The Lady and Her Monsters (3 page)

William Godwin did not attend the ceremony. Bereaved and full of “longing,” he tried to get his mind off the alarming thoughts that had overwhelmed him since Mary's death. One of his wife's books was near him, but he did not want to pick it up, much less read it. Instead, he focused on another book by his side, this one detailing “the education of children.” As he leafed through it, he could not help but think of the “two poor animals” who were now his sole responsibility.

Rather than reading, he decided to write a letter to the medical man Anthony Carlisle, a friend of his and Mary's. “It is pleasing to be loved by those we feel ourselves impelled to love,” Godwin wrote. “It is inexplicably gratifying, when we find those qualities that most call forth our affections, to be regarded by that person with some degree of feeling.”

T
hat two such individuals—Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin—became entangled with one another to begin with struck some as an utterly peculiar event. They had initially become acquainted at a dinner party that Godwin attended to meet Thomas Paine, who had just published
The Rights of Man.
It was not love at first glance for William and Mary. On the contrary, they were “mutually displeased with each other.” Godwin had hoped to spend the evening with Paine, and Mary's presence there irked him.

Mary was an attractive woman who was rather tall and had brown hair and eyes. But right away, Godwin was put off by a streak of gloominess that was part of her persona. She would pass this trait on to her daughters. She was left cold by Godwin's habit of complimenting everyone he met, even when they did not merit it. This was certainly not the most auspicious start of a love match in history.

They saw very little of each other after the dinner party, as Mary went to France to attend to some business. It was a personal matter about a man with whom she'd become infatuated: Henry Fuseli, a painter eighteen years her senior. She didn't seem to be bothered by the fact that he was married, and those around her did not understand why she was fascinated with him. This included Godwin, who thought Fuseli was not an intellectual but a snob.

In the winter of 1792, Mary decided the only way to have a deeper relationship with Fuseli was to include his wife, Sophia. She propositioned them with a sort of ménage-a-trois that would involve all of them living together and her becoming their mutual partner. Not surprisingly, they rejected her.

Toward the end of 1792, she was living a lonely existence in a tiny Paris apartment, the icy landscape of the city matching her own sadness. The passion she had desired from Fuseli may not have materialized, but she was desperate for the affection of any man. That's when she fell for the American Gilbert Imlay, who picked up on her vulnerability and need, which let him feed her mind with fantastic (and false) stories of his past and those of a future they might have together. She quickly fell for him and clung tightly to him, especially when she learned she was pregnant.

The pregnancy brought about a dramatic shift in their relationship, causing Imlay to spend weeks away from Paris, most especially in Le Havre. As the days turned into weeks and weeks extended into months, Mary's familiar ache and loneliness returned. Only toward the end of her pregnancy did Mary join Imlay in Le Havre, where her daughter Frances—Fanny—was born. In September 1795, soon after the birth, Mary left for London, in what she believed would become a permanent separation.

Not long after, Mary learned that Imlay had found another woman. She urged him to change his ways and meet their new baby daughter, but this did not happen. Again she was alone, but this time with a baby. Unable to continue on, Mary decided to end her life. “I have been treated with unkindness, and even cruelty by the person . . . [from] whom I had every reason to expect affection,” she wrote to Archibald Hamilton Rowan. “I looked for something like happiness in the discharge of my relative duties, and the heart on which I leaned . . . pierced mine . . . I live but for my child, for I am weary of myself . . . I have been very ill—have taken some desperate steps . . . for now there is nothing good in store,—my heart is broken!”

Panorama of the river Thames and the buildings of the city. In the eighteenth century, the river provided a great divide between social classes in London. It was also from one of its bridges that Mary Wollstonecraft jumped trying to commit suicide.

During the eighteenth century the river Thames had become a major center of commerce by transporting goods across the British Empire and servicing farmers, fishermen, tradesmen, and other commercial ventures. It had also formed an unspoken boundary between the different classes who lived on either side of its waters. And that river, Mary decided, would finally transport
her
to her next life. It would become her grave.

She tried to find a quiet spot for her final moments but could not find one on the Battersea Bridge. The evening of her demise was a viciously cold and rainy one in October, a dreary occasion even by London's standards. Rather than being deterred, she decided this weather was helpful. Drenched, undoubtedly lonely, and surely frightened, Mary walked up and down the wooden bridge, allowing the rain to soak her clothes.

On this night, no one was on the bridge, which meant she could carry out her plans in secret. The rain that seeped through her clothes added much-needed weight to her frame. When she thought she was heavy enough, she neared the parapet. She felt the cold dark currents sloshing against the riverbank below were beckoning her, and she jumped. One would imagine her body, now soaked, would have sunk deeply and quickly, but that's not what happened. Agitated, she struggled against the currents and became tangled in her clothing more and more tightly until she passed out.

Her body washed ashore and was later found and revived by a passerby. Gilbert Imlay rushed to her, declaring his love, but strangely enough, Mary was not moved by this. Apparently, plunging into the cold water had shaken her out of her melancholy, and she realized the affair needed to come to some sort of resolution.

Around this time, she reconnected with William Godwin. Having been invited to take tea with Thomas Holcroft, she was surprised to see Godwin there as well. As before, their exchanges didn't cause either one of them to feel any flurry of love or passion toward the other. By now Godwin had become famous, which seemed to have boosted his demeanor. He was socially awkward but also bent on achieving fame and acceptance from society, so this new lifestyle provided a bonus.

On the other hand, Mary Wollstonecraft was now a disreputable woman with a sordid love life and an illegitimate child. Not surprisingly, Godwin didn't think she was as irksome anymore, but rather, somehow, the suffering Godwin saw on her pale features gave her an alluring, vulnerable quality, so much so that he was drawn to a sense of “sympathy in her anguish.” In the following weeks, they saw a great deal of one another and eventually both spoke of “the sentiment, which trembled upon the tongue but from the lips of either.”

To them, the state of their relationship felt as good as a marriage, without the restrictions of an actual ceremony. They both detested such shows of formality. “Nothing can be so ridiculous upon the face of it, or so contrary to the genuine march of sentiment, as to require the overflowing of the soul to wait upon a ceremony,” Godwin declared. That is, until a child entered the picture.

When Mary became aware of her second pregnancy, she recalled the scorn she had suffered during her first. Godwin, of course, agreed to marry her, though doing so went against all the principles he had been advocating for years. He was aware that some would see him as a hypocrite for yielding to the institution he so despised: “Some people have formed an inconsistency between my practicing this instance & my doctrine,” he wrote to his friend Thomas Wedgwood. But he also explained why he did not see any inconsistency. He still believed marriage was wrong, and he had only married Mary because he cared for her. Despite having gone through the ceremony, he felt no different than before and said, “I hold myself no otherwise bound than I was before the ceremony took place.”

On March 31, 1797, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft married in the small church at St. Pancras, and on April 6, 1797, they moved into a house together located at 29 Polygon Road, in London's Somers Town district. Godwin immediately began to receive congratulatory notes that said such a union was powerful and intellectually a fabulous match. One note came from Thomas Holcroft, in whose house they had reacquainted themselves. As others before him had, Holcroft extended a happy note to Godwin for having landed “Mrs. W.” But whether or not his wishes were heartfelt remain unclear, because earlier in the months preceding the marriage, Holcroft seemed to have a great and passionate crush on Mary Wollstonecraft.

“I think I discover[ed] the very being for whom my soul has for years been languishing,” he wrote to her. “The woman of reason all day . . . in the evenings becomes the playful and passionate child of love . . . one in whose arms I should encounter . . . soft eyes and ecstatic exulting and yielding known only to beings that seem purely ethereal: beings that breathe and imbue but souls: You are this being.”

E
ven though William Godwin had at first been reluctant to marry her, the void he felt upon Mary's death was deep and long lasting. And he dealt with it in the only way he knew how. Stunned into disbelief, the day after her death William Godwin entered his study, sat down at his writing desk, set quill to paper, and began working on what eventually became
Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.”
He felt obliged “to give the public some account of the life of a person of eminent merit deceased” during that particular time, for “it is a duty incumbent on the survivors.”

His intentions were to tell Mary's story, to highlight her heartbreaks and successes, her triumphs and apologies, so that readers could glimpse the most transfixing woman he had ever known. He was well intended, though when the memoirs were published in January 1798, the criticism and backlash he received came as a stab in the heart. On those pages he had poured out his heart as well as Mary's secrets, going to great lengths to highlight not only her life but also her private affairs and indiscretions, including her infatuation with Henry Fuseli, her affair with Gilbert Imlay, and the birth of Fanny.

Most of the information had been taken from private letters, journals, and confidences shared during their conjugal life. He also included detailed accounts of her two suicide attempts and her bouts with depression, clearly something her readers, those who had read
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
had either not known about or wished not to know about. In Godwin's hands, Mary Wollstonecraft came across as a bit of a hypocrite: in her work, she had fought for the equal rights of women, for owning one's own life and doing with it what one may, for refuting marriage, for being on par with men, for having other choices; most of all, she had attacked the educational system of the time for training young women solely to be “the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears, dismissing reason, whenever he chooses to be amused.” And yet in Godwin's book, she was attempting to drown herself over the inconsequential Gilbert Imlay? And what was to become of the child she had given birth to?

Written and published reviews were even harsher than the ones he received in person. One particularly nasty one printed in the
Monthly Review
declared that “blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands, if they were
forced
to relate these anecdotes of their wives which Mr. Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world. The extreme eccentricity of Mr. G.'s sentiments will account for his conduct. Virtue and vice are weighed by him in a balance of his own. He neither looks to marriage with respect, nor to suicide with horror.”

Godwin also foolishly revealed that he and Mary had engaged in sex before their marriage. This particularly angered those whose strict religious beliefs went against the notion of premarital sex, so much so that the memoirs were dubbed merely “a narrative of his licentious amours.”

Only years later did Godwin actually refer to the events that transpired upon the death of Mary Wollstonecraft as “stained with . . . melancholy colours . . . the air appeared to be murky and thick, an athmosphere that bore pestilence on its wings.” By then the damage had been done.

Godwin's book misrepresented everything Wollstonecraft had worked so hard to accomplish, damaging her reputation and causing her works to be disregarded for years to come. Only her daughter Mary claimed kinship with her. She read her mother's works and her private letters in the seclusion of St. Pancras Cemetery and her father's study, and through them learned how influential her mother had been to other women. This influence would extend over Mary's own life, particularly when it concerned romantic matters. She would become bonded with her mother as she suffered the scorn and misjudgments of a society that would not understand her affair with Percy Shelley.