controversy by encouraging parents to teach their children about sex and promoted the idea of coeducational schools.

The book was published in England, America, Germany, and France and made Mary famous. Although it only sold three thousand copies in its first five years, it was the first treatise of its kind published in Britain and America to enter the mainstream. Aaron Burr used the book as a guide to teaching his daughter Theodosia. Amid the hosannas were a few sour notes. There was a cry to burn Mary in effigy. Horace Walpole famously called Mary “a hyena in petticoats.”

Mary left for Paris in December 1792, joining a circle of expatriates then in the city. In the stimulating intellectual atmosphere of the French Revolution she met and fell passionately in love with Gilbert Imlay, an American writer and adventurer. While Mary had taken a prim attitude toward sex in her book, Imlay awakened her passions. He was thirty-nine, handsome, charming, and easygoing. He told Mary that he considered marriage a corrupt institution, which she wasn’t savvy enough to know meant he was keeping his options open. Like a lot of women, Mary built up an image in her head of Imlay that had nothing to do with reality. Imlay, on his part, must have been flattered to have this famous woman so into him, but he had no idea what he was letting himself in for. As Virginia Woolf wrote, “Tickling minnows, he had hooked a dolphin.”

As the political situation grew worse, Imlay registered Mary as his wife in 1793, giving her the protection of his American citizenship, even though they were not married. To Mary this was proof of his commitment to her. “My friend,” she told Imlay, “I feel my fate united to yours by the most sacred principles of my soul.” She soon became pregnant, and while waiting to give birth at Le Havre, Mary spent her time writing
An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
, which was published in December 1794. On May 14, 1794, attended by a midwife, she gave birth without complications to her first child, Fanny, naming her after her late friend.

Mary reveled in motherhood, and the pleasures of breastfeeding. She wrote to her friend Ruth Barlow, “My little Girl begins to suck so MANFULLY that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the Rights of Woman.” Refusing to let Fanny be swaddled, she dressed her in loose, light clothing, allowing her plenty of fresh air, which scandalized the women of Le Havre who called her the “raven mother,” considering her unfit to be a mother.

Imlay became tired of the maternal Mary and eventually left her. She attempted suicide twice, first by an overdose of laudanum, the second time by trying to drown herself in the Thames. Mary considered her suicide attempts completely rational, writing after her second attempt, “I have only to lament, that, when the bitterness of death was past, I was inhumanly brought back to life and misery.” In a last-ditch attempt to win Imlay back, she agreed to help him recover cargo stolen by a Norwegian captain. With only her infant daughter and a teenage nursemaid as her companions, Mary spent four months battling seasickness, traipsing over fjords, and haggling with officials all to save her lover’s bacon to no avail. Her reward was to discover on her return that Imlay had taken up with another woman. She did get a bestseller out of the deal, publishing her account of her travels as
Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796.
William Godwin later wrote these prophetic words in his memoir of Mary’s life: “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.”

Calling herself Mrs. Imlay in order to bestow legitimacy to Fanny, she returned to London. In April 1796, Mary presented herself at Godwin’s lodgings. The first time they had met, they disliked each other. Godwin had come to Joseph Johnson’s house to hear Thomas Paine, but, to his annoyance, Mary wouldn’t shut up. They had become reacquainted in January, before her second suicide attempt. Just friends at first, they soon became lovers. It was a tempestuous relationship. Mary was still gun-shy after Imlay, and Godwin, at forty, had gotten used to the life of a bachelor. By December, however, she was pregnant. They married in March 1797. Mary wasn’t about to have another illegitimate child, and after some reluctance, Godwin agreed.

Despite their marriage, they both still prized their independence. “I wish you for my soul, to be riveted in my heart, but I do not desire to have you always at my elbow,” she told Godwin. So Godwin rented separate quarters to work. They communicated by letter, several times a day, and each spent evenings, as before, with separate friends. However, their happiness was short-lived. On August 30, Mary went into labor. Infection set in, and nine days after giving birth to a daughter, named Mary, Wollstonecraft expired.

Godwin was devastated; he wrote to his friend Thomas Holcroft, “I firmly believe there does not exist her equal in the world. I know from experience we were formed to make each other happy. I have not the least expectation that I can now ever know happiness again.” In January 1798, Godwin published his
Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
. In his grief, Godwin wrote a warts-and-all memoir that did a great deal of damage to Mary’s reputation. Godwin turned Mary into a tragic heroine, and readers were appalled that he would reveal intimate details about her love affairs and suicide attempts. The book also portrayed Mary as a woman deeply invested in feeling, who was balanced by his reason and as more of a religious skeptic than she actually was. Mary’s reputation wasn’t restored until one hundred years after her death when Millicent Garrett Fawcett, a suffragist, wrote an introduction to the centenary edition of
Vindication
. In the two-hundred-plus years since her death, Mary has become one of the most discussed, admired, demonized, reviled, and criticized feminists in history. Her life was full of contradictions that confound modern feminists—she shunned marriage, yet married; she admired the ideas of the French Revolution, but hated the bloodshed. However, her unconventional ideas lived on in her daughter Mary Shelley.