Vindication (49 page)

Godwin did point to what he calls ‘genius'. ‘She felt herself alone…in the great mass of her species', he recalls, and elsewhere touches on Mary's ‘firmness of mind, an unconquerable greatness of soul, by which, after a short internal struggle, she was accustomed to rise above difficulties and suffering'. But these rays are lost in fogged versions of Fanny Blood and Fuseli. Godwin grants too little to what didn't fit a female Werther. Armed with ready-made fictions, he offers doomed narratives from Virgil and Goethe in place of the open-ended narrative of a woman who refused to walk ‘the beaten track'. Everina, we recall, was the person to whom Mary had confided her venture ten years before. She had trusted Everina to understand something of the character who would take such a course. When Godwin shut the valves of his attention to Everina's warning, he was engaged in bringing Mary's exploratory path into line with recognised fictions and with his own doctrines of free love and atheism. When he reports her attendance at Dr Price's sermons, he makes a gratuitous point that she did not succumb to ‘superstition'–not a word Mary herself would have used, and certainly not in relation to a minister she revered. Godwin's claim that Mary manifested no faith on her deathbed proved damaging. Not only was the claim, again, gratuitous–as we know, she was barely able to speak during the last twenty-four hours of her illness–it was also emotionally untrue, for as he himself explains earlier, she held to a faith of her own:

Godwin's ability, here, to see into character matched a subject who required it. At times, though, another manner undercut this gift. Godwin believed that biographic honesty honoured the Enlightenment ideals he and Mary shared, but when he compels himself to state a private fact, that they became lovers, he is blunt–almost defiant: ‘We did not marry.' Then, too, he ignores Imlay's more complex character as an author of the American frontier and, as such, bound to appeal to a woman who had turned from the beaten track. Godwin was not likely to forget Mary's confession of the ‘rapture' she had found in Imlay's arms; he was certainly gripped by the love-letters that came into his possession after her death. In narrowing Imlay's appeal to sexual charm, Godwin did further unintended damage to his wife's reputation. For he assumed, in his bluntest manner, that a virgin of thirty-four must have ‘panted in secret' for a man, before he goes on to explain that, for Mary, love was sacred, imaginative, intensely loyal. Readers, fixed on the former, disregarded the latter. They saw a wanton, wafting from Fuseli, to Imlay, to Godwin himself. In 1798 a posthumous image appeared of a brash, unintelligent face under a masculine hat, said to have been engraved after a vanished portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft. Its authenticity has gone unquestioned, but it's nothing like the intellectual seriousness of the authenticated Opie portraits or the austere Liverpool one. Her case for women's rights was dismissed as ‘scripture…for propagating w[hore]s', and Thomas J. Mathias, a leading antifeminist, reduced her range to shallow caprice:

The even more venomous ‘Vision of Liberty', published anonymously in 1801 in the
Anti-Jacobin
(a counter-revolutionary journal put out by Pitt's Treasury), taunts Godwin for his ‘simple' candour, and even for misplaced grief:

Her friends were dismayed. Southey thought Godwin had ‘stripped her naked'. Roscoe, her supporter in Liverpool, spoke of his ‘heart of stone'.

Godwin shocked readers in a different way with Mary's obstetric complications. His witness to the agony of an operation without anaesthetic and their exchanges during her last days draws us into that tragedy. In his restrained way he is wonderfully true to his own tie with Mary Wollstonecraft. But he remained ill informed about her contacts in France. Joel Barlow or Tom Paine could have told him that she was distanced from the prime actors in the Revolution, and mixed almost entirely with other expatriates. As for Mary's summer in Scandinavia, Godwin was forced to sidestep the business of that journey, and censor her letters to Imlay. During the very month the
Memoirs
came out Godwin was in touch with Imlay's English associate, Mr Cowie, who had advanced funds to Mary Wollstonecraft in view of what was due to her for her efforts in Scandinavia. Either Godwin chose not to question Cowie, or suppressed what information he had. Nor did he test the evidence of Mary's real letters against the fictional letters of the
Travels
–a pity, for he destroyed the real letters when the censored copies were published. Nor do the
Memoirs
explore her entry into Hamburg's heart of darkness. This is because Godwin narrowed her motives to emotional fits and starts: in his version, Mary goes to France not because she wished to see the Revolution, but to escape her crush on Fuseli; and she abandons Hamburg not because she was appalled by fraud (as the
Travels
tell us), but solely in response to Imlay's neglect.

Again, this was entirely well meant. Godwin had lent himself to the emotional expressiveness of her role in their private domestic drama, but it led him to play down her rationality and the amount of time she devoted
to the life of the mind. The claim of his Preface to transmit word-of-mouth fact, on the basis of notes made during Mary's lifetime, remained unquestioned until 1876 when Godwin's first biographer, Charles Kegan Paul, cast doubt on Godwin's version of Fuseli's story. Richard Holmes revived this doubt in
Footsteps
in 1985. The time has come to go back to Everina's warning of wider inaccuracy.

Godwin lacked the letters that would have filled in Mary's schooldays in Yorkshire; her friend Jane Arden, now Jane Gardiner–for she too had married in 1797–produced them a year late, in January 1799. Afterwards she met Godwin, but those were only social occasions; he didn't come to know her. Fanny Blood's letters to the Wollstonecraft sisters would have revealed a more humorous and professional character than Godwin's notion (derived most likely from what became a common misreading of
Mary
:
A Fiction
) that Fanny was a feeble figure. Godwin's portrait was designed to offset Mary's energy of purpose: ‘Fanny, on the contrary, was a woman of a timid and irresolute nature, accustomed to yield to difficulties, and probably priding herself in this morbid softness of her temper.' The real Fanny was almost the opposite: steady, sensible, guiding her family and screening her pains out of consideration for others (in the manner of Elinor Dashwood in
Sense and Sensibility
). Mary's letters to her sisters would have lit up the scene of Fanny's death in Lisbon, and, even more vividly, scenes in Ireland: Mary's midnight reveries at Mitchelstown Castle, her dislike of Lady Kingsborough, her satire on Dublin society from behind her mask, the Viceroy's ball, and the radicalisation of Margaret King. The letters in the Wollstonecrafts' possession would have led Godwin to the Revd Dr Gabell. The young Oxford graduate who had debated theology with Mary Wollstonecraft on the packet to Ireland in the autumn of 1786 was another who kept her letters. In time, he became headmaster of Winchester College. Jane Austen, who spent her last weeks in Winchester in 1817, could view ‘Dr Gabell's garden' from her window.

For all this, Godwin had two advantages. There were indeed things Mary had told him. She had talked of her formative years at Newington Green: the goodness of Mrs Burgh, and Dr Price as prime mover of her
political life. Of her time in Ireland, she had singled out George Ogle as the most perfect gentleman she had known. The persistence of these memories reminds us how much she loved benevolence–how reassuring it was to find it in the world to which an unsupported woman in the eighteenth century was exposed. Godwin's other advantage was access to Mary's fourth benefactor, Joseph Johnson. He read her letters to Johnson, and gave
Mary
:
A Fiction
its due.

Unfortunately, Godwin errs in his judgement of everything else Mary Wollstonecraft produced for Johnson during 1787–92, nor does he commend her subsequent history of the French Revolution, though this book was astute enough for President Adams to read it twice with minute attention. When Wollstonecraft politicises the importance of women and domestic relations, Adams concedes the amoral basis of standard political dramas of greed and commerce demanding the increase of armies and navies in order to protect property. Is this not ‘the true secret' of French and English policies? Adams asks himself in the margin. ‘And is not this the secret of the inscrutable conduct of our American Congress?' Adams fears he might be ‘visionary' if he accepts the idea. He might find himself tugged outside his usual habits of mind by Wollstonecraft's portrait of an alternative civilisation governed by domestic affections–a superior domesticity of a kind he has known with Abigail, another champion of women's rights. When Wollstonecraft looks to a glorious era when ‘fool' and ‘tyrant' will be synonymous, Adams echoes her. ‘Amen and Amen! Glorious era come quickly!'

Godwin's training at the Hoxton Academy had stressed a slow, measured logic. He was astonished at Wollstonecraft's speed and insistence, and did not see that she proceeds less as philosopher and more as an orator for whom repetition is part of the impact. Godwin's influential reservation about a want of order in the
Rights of Woman
became almost obligatory for future critics. Godwin also found the book ‘amazonian'. From about 1795 this word came into use, as the counter-revolution turned against boldness in women. Erasmus Darwin said, ‘great eminence in almost anything is sometimes injurious to a young lady; whose temper and disposition should appear pliant rather than robust'. Women themselves preached a retreat
from independence, experiment and politics. Anti-heroines based on Mary Wollstonecraft abound. Harriot Freke in Maria Edgeworth's
Belinda
(1801), Adeline Mowbray in a novel of that name (1804), and Elinor Joddrel, the rash spokeswoman for ‘the Rights of human nature' in Fanny Burney's
The Wanderer; or Female Difficulties
(begun before 1800, published in 1814) are amongst numerous warnings against independent girls who wreck their lives. Mrs Opie, the author of
Adeline Mowbray
, was none other than Mary Wollstonecraft's one-time friend Amelia Alderson. When Mary had married in the spring of 1797, Opie had turned his attention to Amelia Alderson, and they had married. Social pressure led Amelia Opie to show up a mistaken heroine who refuses marriage and lives with the man she loves. But the most influential opposition came from Hannah More's best-selling
Coelebs in Search of a Wife
(1808). The Wollstonecraft figure is the unfeminine Miss Sparkes who envies men. This novel, more than any other piece of counter-revolutionary propaganda, succeeded in refuting women's claims for equality and a public voice, and turned thoughts back to wifely dependence.

 

The scandal of Godwin's revelations happened to coincide with a greater scandal. The youngest of Mary Wollstonecraft's charges at Mitchelstown Castle was Mary King, who had been six years old in 1786–7. Her mother Lady Kingsborough, won over by Wollstonecraft's methods of reason and affection, had granted her a free hand. Her ladyship even took to showing off her daughters' governess–author of
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters–
in Dublin society. In September 1797, at the time of Wollstonecraft's death, Mary King, aged sixteen, was living at Windsor with her mother. Viscount and Lady Kingsborough, ill-matched (as the governess had observed), had separated in 1789, and Kingsborough had introduced a mistress, Elinor Halleran, into his wife's ancestral home. She had borne him two children.

In Wollstonecraft's time with the Kings, an extra boy had been attached to the family. His name was Henry Gerald Fitzgerald, and he was probably a first cousin of Lady Kingsborough, the son of her father's brother, who was declared by the family to have been illegitimate and orphaned at about fourteen in 1781. The Kings brought him up with their own children–
though they didn't send him with their sons to Eton, followed by Exeter College, Oxford. So he was set apart educationally, despite superior abilities, nor was he to share their prospective wealth. Kingsborough must have bought him a commission in the army, where he rose rapidly through the ranks. Still, it may have rankled that he lacked the advantage of the King son destined for the army–another Henry–who was sent to Oxford in 1794. In September 1797, as Henry Fitzgerald enters our story, he was about thirty, a lieutenant-colonel in the Guards, married three years, with two children, and living further up the Thames from Windsor, in Bishopsgate. Mary King–parted from her errant father–fell in love with this relation about twice her age.

She had a graceful figure and a profusion of long hair like her mother's. Fitzgerald, who was a frequent visitor in Windsor, began to pay Mary attentions–the servants noticed; no one else. Suddenly, Mary disappeared. A hue and cry followed. Advertisements were placarded about London offering a massive reward for information. One day, a servant appeared at the Kings' door with the story that, at the time of Lady Mary's disappearance, a gentleman had brought a girl to the lodgings where she worked at Clayton Street, Kennington. He had slept with her that Sunday night, departed at six next morning, and returned often. The maid had noted the luxuriant hair (mentioned in the advertisement), and spied the girl cutting hers off. Then, at the very moment the servant was relaying her suspicion to Lady Kingsborough, Fitzgerald turned up.