OF ALL THE THINGS Mary Wollstonecraft might have wished for her sisters, friends, or indeed herself and humanity, self-command or, as she would have termed it, fortitude, would be highest. She has Maria, the protagonist of her posthumous novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, recall her uncle defining “genuine fortitude” thus: it “consisted in governing our own emotions, and making allowance for the weaknesses in our friends, that we would not tolerate in ourselves.”1 Control over one’s self was central to her conception of character, and it was something that she viewed as sorely missing in the world: “Most women, and men too, have no character at all,” she wrote in her first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787).2 She stressed the essential nature of control of one’s self in all her writings in one form or other. Self-command or self-governance, as Catriona MacKenzie refers to it in an important article on the subject, was the foremost virtue for her since it was the necessary condition of all the others.3 She was not alone in seeing it as the bedrock of human personality. Adam Smith (1723–1790), with whose work on moral personality she engaged, thought likewise; he spoke of the “great school of self-command” and saw it as the basis of every other virtue;4 so, of course, had a long line of philosophers reaching all the way back to Socrates. To be sure, all philosophers, when pressed, would agree that ultimately nothing can be achieved, no virtue exercised, without the power to will oneself to do or to forbear. Wollstonecraft made that point emphatically. She believed European society to be in particular need of being told this. Although she did see, or hoped to see, some signs of a potential moral rejuvenation in the revolution in France, she judged contemporary society to be corrupt and the bulk of her contemporaries to be degenerate in some way. While she expended much intellectual energy understanding how self-control could be taught and developed, and which social forces enhanced and which weakened it, she used most of her ink exposing what she took to be the folly of the world, its vanity, and delusions: its sheer stupidity. This is particularly true of her A Vindications of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Wollstonecraft found little to praise in either sex. Neither women, with very rare exceptions, nor men emerge unscathed from her pages or fulfill their human potential. While she certainly did not hold what is commonly referred to as a pessimistic view of human nature, much of her writing is condemnatory and her tone, cutting. Her book reviews are mostly damning when they are not dismissive, her own books rich in disapproval of nearly everything she depicted in them, likewise her correspondence. It was, to be sure, the style of the time, of the genres in which she wrote, and in many ways the product of her circumstances, but it did become her.
As a result, it would be all too easy to think of her as all denunciation and a thorough killjoy. Indeed, that is how she has been viewed, and Julie Murray has rightly challenged this.5 It therefore may not be amiss to begin a study such as this by evoking some of the things Wollstonecraft did appreciate or even love and wish others to relish. It is also worth noting that while she thought forms of abstemiousness often necessary and the capacity to exercise them vital to the individuals themselves, their relations, and society more generally, she did not think of self-command as equating to, or necessarily entailing, self-denial. In considering what she divulged, or appeared to be, enjoying and what she thought constituted a good life, we gain both in understanding of her as a person and comprehension of her philosophical outlook. It allows us to see and, in some cases, tease out what she deemed the philosophical challenges a reflecting mind such as hers faced, for even the seemingly most simple pleasures entailed serious considerations on her part. Most, it would appear, if not all, had to be in the service of the development of a particular kind of personality, one with character. What made for character or contributed to its making emerged in part from what she wrote of the arts.
Wollstonecraft did value many things for the sheer enjoyment they gave her and others. This was especially evident in her youth, before “misfortune had broken [her] spirits,” as she described it when she was only twenty-two.6 She prized the performing arts from an early age and, in one of the earliest extant letters of 1773, expressed excitement at the prospect of seeing a play: “I am going to see the Macaroni if it be performed, and expect a great deal of pleasure.”7 The theater was for Wollstonecraft a lasting source of delight. She began the final of her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark by reporting that there was “a pretty little French theatre at Altona; and the actors are much superior to those I saw at Copenhagen,” and noted that the theaters at Hamburg would soon open.8 Her correspondence toward the end of her life also attests to her continued enjoyment of the theater, a milieu in which Godwin and she had a number of friends, and her copious quotations show that she not only attended performances but read plays.
Pleased to be given a new edition of Shakespeare while in Dublin in 1787, she cited him frequently and throughout her life, drawing on a great many of his plays, including As You Like It, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest, and providing lengthy extracts from these in The Female Reader (1789). On seeing “some heart’s ease,” she evoked A Midsummer Night’s Dream when she wrote to Imlay that “[if] you are deep read in Shakespeare, you will recollect that this was the little western flower tinged by love’s dart, which ‘maidens call love in idleness.’ ”9 Her novels are infused with his words, and in a 1788 review for the Analytical Review of Essays on Shakespeare’s Dramatic Character of Sir John Falstaff and on his Imitation of Female Characters. To which are added, some general Observations on the Study of Shakespeare by the Glasgow Professor of Humanity, William Richardson (1743–1814), it is clear that she thought of herself as someone who, unlike many, had a genuine understanding of Shakespeare’s works.10 She agreed with Richardson’s claim that “half critics” were mistaken in thinking that Shakespeare “has exerted more ability in his imitation of male, than female characters,” though she could not concur with “the cordial praise he bestow[ed] on Ophelia.” Ophelia’s conduct in Hamlet, she maintained (unknowing what lay in her own future), “was mean and unjust; if she acted like a female we pity her weakness, but should not either praise or palliate a fault that no mistaken notion of duty could justify without confounding the distinction between virtue and vice.”11
If she condemned the action of his character, Ophelia, she did not fault the playwright. She thought that, unlike most dramaturges, he had succeeded in what she considered one of the great challenges that only great art could meet, namely, finely delineating the “almost imperceptible progress of the passions.”12 Given how little she was given to unqualified commendation, her expressed admiration for “our incomparable poet” is striking and the grounds for it of particular interest.13 Commenting in a review in 1789 on the number of novels being published and how very few of them were “tolerable,” she wrote of Shakespeare by contrast as follows:
Shakspeare [sic] created monsters; but he gave such reality to his characters, that we should not hesitate a moment to deliver our imaginations, and even reason, into his hands; we follow their wild yet not fantastic foot-steps through wood and bog, nothing loath—thinking them new, though not unnatural.14
Here Wollstonecraft tells us that great, true art, even when fantastic, is “not unnatural.” A great artist was one to whom his or her audience surrendered themselves fully, as in an act of love. Such artists were magicians, but their powers did not affect everyone: “nay, even Shakespear’s [sic] magic powers are only for those who cultivate their reason.”15 Her knowledge of the theater extended well beyond him, however, and she could not resist speaking of Molière, Corneille, Dryden, and Racine in The French Revolution praising the first as an extraordinary author who wrote on “the grand scale of human passions, comparing the second to the third, and describing the last as ‘the father of the french [sic] stage.’ ”16
Her first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, included a piece on ‘The Theatre’ as one of its constituent short essays.17 She began by declaring it the site of the most rational amusements, especially to “a cultivated mind,” though she warned that to one less so, it might prove a schooling in affectations. This was not a minor consequence for Wollstonecraft. Authenticity mattered to her. Exaggerated displays, false emotions, and all forms of distortions of personality were anathema to her. When writing to Imlay from Scandinavia, she even declared always having been “of the opinion that the allowing actors to die, in the presence of the audience, has an immoral tendency; but trifling when compared with the ferocity acquired by viewing the reality as a show.”18 The theater was therefore not free of moral danger, as it could easily be the scene of “a false display of the passions” and lead spectators to copy extreme ones, while being oblivious to the “more delicate touches.” Wollstonecraft confessed that she herself had been affected “beyond measure” by Lear’s line on seeing Cordelia: “I think that Lady is my daughter,” yet had been unmoved by the unfaithful, deceitful, but ultimately penitent Calista’s declamations about the cave in which she would live “Until her tears had washed her guilt away.”19 Wollstonecraft, no less than anyone else, needed to be taught to be sensitive to the more subtle emotions and complex moral predicaments depicted on stage. However, her awareness of her own limitations had not stopped her questioning the value of Greek tragedies and, taking Oedipus as an example, asked what moral lesson could conceivably be drawn from a story of someone impelled by the gods “and, led imperiously by blind fate, though perfectly innocent, he is fearfully punished, with all this hapless race, for a crime in which his will had no part.”20 Sheer destiny was, we can infer, of no psychological interest to her. What she wanted to see staged were moral dilemmas facing characters who had genuine choices and were not shackled to a preordained fate. Whether Ophelia was in such a position is questionable, but one may assume, given what she argued, that Wollstonecraft thought Hamlet had faced such a choice.
So, while Wollstonecraft did express some concern about the potential of drama to have an emotionally distorting impact, her brief composition on the subject made clear her genuine interest in it as well as providing further evidence of her love of Shakespeare. The theater could enhance our understanding of humanity and thereby contribute to the making of our own selves. To be sure, this was by no means always the case. She could be critical of individual plays for their want of plot or character development without rejecting the art itself.21 That her concern was far from the virulent critique of the theater articulated by Plato and famously in the mid-eighteenth century by Jean-Jacques Rousseau might be somewhat surprising, not so much because she engaged with the thought of both these authors, but because, like the latter, she was so hostile to anything that might encourage men and women to appear other than they were or indeed to all that contributed to the making of the hall of mirrors in which much of society was entrapped.22
She was also aware that the theater and theater audiences were not the same the world over. They reflected deep cultural, social, and psychological differences between people. As Lisa Plummer Grafton has argued, Wollstonecraft thought the French people particularly theatrical, and claimed they imbibed the fondness for public places, and the theater in particular, as they suckled their mothers’ milk.23 Indeed, she was initially critical of their national character for being so much shaped by their theatrical amusements. She thought that the continual gratification of their senses in which the theater played a large part made the French fickle, unable to reflect on their feelings, and stifled their imagination.24 Once in Scandinavia, she was to revise her opinion on this subject, as we will have occasion to see later, and began her Letter XX in her disarmingly confessional tone: “I have formerly censured the french [sic] for their extreme attachments to theatrical exhibitions, because I thought that they tended to render them vain and unnatural characters.”25 She now considered that money spent at the theater was far better spent than in drinking and commented on the sobriety of the French people, remarking that it was precisely this that made “their fêtes more interesting” and their common people superior to that of every other nation.
Moreover, she noted, responses to performances did not vary greatly between social classes in France, where audiences responded as one socially unified whole, whereas differences were far more marked in England:
At our theatres, the boxes, pit, and galleries, relish different scenes; and some are condescendingly born by the more polished part of the audience, to allow the rest to have their portion of amusement. In France, on the contrary, a highly wrought sentiment of morality, probably rather romantic than sublime, produces a burst of applause, when one heart seems to agitate every hand.26
Thus plays, performances, and reactions to them were of great interest to her on several different levels. The powerful impact of art on individuals and large audiences, as we will have cause to see again in relation to music and other forms of creations, was a subject on which she deliberated.
If she rejected artificiality, she did not reject the fine arts any more than she did the theater. Both needed conditioning or training of some kind. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argued that “[a] taste for the fine arts requires cultivation; but no more than a taste for the virtuous affections; and both suppose that enlargement of mind which opens so many sources of mental pleasure.”27 This brief statement is one of her most revealing and warrants highlighting. One had to acquire a desire for being a certain kind of person. The yearning to be a cultivated and moral being had itself to be nurtured. Both called for effort. Both called for intellectual development, which in turn produced greater fonts of enjoyment. The desire to be cultivated and virtuous had to be inculcated by thoughtful parenting, sustained by appropriate education, and not thwarted by society.28 The theater could, given the right preparation on the part of individuals in the audience, contribute to that process, as could—and indeed should in Wollstonecraft’s view—the other arts.
Of the art of painting itself Wollstonecraft wrote relatively little directly, or if she did, it has not survived the destruction of many of her letters.29 She probably sat for her portrait for John Williamson (1751–1818) in 1791, a work commissioned by her admirer, the Liverpool lawyer, William Roscoe (1753–1831), and for John Opie (1761–1807) around 1792 and again in 1797, and was on very good terms with him and his wife.30 They are mentioned in her letters, as are brief references to her posing amidst accounts of social engagements. She encountered illustrators and painters when she joined the circle of Joseph Johnson, her publisher. He patronized William Blake and Henry Fuseli (1741–1825), who rose to fame following the exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1782 of The Nightmare (1781), his erotically charged and disturbing painting.
Wollstonecraft became wildly besotted with him, but although she referred to him as an “original genius,”31 we do not know whether her infatuation with the married artist owed much to his art, much less which aspect of it.32 Writing to Roscoe, she disclosed that she did not anticipate liking Fuseli’s representation of Eve in his series of depictions of Milton’s poems. Rather than describe the early sketches, she urged Roscoe to see them for himself, adding, “[w]e have all an individual way of feeling grandeur and sublimity.”33 Blake was to illustrate her Original Stories from Real Life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788), but again, we do not know what she thought of his engravings.
Her review of Joshua Reynolds’s A Discourse Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, on the Distribution of the Prizes, Dec. 10, 1788 gives almost nothing away about either Reynolds himself or his subject, Thomas Gainsborough. Yet her relatively lengthy citations of his Discourse do provide an indication that she agreed with Reynolds in thinking that, while students might learn from past and present masters, the latter should not be turned into rigid models for pupils, as these would become “bad copies of good painters, instead of excellent imitators of the great universal truth of things.”34 She shunned imitation, whatever the context. Independence of mind was of prime importance to Wollstonecraft. How that could be achieved, how one could be true to nature, yet taught or schooled, and, what is more, be original was an unresolved difficulty to which she returned time and again in a number of ways. Rendering nature on those terms clearly presented a great challenge whatever the medium, but as we saw earlier, Shakespeare had, in her estimation, achieved something comparable in his medium.
Reviewing four of the works of the parish priest, schoolmaster, and highly prolific writer and artist William Gilpin (1724–1804) gave her cause to reflect on the nature of beauty and the beautiful in nature, as well as travel literature, of which she was to become a noted practitioner when reporting on her journey through Scandinavia in 1795. The way Gilpin integrated his views of nature into his ethics and theology was, in any event, likely to appeal to Wollstonecraft.35 She valued his Observations on the River Wye, and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to picturesque Beauty, made in the Summer of the Year 1770, the second edition of which she considered for the September 1789 issue of the Analytical Review, “as it contains the principles of picturesque beauty, as far as it is capable of being reduced to principles, and transmitted from one man to another.” Like Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), whose Critique of Judgment (1790) she knew and cited in her Hints in relation to the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful, but contra Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), who believed in a universal aesthetic standard, she thought taste was, to a large extent, an individual matter.36 Possibly as a result, expressing one’s taste, verbalizing it, was intrinsically difficult. In contrast to matters of fact, which could be conveyed “by the most direct road” with precision and clarity from one mind to another, “pleasures arising from taste and feeling are more complex and accidental” and “almost incommunicable.”37 While Wollstonecraft thought Gilpin’s drawings did help to share his perceptions of what he saw in the course of his travels as they fixed the attention on specific moments and spaces, they also limited the nature of the shared experience: “from the size of the drawings, their studied neatness, and perhaps, the imperfection inseparable from art, his elegant sketches oftener gave us an idea of the beautiful than the sublime.”38 However good, the logic of composition, its inevitably restricted span, the artifice it introduced, meant that representative art could not but provide a diminished experience of nature. This said, neither Gilpin nor she thought that art should or indeed could seek to replicate nature. In fact, in a review some months later, Wollstonecraft went further, asserting that art required “artificial effects.” Furthermore, she thought Gilpin himself was more committed to this view than he seemed to realize: “we are apt to believe, from experience, that a small landscape, when it is tinted, assumes a more diminutive and artificial appearance than plain, shadowy drawings, because the unnatural, striking glow in them, awakens the imagination, which bold strokes might have cheated, if the veil had not been removed; for unnatural must the charming tints of nature ever appear, when they are not mellowed, by melting into a large expanse of grey air.”39
Wollstonecraft’s third review of Gilpin’s works, Remarks on Forest Scenery, and other Woodland Views, (relatively chiefly to Picturesque Beauty). Illustrated by the Scenes of New Forest in Hampshire, in August 1791, merits special attention. It reveals, first, that she thought aesthetic taste had to have some form of theoretical grounding. She believed this showed, as will be discussed further in the next chapter, “that reason and fancy are nearer akin than cold dullness is willing to allow.”40 In other words, a genuinely perceptive person would intuit that however much reason and the imagination were generally thought of as opposite/opposing terms, they were in fact profoundly connected. Second, after citing Gilpin on the comparative advantages of exhibiting “incidental beauties” of the meridian and the rising sun, she approvingly quoted the following:
[i]n general, the poet had great advantages over the painter, in the process of sublimification, if the term may be allowed. The business of the former is only to excite ideas; that of the latter, to represent them. The advantage of excited over represented ideas is very great, inasmuch as they are in some degree the reader’s own production, and are susceptible of those modifications, which make them peculiarly acceptable to the mind in which they are raised. Whereas the others being confined within a distinct and unalterable line, admit of none of the modifications, which flatter the particular taste of the spectator, but must make their way by their own intrinsic force.41
Gilpin was writing as an artist. Wollstonecraft was citing him from her point of view, namely as a viewer. There is reason to think from what she wrote of the other arts that she preferred what was conducive to the process of sublimification (Gilpin’s coinage) rather than having an effect forced upon her mind, which is to say that she preferred art that excited ideas in the viewer rather than a mere representation of the ideas. This applied to viewing art, not producing it. When writing, in the fourth and final review of Gilpin, from the point of view of the practitioner, she did assert that “[l]andscape sketching is certainly a most pleasing amusement, and affords the idle, we mean the rich, an employment that by exercising the taste, leads to moral improvement.”42 Thus, the practice of drawing was morally edifying in her view: it gave the practitioner something to do and developed his or her aesthetic judgment in so doing.
This said, although Wollstonecraft did not consider painting in much detail, she often visualized political and human relations more generally, and wrote about them as if they were tableaux, tableaux of pastoral idylls or urban poverty, and of women in each other’s company, for instance. Thus, we find another glimpse of her thoughts on the subject in an unexpected context, namely that of her first Vindication. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was partly prompted and shaped as a response to a young Frenchman of his acquaintance asking for his opinion of the unfolding events. Part of Burke’s withering answer focused on the composition of the National Assembly. Attacking Burke’s deprecating comments, Wollstonecraft evoked the quasi-pedagogical relationship between the young Frenchman and the older Member of Parliament, and argued that
[i]f you had given the same advice to a young history painter of abilities, I should have admired your judgment, and re-echoed your sentiments. Study, you might have said, the noble models of antiquity, till your imagination is inflamed; and, rising above the vulgar practice of the hour, you may imitate without copying those great originals. A glowing picture, of some interesting moment, would probably have been produced by these natural means; particularly if one little circumstance is not overlooked, that the painter had noble models to revert to, calculated to excite admiration and stimulate exertion.43
Here we see her, as we have already noted and will see again, deliberating on the relation between imitation as obsequious copy and imitation that is nothing of the sort, but rather takes a model as inspiration in a manner that transcends them. It was a major concern of hers that all forms of servile replication be eradicated in every aspect of human existence, not just the visual arts. Wollstonecraft’s reflections on the latter and the arts more generally, however, do shed some light on what she thought the relation between imitation and inventiveness ought to be.
While these topics, whether singly or in combination, were hardly Burke’s monopoly, and Wollstonecraft had more than one reason to come to them, his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which she ransacked in aid of her unrestrained attack on his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), brought them to the fore. Although Burke was by no means averse to change and is well-known for his pronouncement that “[a] state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation,”44 both of these works addressed the issue of the reproduction of society through the combined activity of the imitative capacity of mankind and the transformative effect of the ambitious among it. As we shall have occasion to see further on, much of what Wollstonecraft wrote was shaped by her engagement with him on this subject and by his conception of the sublime and the beautiful and his comments about women within it.
Given that she was asked to review the subject of music as well as poetry, it would seem that the Analytic Review’s editor, Joseph Johnson, must have thought Wollstonecraft might not only appreciate these arts, but also be well-placed to reflect on their particular nature. Already in her first published work, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life (1787), she stated that “[m]usic and painting, and many other ingenious arts, are now brought to great perfection, and afford the most rational and delicate pleasure.”45 In a work of the same period, Original Stories from Real life; with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness (1788), Wollstonecraft argued that “[e]very gift of Heaven is lent to us for improvement” and “[m]usic, drawing, works of usefulness and fancy, all amuse and refine the mind, sharpen the ingenuity and [form insensibly] the dawning judgement.”46 Artistic talent should not, therefore, be allowed to lie dormant, she contended, as they were divine gifts and great blessings that enhanced our capacity to be fully human; as we just read in her comments regarding landscape painting, it was conducive to “moral improvement.”
Wollstonecraft was rather more vocal about music than she appears to have been about painting, though the latter subject did surface, as we shall see again, in her reflections on poetry and nature. That she was more expressive about music may be due to the fact that she responded emotionally more immediately to the one than the other, possibly because she found it less imitative and more consolatory, but perhaps also because her experience of its beauty led her more easily to that of the sublime. It was for her a source of joy and solace, a spiritual channel, a mirror to God’s harmonious creation, and a unifying force.
Even though her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters was not an auto-biographical but a pedagogical work, she disclosed that she preferred “expression to execution,” adding “[t]he simple melody of some artless airs has often soothed my mind, when it has been harassed by care; and I have been raised from the very depth of sorrow, by the sublime harmony of some of Handel’s compositions.”47
Music, and possibly that of Henry Purcell (1659–1695) and Georg Frideric Handel (1685–1759) in particular, had an important transcendent dimension for Wollstonecraft: “I have been lifted,” she continued, “above this little scene of grief and care, and mused on him, from whom all bounty flows.”48 It afforded her a conduit to the celestial and likewise to writing about it and the arts more generally. In Mary, A Fiction (1788) composed in the summer of 1787, the heroine, upon hearing a sailor say that “he believed the world was going to be at an end,” was led toward a new train of thought:
Some of Handel’s sublime compositions occurred to her, and she sung them to the grand accompaniment. The Lord God Omnipotent reigned, and would reign for ever and ever!—Why then did she fear the sorrows that were passing away, when she knew that He would bind up the broken-hearted, and receive those who came out of great tribulation.49
Similarly, in the posthumous novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, begun just a little more than a year before her death, Wollstonecraft had its heroine, Maria, upon escaping her brutal husband, procure herself some books and music “to beguile the tedious solitary days,” “and [sing] till, saddened by the strain of joy,” “Come, ever smiling Liberty / And with thee bring thy jocund train” from Handel’s Judas Maccabaeus.50 Criticizing a poem that referred to the effect of Handel’s music (“What moral is not rapt / To hear his tender wildy-warbled song”), she retorted that “[i]t is not Handel’s tender-wildly-warbled song, with few exceptions, which demand our praise; but the grand combinations that force us to applaud his exquisite judgement—his harmony rather than his melody.”51 However, she did acknowledge that “the admirer of Handel’s grand instrumental accompaniments” might be led to overlook “the melody of many composers of genius,” observing that “[t]hese feats tickle the ear and wonder is mistaken for admiration.”52
The oratorio, Judas Maccabaeus, composed in 1746 with a libretto by the Reverend Thomas Morell (who borrowed from Milton and Shakespeare), must nonetheless have been a favorite of hers.53 She included a reference to the oratorio in the fourteenth of her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) as she related the effect reports of the honest and incorruptible farmers of northern Norway had had on her: “[t]he description I received of them carried me back to the fables of the golden age: independence and virtue; affluence without vice; cultivation of mind, without depravity of heart; with ‘ever smiling liberty’; the nymph of the mountain.”54 Judas Maccabaeus was composed to celebrate the victory of William, Duke of Cumberland, over Charles Edward Stuart the Pretender at the battle of Culloden on April 16, 1746, which, among other things, was a Catholic defeat. One of Handel’s most popular works from its first performance, it tells of the Israelites rallying behind Judas following the death of his father, the leader Mattathias, and of Judas’s heroic victory against the Seleucid Empire which had proscribed Judaism and forced Jews to worship Hellenistic divinities. The reason behind Handel’s choice of biblical stories was therefore clear. Whether, as a fervent anti-Catholic for much of her life, although not its entirety, Wollstonecraft’s liking of the musical work was partly due to this connection can only be surmised. Be this as it may, the smiling liberty of which her novel’s heroine, Maria, sang was, as for the Jewish people in Handel’s work, to praise God.
These were not the only instances of her conception of music as a link between the human and the divine. Commenting on Charles Burney’s four-volume study, A General History of Music, from the earliest Ages, to the present Period. To which is prefixed, A Dissertation on the Music of the Ancients in the February 1790 issue of the Analytical Review, within months of writing A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft produced one of her longest and most positive reviews, notwithstanding her divergence from the author on some points. The article makes evident her musical knowledge and sensibility, lauds the composition of Purcell and Handel, and reaffirms her view of the art as both divine manifestation and prayer. After extending to Burney the “warmest praise for his indefatigable industry” and re-entitling the work “An Historical Dictionary of Music,” she wrote:
Every lover of this captivating art, must thank the author, emphatically, for his unwearied researches, whilst the unimpassioned philosopher may coldly connect a more grand and comprehensive interest with the enquiry, and drawing metaphysical inferences from the ingenuity displayed in the progressive improvement of music, advance a step further into the terra incognita of the human mind. From the vocal shell to the bent horn; from the rustling of the breezes amongst reeds, or the sweep of winds across stiff aquatic plants, to the rude syrinx, and perforated flute; from the deep tone lyre, to our admirable violin, which a skilful hand and feeling heart can almost make articulate every gradation of passion; how slow, yet striking the improvement, in the aggregate! Connected thus with universal harmony, though music may be called the food of passion and sensation, it affords the contemplative mind the most exalted intellectual pleasure, and becomes the food of devotion; if the effusions of awful gratitude, and reverential love, on discovering any fresh glimpse of order and wisdom in creation, is the most perfect homage of a being, who gropes in the dark for proofs of its great origin and destination.55
We saw earlier that Wollstonecraft approved of artistry that suggested ideas rather than seeking to reproduce them literally. We also noted that she believed the cultivation of aesthetic and moral sense led to other pleasures. In this February 1790 review, we see these to be the delights of piety: divine faith was deliciously pleasurable in her account.
Burney had asked, “What kind of music is most pleasing to mankind?,” and replied: novelty, refinement and “ingenious contrivance” to the connoisseurs, the “familiar and common” to those who were not. Wollstonecraft thought he ought to have added that “people of taste and feeling, who are not professed performers, are most touched by strains addressed to the heart.” One can only presume she was speaking for herself when she also noted that neither “novelty of harmony” nor “ingenious contrivance” was pleasing; indeed, she thought that listeners would be as disgusted by them as by “fine attitudes in an actor, which, so far from being the expression of passion, spring from study, to produce stage effect.” Thus, while Wollstonecraft disapproved of mere copying and admired originality, she did not wish the latter to be forced and unnatural. She thought that on this part of his subject, Burney was speaking too much like “a mere musician, whose heart and ears were not connected, or to use the language of Rousseau, whose ears were depraved by harmony.”56 That music ought to make the sensible heart vibrate was a thread running through the review, something she clearly thought Burney could not fully appreciate, though she did not quite explain how music could succeed in so doing. Despite her positive response to the book under review, she distinguished herself from its author in another important respect. She read his claims about music from the perspective of an audience member, not that of a composer or performer. Her comments are illuminating, moreover, not only of her as a listener, but of her views about the history of humanity.
While Wollstonecraft was willing to allow that the ancients might not have used “simultaneous harmony, that is, music in different parts,” she was not inclined to follow Burney in denying ancient music its powerful effects. The praise its powers had received from poets and historians could not be discarded, she argued. She thought the reactions of the learned needed to be distinguished from those of the “vulgar of most nations [who] will never perceive the delicate graces of harmony, or feel the melodious shades of passion—words are sufficient for them; refinement has not fostered those sentiments, to which tones only can give articulation.”57 This was obvious if one considered popular tunes, given their monotonousness and the repetitiveness of a “particular motivo” in them. Yet, speaking again as a listener, she imagined that the sudden effect of a “wild melody” on a large assembly would have been wondrous. National music should not be slighted; even “a heart of sensibility will sometimes beat with the crowd, though it understands a superior language.”58 The ignorant could be moved and united to good effect. By contrast, she thought “the immoderate indulgence of genuine feelings, or the sickly appetite of fastidious refinement, the melody of passion, the graces of harmony, pall on the sense.”59 Like a tight-rope artist, Wollstonecraft walked the thin line between wishing to acknowledge taste and discernment and railing against denaturation through over-refinement. As with painting, the question revolved around the extent to which learning enhanced perception and feeling or corrupted them in the formation of taste.
Thinking of this in relation to music, Wollstonecraft was eager to resist a division between heart and mind, passion and understanding, sound and language. Some music required no explanation. Listening to it and comprehending it were one. Its absorption was instantaneous. “We perfectly agree with Dr B[urney],” she declared,
[t]hat there is some kind even of instrumental music, so “divinely composed, and so expressively performed, that it wants no words to explain its meaning: it is itself the language of the heart and of passion, and speaks more to both in a few notes, than any other language composed of clashing consonants, and insipid vowels, can do in as many thousand.”60
However, she firmly disagreed with him in opposing music to poetry. In this, we see her thinking of the interconnectedness of feeling and understanding in the first months of 1790 as she had begun to in her earliest work and would do for the remainder of her short life. “We cannot subscribe,” she continued, with what Burney took as the inference that “ ‘upon the whole, it seems as if poetry were more immediately the language of the head, and music that of the heart; or in other words, as if poetry were the poorest vehicle of instruction, and modulated sound that of joy, sorrow and innocent pleasure.’ ”61 Neither music nor poetry were, in her view, or, at least should be, didactic. They did not, or ought not, seek to teach. Given how prone she was never to miss an opportunity to moralize, these pronouncements on music and especially poetry are striking. She believed they sought or ought to seek to move. It may be that she thought that is how they edified. But in moving listeners or readers, they did not skirt understanding. They involved it seamlessly. Although, as we shall see shortly, Wollstonecraft could often speak of the different mental faculties as if they were neatly divided and indeed conflicting, that is not how she thought they ought to be conceived or how one should think of the human psyche in its entirety.
Unsurprisingly, if judged only by what we saw of her admiration of Shakespeare, poetry, the music of words, was much loved by Wollstonecraft.62 She cited poems in her correspondence as well as in her published writings, such as those of John Milton (1608–1674), John Dryden (1631–1700), James Thomson (1700–1748), and William Cowper (1731–1800). Read by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834), who drew on A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in his account of the status of women within Germanic tribes in The Watchman,63 she became the subject of poetry herself. Shortly after her death, Robert Southey, counterbalancing the many satires of which she had been the target, wrote a sonnet in her praise:
Who among Women left no equal mind
When from this world she pass’d; and I could weep,
To think that She is to the grave gone down!64
Her influence on the first generation of Romantics—Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Southey, William Hazlitt—extended beyond the radical politics that she and William Godwin shared in common in them in the 1790s. The young poets were frequent visitors to Wollstonecraft’s and Godwin’s intellectual salons, where Wollstonecraft’s conversation dazzled them. Hazlitt has left a vivid recollection of a conversation with Coleridge on this subject in 1798:
[Coleridge] asked me if I had ever seen Mary Wollstonecraft, and I said, I had once for a few moments, and that she seemed to turn off Godwin’s objections to something she advanced with quite a playful, easy air. He replied that “this was only one instance of the ascendancy which people of imagination exercised over those of mere intellect.”65
Given Coleridge’s high estimation of the imagination, this was no small praise. But it was Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark that most influenced the Romantics.66 All of them frequently mention this work in their correspondence; critics have argued that the imagery of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is directly influenced by Wollstonecraft’s description of “the impetuous dashing of the rebounding torrents from the dark cavities” in Wollstonecraft’s travelogue.67 Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark also inspired Coleridge to plan (but not to execute) a pedestrian tour of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.68 She became the Romantics’ ideal of a person—indeed, a woman—in whom Reason and Imagination, politics and poetry, were perfectly combined.
As with music, poems led Wollstonecraft to reflect on the activity of the mind in reading or hearing it. “Poetry,” she wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, “naturally addresses the fancy, and the language of passion is with great felicity borrowed from the heightened picture which the imagination draws of sensible objects concentred [sic] by impassion reflection.” Quoting from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, she added, “during this ‘fine phrenzy,’ reason has no right to rein-in the imagination, unless to prevent the introduction of supernumerary images; if the passion is real, the head will not be ransacked for stale tropes and cold rodomontade.”69 Wollstonecraft did not only enjoy poetry, but as with everything else, she reflected on its nature and its history, and as with music, her views on the subject open a door on to her other beliefs. She thought poetry at its most vivid in the early history of humankind, “the infancy of civilization,” as she termed it, when the imagination ruled supreme before it began to be unseated by reason “which clips the wing of fancy—the youth becomes a man.”70 In Hints, the notes we have of what was to be a sequel or second volume to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she meant to consider the question of women’s legal status and rights more particularly, we find her reiterating this view of humanity: “I am more and more convinced, that poetry is the first effervescence of the imagination, and the forerunner of civilization.”71 Her juxtaposition of the imagination and reason went further. Speaking of a period when the Arabs had “no trace of literature or science,” she noted that they “composed beautiful verses on the subjects of love and war,” adding that the “flights of the imagination, and the laboured deductions of reason, appear almost incompatible,” and again that “[p]oetry certainly flourished most in the first rude state of society. The passions speak most eloquently, when they are not shackled by reason.”72 We saw earlier that Wollstonecraft believed discernment could make one realize that the imagination and reason were not as opposed as one might think. We should also be wary of thinking that she thought dichotomously of feelings and reason from such passages, but there is no doubt that she also thought that a certain kind of reasoning could have a baneful effect on creativity.
The origins and power of poetry was a subject that continued to preoccupy Wollstonecraft, as she was to devote a very condensed work to it toward the end of her life. In April 1797, just five months before she died, “On Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature” appeared in the Monthly Magazine.73 While only a few pages long, it is not an easy text, as Wollstonecraft seems to be carried away by the force of her own prose, weaving together several of her most important concerns. As a result, it encapsulates much of her view of the world. Beginning with a theme we touched on already in relation to the theater and painting—the divide between true feeling and false sensibility—it contrasts nature and artifice, the beginnings of civilization and its current stage, sensual love and friendship, happiness and contentment. In the present state of society, Wollstonecraft began, “[a] taste for rural scenes,” though frequently seemingly displayed, was often not genuine. It was mediated by poetry and romances rather than by a direct or “real perception of the beauties of nature.”74 In such circumstances, poetry distanced its readers from nature, creating a sham encounter with it.
Thinking historically about this as she did about all else, Wollstonecraft went on to say that she had often wondered why poetry written in the infancy of society was most natural. Which early poets she had in mind was not made explicit, but it would seem she had Ancient Greek, probably Homeric, poetry in her thoughts, though, given her biblical knowledge and her liking of Judas Maccabaeus, she might also have been thinking of the poetry of the Ancient Hebrews.
She did own that “natural” had an indeterminate meaning and explained that in relation to poetry at least, it should be read as “the transcript of immediate sensations, in all their native wildness and simplicity, when fancy, awakened by the sight of interesting objects, was most actively at work.”75 In such moments, she thought, similes and images spontaneously came to mind, without the understanding or memory laboriously searching for words and effects. Judging by her tone, that was the poetry she thought most affecting. “The poet, the man of strong feelings,” she wrote,
Gives us only an image of his mind, when he was actually alone, conversing with himself, and marking the impression which nature had made on his own heart.—If, at this sacred, moment, the idea of some departed friend, some tender recollection when the soul was most alive to tenderness, intruded unawares into his thoughts, the sorrow which it produced is artlessly, yet poetically expressed—and who can avoid sympathizing?76
Following this passage, Wollstonecraft writes of poetry and its effects, as she had of music, within the framework of contemplation of the divine creation. Indeed, she thought of poetry, in what one might call its purity, when a most direct reflection of sensory impressions of nature or feelings, as devotional:
Love to man leads to devotion—grand and sublime images strike the imagination—God is seen in every floating cloud, and comes from the misty mountain to receive the noblest homage of an intelligent creature—praise. How solemn is the moment, when all affections and remembrances fade before the sublime admiration which the wisdom and goodness of God inspires, when he is worshipped in a temple not made with hands, and the world seems to contain only the mind that formed, and the mind that contemplates it! These are not the weak responses of ceremonial devotion; nor, to express them, would the poet need another poet’s aid: his heart burns within him, and he speaks the language of truth and nature with resistless energy.77
Such spiritual elation was known in ancient times as its peoples were closer to nature. They saw it for themselves and responded to it. “In a more advanced state of civilization,” she claimed, “a poet is rather the creature of art, than of nature.”78 Literary exposure interceded between nature and modern poets. This could be seen in classically educated boys, who could write according to prescribed forms, but expressed very little, if anything. They could not be un-read, and in meeting the rules of various poetic styles, in their desire to be elegant, and in their attention to their choice of words, they deprived themselves of “sublime, impassioned thoughts.”79 Knowledge and understanding interfered far too much, dampening flights of fancy. Moderns were caught in a hall of mirrors, imitation imitating imitation ad infinitum—a view that has now become associated with postmodernism.
Taking Burke up on the question of whether the “spirit of romance and chivalry” was on the wane in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft gave “romantic” “one definition—false, or rather artificial, feelings,” and went on to say that sentiments were being imitated because they were deemed fashionable, “not because they were forcibly felt.” Turning to poetry more specifically, she claimed that “[i]n modern poetry, the understanding and memory often fabricate the pretended effusions of the heart, and romance destroys all simplicity; which, in works of taste, is but a synonymous word for truth.”80 She thought this “romantic spirit [had] extended to our prose, and scattered artificial flowers over the most barren heath; a mixture of verse and prose producing the strangest incongruities.” She believed it had contaminated Burke’s style or his character, making one doubt his sincerity.81
This is not to say that she thought that “the first observers of nature, the true poets” were devoid of understanding. On the contrary, they “exercised their understanding much more than their imitators”: [b]ut they exercised it to discriminate things, whilst their followers were busy to borrow sentiments and arrange words.”82 Yet, she could waver on the relation of the understanding to the imagination, as when she took issue with Kant in her Hints:
Mr. Kant has observed, that the understanding is sublime, the imagination beautiful—yet it is evident, that poets, and men who undoubtedly possess the liveliest imagination, are most touched by the sublime, while men who have cold, enquiring minds, have not this exquisite feeling in any great degree, and indeed seem to lose it as they cultivate their reason.83
What she conceived as the just exercise of understanding had received some elucidation five years earlier in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Depicting a scene in which a poem that left her breathless, whose “melody [had] almost suspended respiration,” was met by “a languid yawn” from a lady more eager to discuss the provenance of a gown, she explained that “[t]rue taste is ever the work of the understanding employed in observing nature’s effects.” Men of true genius, she observed,
have appeared to have the highest relish for the simple beauties of nature; and they must have forcibly felt, what they have so well described, the charm which natural affections, and unsophisticated feelings spread round the human character. It is this power of looking into the heart, and responsively vibrating with each emotion, that enables the poet to personify each passion, and the painter to sketch with a pencil of fire.84
With the progress of civilization and concomitantly, that of luxury, neither the beauties of nature nor those of poems conveying them were forcefully felt. The countryside was found to be too dull, its tranquility incapable of touching those enervated by the heightened liveness of artificial pleasures.
This was not true of Wollstonecraft herself; she delighted in it. That much is clear. What is somewhat less so is which poets she liked. Her compilation, The Female Reader: or Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose and Verse; Selected from the Best Writers, and Disposed under Proper Heads: for the Improvement of Young Women. By Mr Creswick (1789), contained a good number of poems, including some by Charlotte Smith (1749–1806), Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743–1825), William Cooper, James Thomson, and Edward Young (1683–1765). In her other works, references were often biblical. Shakespeare’s plays, we saw, she cited very readily. The same is to a lesser extent true of John Milton, whose Paradise Lost she quoted repeatedly, despite the occasional divergence, shall we say, in their respective views of women. In November 1796, she did ask Godwin to lend her Mary Robinson’s Poems by Mrs. Robinson (1775).85 In a review of 1788, she spoke very favorably of Dryden’s fable “The Flower and the Leaf; or, the Lady in the Arbour” (1700), and of Milton in her posthumous novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798).86 But she also compared Corneille to him in An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution; and the Effect It Has Produced in Europe (1794), describing them both as “often tottering on the brink of absurdity and nonsense,” though she was quick to avoid being seen as dismissive, explaining that the former (and possibly also the latter) “still delights his readers by sketching faint outline of gigantic passion; and, whilst the charmed imagination is lured to follow him over enchanted ground, the heart is sometimes unexpectedly touched by a sublime or pathetic sentiment, true to nature.”87 Whether any of these authors could be described as writing unfiltered by form or influence, as she had claimed the best poetry to be, is quite another matter.
There is no doubt, however, that writing about poetry gave her occasion to think deeply about the relationship between direct sensory perception of the natural world and the ideas formed in the listener or reader through the medium of the poets’ words. This emerges in several of her reviews of poetry, as in that of Poems. Consisting of Odes, Songs, Pastorale, Satires, etc. and a descriptive Poem, in Four Books, called Prospects, by the Rev. Geo. Sackville Cotter (1788). She called these poems “neither sublime nor beautiful” but “pretty,” by which she meant, drawing on Samuel Johnson’s (1709–1784) definition of the word, “beauty without dignity; neat elegance without elevation.”88 Descriptive poems could be pleasing, but they generally lacked interest and were likely to be the refuge of clichés (“the morning came to disperse the dews” and “the lark ascended with the rising mist”). Evoking rustic sounds could affect the reader to a degree, but the latter needed to be made to hear the music of nature and see it. What was required was generating an emotion to unify the reader to the poet, to make them one. “We cannot accompany the poet quickly from one [the impression of morning] to the other [the impression of evening],” she explained.
We must follow the foot-steps of a fellow creature, a social passion must connect the whole, to give warmth and continuity to our most refined instincts, or we flag, particularly in cultivated scenes, more wild ones remind us of the present God; the soul asserts its dignity and claims kindred with the Being who inhabits the gloomy waste. A pleasing sympathy draws us to woods and fields, from the vegetable to the animal world; the moistened eye surveys the attractive prospect, and expansive tender love fills the heart; but, when nature seems to rest from her labours, and the features of chaos appear, we tread with firmer step, and feel immortal.89
Writing of cultivated or untouched landscapes, beautiful and sublime poetry drew its listeners and readers where “pretty” poems could not, that is, to thoughts of the divine and immortality. The word must bring nature, man, and God into harmony.
What is also certain is that Wollstonecraft wanted everyone to try to form “an opinion of an author themselves” rather than just praise only those “whose merit is indisputable,” as she put it in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in The More Important Duties of Life (1787):
I am sick of hearing of the sublimity of Milton, the elegance and harmony of Pope, and the original, untaught genius of Shakespear [sic]. These cursory remarks are made by some who know nothing of nature, and could not enter into the spirit of those authors, or understand them.90
Such was most definitely not Wollstonecraft’s view of herself. She knew nature and understood these authors. Ultimately, as she expressed it already in the summer of 1790 in a review of an English translation of a sequel to Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, “neither poetry nor painting, music or eloquence, have much power over the passions, to move them to virtuous or vicious exertions, if they are not natural and excellent.”91
Wollstonecraft did make plain her liking of the countryside.92 Whilst residing at Bath in 1780, she wrote to Jane Arden, her close friend from when the Wollstonecraft family lived in Beverley in Yorkshire, that were she to have a choice in the matter, she would not live in a large town, explaining: “as I am fond of the country.”93 She enjoyed physical exercise and was particularly fond of walking and riding among fields as well as swimming. In Yorkshire, she exclaimed affectionately of a nearby commons: “I long for a walk in my darling Westwood.”94 In a letter from Henley in mid-September 1787, she told her publisher Joseph Johnson that
[s]ince I saw you, I have, literally speaking, enjoyed solitude. My sister could not accompany me in my rambles; I therefore wandered alone, by the side of the Thames, and in the neighbouring beautiful fields and pleasure grounds: the prospects were of such a placid kind, I caught tranquillity while I surveyed them—my mind was still, though active. Were I to give you an account how I have spent my time, you would smile.—I found an old French bible here, and amused myself with comparing it with our English translation; then I would listen to the falling leaves, or observe the various tints the autumn gave them—At other times, the singing of a robin, or the noise of a water-mill, engaged my attention—partial attention—, for I was, at the same time perhaps discussing some knotty point, or straying from this tiny world to new systems. After these excursions, I returned to the family meals, told the children stories (they think me vastly agreeable), and my sister was amused.—Well, will you allow me to call this way of passing my days pleasant?95
The sight of nature transported her. She wanted to live in the forest outside Windsor every time she rode through it.96 This was true not only in her youth. Natural beauty had a profound effect on her throughout her life, invigorating her and restoring her to physical and emotional health. Writing to Imlay from Tønsberg, Norway, at the end of July 1795, she declared: “I never was so much in the air.—I walk, I ride on horseback—row, bathe, and even sleep in the fields; my health is consequently improved.”97 Adding, a few days later,
Employment and exercise have been of great service to me; and I have entirely recovered the strength and activity I lost during the time of my nursing. I have seldom been in better health; and my mind, though trembling to the touch of anguish, is calmer—yet still the same.—I have, it is true, enjoyed some tranquillity, and more happiness here, than for a long—long time past.—(I say happiness, for I can give no other appellation to the exquisite delight this wild country and fine summer have afforded me.)98
She also declared her love of the country to Godwin, longed to be in it with him, and imagined herself smelling “the fragrant gale” and feeling both the sun and moonshine on her in one of his travels.99 As with music and poetry, the thought of God was never far behind in her reflections on nature. “As I love the country and think with a poor mad woman, I knew,” she wrote to Godwin in May 1797, less than four months before she died, “that there is God, or something, very consoliatory in the air.”100 Indeed, she marveled at the Creation in individual instances and its entirety, and though Wollstonecraft’s faith often manifested itself in relation to somber thoughts of death, she did take pleasure in seeing the world explained in such a way as to reveal God’s omniscience. Thus, reviewing the Rev. Samuel Stanhope Smith’s An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. To which are added, Strictures on Lord Kaims’s [sic] Discourse on the original Diversity of Mankind shortly after its publication in 1788, she concluded: “We cannot dismiss this article without expressing the pleasure the perusal has afforded us; […] whatever tends to make visible the wisdom of the Supreme Being in the world we inhabit, is of the utmost importance to our happiness.”101
This expression of delight might explain why Wollstonecraft was asked to review a number of works of natural history, including Buffon’s Natural History, abridged and William Smellie’s The Philosophy of Natural History. Although we do not know whether she asked Johnson to have them sent her way, she did appear to take a genuine interest in them. Such comments also explain why, in the June 1791 issue of the Analytical Review, she said that she had “long been persuaded that the first study of children should be natural history.”102 To be in nature, particularly walking through it, and to see oneself at one with it through its study was clearly essential to well-being in her view. The centrality of this belief to her view of pedagogical and moral and political philosophy cannot be overstated.
Wollstonecraft’s love of nature did not entirely blind her, however, to the charms of some towns, though her liking of them tended to be connected to nature in some way. She thought Bath very attractive, and if she were to have to settle in a town would have chosen it, if only for its situation.103 She liked Southampton, where she sea-bathed.104 She found its inhabitants particularly friendly, and her appreciation of places was also tied to the character of the people in them. She longed to visit Ireland and
in particular the dear county of Clare.—The women are all handsome, and the men all agreeable; I honor their hospitality and doat on their freedom and ease, in short they are the people after my own heart.—I like their warmth of Temper, and if I was my own mistress I would spend my life with them.105
She changed her mind once on the island, but that had more to do with her social life while residing in Dublin and working as governess to the Kingsboroughs’ children than it had with Ireland or the Irish per se.106
Thus, while most of her letters are those of a troubled and unhappy friend, sister, and lover, what she called her “melancholy” and the painful reality of her circumstances should not obscure the fact that, had things been otherwise, she had the capacity to rejoice in a great variety of experiences.107 Similarly, her very extensive critiques of her contemporaries at home, in Portugal, Ireland, France, and Scandinavia, should not be taken to mean that she was essentially censorious, though she could, naturally enough, be envious, of the happiness of others. Writing to Jane Arden from Windsor in the spring of 1781, she confessed:
This is the gayest of all gay places;—nothing but dress and amusements are going forward;—I am only spectator—I have lost all my relish for them:—early in life, before misfortune had broken my spirits, I had not the power of partaking of them, and now I am both from habit and inclination averse to them.—My wishes and expectations are very moderate.—I don’t know which is the worst—to think too little or too much.—’tis a difficult matter to draw the line, and keep clear of melancholy and thoughtlessness; I really think it is best sometimes to be deceived—and to expect what we are never likely to meet with[.]108
Although her tribulations afforded her few opportunities to express joy, she made the most of the occasions she had to experience happiness whether in nature or evoked by music and poetry or through close relationships. Her love of nature did not preclude her appreciation of the arts, nor did they need to be imitative of nature to warrant her approval. On the contrary, we saw that she believed that while art should not be made to act or appear as a substitute for nature, at its best art enhanced appreciation and awareness of the natural environment, and in so doing brought humans closer to the divine.
Art had to elevate. Wollstonecraft made this point several times in relation to its various forms, including when speaking of architecture. She thought Grecian buildings graceful; seeing them filled the mind with pleasing emotions, because, in her view, elegance, beauty, and utility never failed to satisfy a cultivated mind, “things appear just what they ought to be.” This led to “a calm satisfaction,” but while “this kind of pleasure may be lasting,” she wrote, “it is never great.”109 Great pleasure could only be had if the beholder was somehow transported. “[R]easonable content” was pleasing, but as it left the imagination unexercised, it could not engender sublime feelings. Art, whether architectural, statuary, musical, or in any other form had to affect beyond contentment. It had to elate. For this to happen, the viewer or listener had to be prepared, that is, be educated so as to be receptive to the artistry and yet, were it to be either slavishly imitative or overly refined, the effect would not be achieved. Similarly, an overly sophisticated spectator or listener would not be open to being taken wherever the art form might lead.
Wollstonecraft read, translated, and wrote, but wrote only of the pleasures of reading, though Susan J. Wolfson has written incisively about the way Wollstonecraft read texts and society as a text.110 One of the Letters from Young Grandison. A Series of Letters from Young Person to their Friends, translated from the Dutch of Madame de Cambon. with alterations and improvements ends with the following advice: “If you would learn to be qualified for general conversation, learn to think when you read, and through the assistance of rational books, many hours of retirement may pass pleasantly away, without your wishing for the noise of society—Books are never failing friends.”111 Her Thoughts on the Education of Daughters included a piece, “Reading,” that presented reading “as the most rational employment, if people seek for food for the understanding, and do not read merely to remember words; or with a view to quote celebrated authors, and retail sentiments they do not understand or feel.”112 As with the fine arts, she thought a “relish for reading” should be cultivated in early life; however, as with the arts, she thought that certain kinds of works were appropriate only when individuals had acquired a sufficient degree of judgment. As we saw in relation to the theater, she was concerned with the potentially distorting psychological effect of some texts:
Those productions which give a wrong account of the human passions, and the various accidents of life, ought not to be read before the judgement is formed, or at least exercised. Such accounts are one great cause of the affectation of young women. Sensibility is described and praised, and the effects of it represented in a way so different from nature, that those who imitate it must make themselves ridiculous. A false taste is acquired, and sensible books appear dull and insipid after those superficial performances, which obtain their full end if they can keep the mind in a continual ferment. Gallantry is made the only interesting subject with the novelist; reading, therefore, will often co-operate to make his fair admirers insignificant.113
By this, Wollstonecraft did not mean that she only recommended “books of an abstract or grave cast.” Instruction and amusement could be combined, and she recommended a periodical, The Adventurer, to which Samuel Johnson contributed, as a successful example of this.114 Once the mind was formed, “everything will then instruct,” she thought.
Generally speaking, and despite writing two of them herself, she did not think much of novels, though she was not entirely against them.115 She did on occasion ask for some to be brought to her, and said of at least one of them, Caroline de Lichfield. Par made de *** [Baroness de Montolieu], that it was “one of the prettiest things I have ever read.” Moreover, Wollstonecraft did wish to marry two men who happened to be novelists, among others things.116 Imlay, who rejected her, tried his hand at one, The Emigrants (1793), and Godwin, whom she did marry, wrote several multi-volume works, including Things as They Are; or The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794). It is not unlikely, as Janet Todd and others have argued, that Wollstonecraft might have contributed at least some of the polemical passages on the condition of women to Imlay’s work.117 We do not know what she thought of it in the main, but do know that she noted the disparity between what Imlay had written of the protection men owed to women and his own treatment of her as he abandoned her and their daughter, Fanny: “Reading what you have written relative to the desertion of women, I have often wondered how theory and practice could be so different, till I recollected, that the sentiments of passion, and the resolves of reason, are very distinct.”118 As for Godwin, she did ask him for the second volume of Caleb Williams, and it shares some features with her posthumous novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria.
In the preface of that novel, she wrote, in a language we saw her use to describe Shakespeare’s achievement, that her aim was the “delineation of finer sensations,” which in her opinion constituted the “merit of our best novels.”119 She had the heroine of that novel, Mary, read Rousseau’s Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), fantasize about its hero, St. Preux, and transcribe some of its passages.120 Wollstonecraft herself liked German novels, as they told of “a simplicity of manners and style,” and thus served as an antidote to the “deluge of sentiments and gallantry” in French and English ones.121 She said the same again in a review in 1796 of Albert de Nordenshild: or the Modern Alcibiades. A Novel translated from the German (1794), remarking that “[a]n interesting warmth of imagination, and truth of passion, appear in this translation, which seems to characterize german [sic] works of fancy, at the very period when the romantic rants of false refinement in the majority of novels of France and England, only excite a restless curiosity, which fatigues the head, without touching the heart.” (She did, however, think the novel was not as successful as it might have been because it included too many ill-conceived incidents and too many characters.) Thus, while she abhorred excess and affectation in novels, she did admire those that portrayed genuine affection and feelings. She valued simplicity in the story line and depth of character analysis. She also sought consistency and deplored the want of it, as for instance in M. G. Lewis’s sensationally popular Gothic novel, The Monk: a Romance (1796), when “the language and manners of the personages are not sufficiently gothic in their colouring, to agree with the superstitious scenery, borrowed from those times.”122 By and large, she thought novels the “spawn of idleness” and that it would be easy to think them “one of the lowest order of literary productions” were it not for the “small number of good ones which appear.”123 As with all else, she believed that different kinds of novels were appropriate at different stages of life. Illustrating that there was a time in life for the prevalence of the imagination and a time for that of understanding, she wrote: “[f]or example, I am inclined to have a better opinion of the heart of an old man, who speaks of Sterne as his favourite author, than of his understanding.”124
The arts and in particular music and poetry could genuinely move Wollstonecraft, and she extolled them to the extent that they did so. She wrote about music and poetry in a manner usually associated with the sensations attendant to being in love. Wollstonecraft wrote of love as well as of being in love and lived her life as a series of passions, from those of youthful friendship to those of a lover, a mother, and wife. She loved individuals but had very strong feelings as well for or about nations and categories of persons.
Like many passionate people, the intensity of her love matched that of her abhorrence when her sentiments happened to change. While she did not wish to reside in England in 1795 for political as well as emotional reasons, even expressing “horror” at the thought of it, she had declared her love of England in earlier years. Writing to Jane Arden at the age of twenty-three, she prescribed for herself the aspiration of “a true born Englishwoman” to “endeavour to do better.”125 While in Ireland some five years later, she confessed to her sister, Everina: “I never before felt what it was to love my country; but now I have a value for it built on rational grounds, and my feelings concur to fix it, I never see an English face without feeling tenderness.”126 Despite her wavering sentiments and strong criticisms, England fared overall better than other countries in The French Revolution (1794); this was especially so in relation to liberty, to which, as we will see later, she thought her country had long provided its first home.127
Similarly, while she expressed admiration for very few women besides Catherine Macaulay, and could be very hard on her own sex, she was capable of the strongest bonds with particular individuals, and developed passionate feelings for Fanny Blood, “the main love of her youth,” as Janet Todd rightly named her, and for Gilbert Imlay, the second man, after her father, to truly break her heart.128 Writing to Jane Arden early in 1780, Wollstonecraft wrote:
I enjoyed the society of a friend, whom I love better than all the world beside, a friend to whom I am bound by every tie of gratitude and inclination: To live with this friend is the height of my ambition, and indeed it is the most rational wish I could make, as her conversation is not more agreeable than improving.
Adding,
I could dwell for ever more on her praises, and you wo. [sic] not wonder at it, if you knew the many favors she has conferred on me, and the many valuable qualifications she possesses:—She has a masculine understanding, and sound judgment, yet she has every feminine virtue [.]129
Todd notes that after her death, Godwin was to write of Wollstonecraft’s first meeting with Fanny in the language he borrowed from Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), when the poet described the first encounter between the love-struck Werther and his adored Charlotte.130 Wollstonecraft was to follow Fanny to Portugal to assist in the delivery of her child. Fanny’s death upon childbirth affected her very deeply. Wollstonecraft named her own daughter, by Imlay, Fanny, and one of the last letters we have from Wollstonecraft shows that her friend remained with her to the last: “I was thinking of a favourite song of my poor friend, Fanny’s—In a vacant rainy day you shall be wholly mine.”131
Wollstonecraft delighted in her daughter Fanny, whom she confessed to loving more than she had thought she would.132 She wrote of the birth, which had been relatively easy, to her friend Ruth Barlow, adding: “I feel great pleasure at being a mother.”133 The same letter ended with: “My little Girl begins to suck so manfully that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R-ts of Woman.”134 Wollstonecraft was proud to attribute Fanny’s good health and sagaciousness to her breast-feeding; she enjoyed the physicality of motherhood, and spoke of her insatiable desire for kissing the baby and of playing and laughing with her.135 The child moved her. As was her way, she studied her own feelings and told Imlay that, while her affection for “our little girl was at first very reasonable—more the effect of reason, a sense of duty, than feeling—now, she has got into my heart and imagination, and when I walk out without her, her little figure is ever dancing before me.”136 Writing to the same from Paris a few months later, in October 1794, she wrote jubilantly of Fanny’s intelligence and gaiety and went on to reveal that
I once told you that the sensations before she was born, and when she is suckling, were pleasant; but they do not deserve to be compared to the emotions I feel, when she stops to smile upon me, or laughs outright on meeting me unexpectedly in the street or after a short absence.137
To be sure, much of Wollstonecraft’s writing about little Fanny was, of course, bound with her passionate desire for Imlay—his presence, if not his love, a vain hope, as would all too soon become clear. While there is no doubt of her utter, indeed terrible, devotion to him and physical need of him, it is difficult to find any testimony of the happiness he gave her other than through their child. The pain he caused her can be gauged by the fact that, for all her motherly love for Fanny, his leaving them drove her to two attempts on her own life. Fanny was herself to commit suicide in 1816, at the age of twenty-two; why she took her life remains a matter of some contention, but what is clear is that her existence in her stepfather, Godwin, and his second wife’s household was never happy.138
Of William Godwin, Wollstonecraft grew genuinely fond. They married in March 1797 while they were expecting Mary, who was born on August 30 that year. In the short period they were together, he did make Wollstonecraft happy. She wrote in the same terms to Godwin of her sentiments for him when pregnant with Mary, as she had admitted of her feelings for her eldest daughter, Fanny,
I begin to love this little creature, and to anticipate his [sic] birth as a fresh twist to a knot, which I do not wish to untie—Men are spoilt by frankness, I believe, yet I must tell you that I love you better than I supposed I did, when I promised to love you for ever—and I will add what will gratify your benevolence, if not your heart, that on the whole I may be termed happy. You are a tender, affectionate creature; and I feel it thrilling through my frame giving, and promising pleasure.139
Though they had their differences of opinion and he could make her jealous, she was proud of being “Mrs. Godwin,” even before she could be called such. Recalling his notorious denunciation of marriage in an Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Morals and Happiness (1793), she wrote in November 1796: “I send you your household linen—I am not sure that I did not feel a sensation of pleasure at thus acting the part of a wife, though you have so little respect for the character.” And, as if that were not saying enough, she continued: “There is such a magic in affection that I have been more gratified by your clasping your hands round my arm, in company, than I could have been by all the admiration in the world, tho’ I am a woman—and to mount a step higher in the scale of vanity, an author.”140
While it would be easy to think otherwise, as she was herself aware, from what she said of physical appearance and sexuality in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and elsewhere, Wollstonecraft was by no means indifferent to physical beauty or love, and as with everything else, she reflected on their nature. She commented on men’s and women’s looks as well as her own, and challenged contemporary notions of physical beauty, especially in women. As we observed with other subjects, she thought of physical beauty historically, believing “that the human form must have been far more beautiful than it is at present, because extreme indolence, barbarous ligatures, and many causes, which forcibly act on it, in our luxurious state of society, did not retard its expansion, or render it deformed.”141 She admired Greek representations of the body, not in spite of their being idealizations, but because they were. However much she loved nature, and shunned artificiality, in sculpture as in other arts, the imagination had to play its part for statuary to be great, according to her. It is worth considering in full a passage toward the end of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman as it shows some of the complexity of her thoughts on the just relationship between nature and its representation:
I do not forget the popular opinion that the Grecian statues were not modelled after nature. I mean, not according to the proportions of a particular man; but that beautiful limbs and features were selected from various bodies to form an harmonious whole. This might, in some degree, be true. The fine ideal picture of an exalted imagination might be superior to the materials which the statuary found in nature, and thus it might with propriety be termed the model of mankind than of a man. It was not, however, the mechanical selection of limbs and features; but the ebullition of an heated fancy that burst forth, and the fine senses and enlarged understanding of the artist selected the solid matter, which he drew into this glowing focus.
I observed that it was not mechanical, because a whole was produced—a model of that grand simplicity, of those concurring energies, which arrest our attention and command our reverence. For only insipid lifeless beauty is produced by a servile copy of even beautiful nature.142
As we have seen already in relation to the other arts and we will have cause to note in relation to her observations on women and men, the imagination and understanding had to be combined with the endeavor to remain true to nature and yet surpass it for a depiction of the human form to merit the appellation of art. Facsimiles of nature could at best be blandly beautiful. The contribution of the imagination was essential in making it more than this. It alone could take the mind beyond nature, according to Wollstonecraft.
While scholars such as Mary Poovey, Cora Kaplan, and Barbara Taylor have debated her attitude toward sex and sexuality, Wollstonecraft, it would seem, was no more immune to physical desire than she was to physical beauty, whether in living bodies or rendered in various forms.143 As early as her first publication, she warned against platonic attachments, thinking nothing could destroy peace of mind more than they did. She hastened to add that she did not think friendship between the sexes impossible, but where there was physical attraction the matter was altogether different. Pretense would not do. She thought it ridiculous to try to raise oneself above the human condition: “we cannot extirpate our passions, nor is it necessary that we should, though it may be wise sometimes not to stray too near a precipice, lest we fall over before we are aware.”144
Graf von Schlabrendorf, who only realized he had fallen in love with her once she had left Paris where they had met, said that “Mary was the most noble, virtuous, sensuous female creature, that I ever met.”145 Her letters leave no doubt as to the extent of her passion for Imlay, but even those to Godwin, for whom she did not feel the same burning physical desire at least initially, are not altogether coy about their lovemaking. Living separately, they exchanged notes every day and sometimes more than once a day. In a letter composed on a Sunday morning in November 1796, just over nine months before Mary Godwin’s birth, Wollstonecraft writes,
If the felicity of last night has had the same effect on your health as on my countenance, you have no cause to lament your failure of resolution: for I have seldom seen so much live fire running about my features as this morning when recollections—very dear; called forth the blush of pleasure, as I adjusted my hair.146
She was unabashed also in her published works, insisting in a manner reminiscent of her views of art, that she did not decry sexual desire, but only raw lust unmixed with what she would call feelings of the heart. This was most explicit in her letters to Imlay as she sought to convince him to love her (again). She claimed that he had given in to “inferior feelings” and told him: “you have sought in vulgar excess, for that gratification which only the heart can bestow.” Want of imagination was the problem with him as with “the common run of men.” He and they had to have variety “to banish ennui” because their imagination did not lend “its magic want to convert appetite into love.” He and they were never to know “the exquisite pleasure, which arises from unison of affection and desire, when the whole soul and sense are abandoned to a lively imagination, that renders every emotion delicate and rapturous.”147 She acknowledged that such pleasures required the exercise of some self-denial. Uncontrolled or rather indiscriminate satiation of desire rendered some emotions unattainable. What is more, the pursuit of mere lust had consequences for women as well as men. Thus Wollstonecraft argued that to satisfy the wantonness of some men, “women are made systematically voluptuous, and though they may not carry their libertinism to the same height, yet this heartless intercourse with the sex, which they allow themselves, depraves both sexes, because the taste of men is vitiated; and women, of all classes, naturally square their behaviour to gratify the taste by which they obtain pleasure and power.”148 Heart and mind had to be conjoined in physicality so that, in this instance as in art, something was added to mere nature for the good of both men and women. As with everything else, she thought pleasure in sex had somehow to elevate out of mere physicality, and lead to a kind of “sublimification,” to borrow Gilpin’s coinage. What is particularly interesting is how, writing to Imlay in June 1795, she brought nature, the imagination, and sexuality into an intriguing and wondrous mix. The emotions to be had when sex and love combined, she claimed: “appear to me to be the distinctive characteristic of genius, the foundation of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begeters, certainly have not idea.” The strongest minds, in her view, and the most original, were those whose “imagination acts as stimulus to their senses.”149
Unsurprisingly given the disparaging comments about eaters and drinkers just quoted, Wollstonecraft wrote next to nothing about food or drink and what little she did leads one to suspect that she preferred meals to be plain and she disapproved of drinking.150 She did not like cooking. She noted that Rousseau thought man was not a carnivorous animal, adding that “the long and helpless state of infancy seems to point [man] as particularly impelled to pair, the first step towards herding.”151 She thought “[i]ntoxication the pleasure of savages, and of all those whose employments rather exhaust their animal spirits, than exercise their faculties.” She thought it the vice in both England and the northern state of Europe, and the greatest impediment to what she called “the general improvement.”152 From these or comparable comments, it would be easy to infer not only that she rejected many things, but that what she took pleasure in or appreciated in some manner had to be simple, plain, and as close to nature as possible. The preceding does not aspire to be an exhaustive list of her loves and likings, or indeed her displeasures, to which we will have cause to return. Nothing was said, for instance, of her love of learning foreign languages. It does however show that she held rather more complex views about the relation between the natural and the humanly created than might be assumed and that she was preoccupied by their rightful interconnection throughout her intellectual life. It also reveals some of her views about the operations of the mind and, as Barbara Taylor, Martina Reuter, and Isabelle Bour have emphasized, the importance she granted to the imagination in these. Aesthetic judgment was an individual matter, in Wollstonecraft’s view. Taste was a function of the particular workings of the mind.153 Though formed through experience and education, it could not be dictated, any more than any passion could. It is also evident from her comments quoted in this chapter that she did not think all such judgments to be equal. It is not even clear that she thought that education and the right kind of habituation could render all taste equal though varied. This said, creativity and originality were to be encouraged in everyone, regardless of talent or genius. These are subjects that the remainder of this book will consider further.
Wollstonecraft’s writings can produce contrary perceptions of her positions. She might have achieved a greater degree of consistency had it not been for the speed at which she had to meet her publisher’s deadlines. This, combined with the nature and subjects of the ripostes and critical reviews she wrote, led her to adopt an adversarial tone, and caused her to be eager to contest the views of others rather than to calmly analyze and clarify her own. Her letters were also dashed off in the heat of the moment and thus might give different impressions of her sense of herself and of her opinions. Yet, it is hoped that the forgoing does offer a taste of what might be viewed as her overall enterprise or what such an enterprise might have been had her circumstances been, if not entirely changed, somewhat easier materially and emotionally, and above all had her life not been cut short. The brevity of that life must never be forgotten. Nor must her very conscious emphasis on the importance of the relevance of temporality to all things human. Behind her many pronouncements on the arts and other aspects of social and political reality, one can begin to sketch the kind of personality she thought ideal, discern her desire to establish what the balance between nature and civilization might ideally be, and see her continual reflection on humanity’s history and, as Barbara Taylor has underscored, a prolonged consideration over time of its ties, to its Creator.154
1. The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, Works, Vol. 1, p. 164.
2. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: with Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life, Works, Vol. 4, p. 36.
3. Catriona MacKenzie, “Reason and Sensibility: The Ideal of Women’s Self-Governance in the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft,” Hypatia 8, no. 4 (1993): 35–55. JSTOR, www
4. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, p. 146, see also pp. 145–156. See also Leddy, “Mary Wollstonecraft and Adam Smith.”
5. Julie Murray, “Mary Wollstonecraft, Feminist Killjoy,” in Romantic Circles, Praxis Series, https://
6. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Janet Todd (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), p. 28 (hereafter Letters).
7. Ibid., p. 8. Wollstonecraft is referring to The Macaroni, A Comedy, by Robert Hitchcock, published anonymously in York in 1773 and performed in 1774 in Beverly, where Wollstonecraft lived at the time.
8. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 344.
9. Ibid., p. 247.
10. Analytical Review, Vol. 2 (1788), Works, Vol. 7, pp. 55–57.
11. Ibid., p. 57.
12. Education of Daughters, Works, p. 47.
13. Analytical Review, Vol. 12 (1792), Works, p. 423.
14. Analytical Review, Vol. 3 (1789), Works, p. 66.
15. Analytical Review, Vol. 6 (1790), Works, p. 224.
16. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 25.
17. For an extensive and wide-ranging discussion of Wollstonecraft’s view of the theater, see Crafton, Transgressive Theatricality, Romanticism, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
18. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, 19, Works, Vol. 6, p. 323.
19. Works, vol. 4, p. 46. The references are to King Lear (IV.vii.68–70), and Nicholas Rowe, The Fair Penitent (1703), IV.i. See S. Harris, “Outside the Box: The Female Spectator, ‘The Fair Penitent,’ and the Kelly Riots of 1747,” Theatre Journal 57, no. 1 (2005): 33–55.
20. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 112.
21. E.g., her review of The Fugitive. A Comedy. As it is performed at the King’s Theatre in the Haymarket. Works, Vol. 7, pp. 454–455.
22. For an illuminating treatment of this subject in relation to Rousseau, see David Marshall, “Rousseau and the State of Theatre,” Representations no. 13 (1986): 84–114, www
23. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 25. Transgressive Theatricality, Romanticism, and Mary Wollstonecraft, p. 50.
24. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 25.
25. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 327.
26. The French Revolution, Works, Vol. 6, p. 19.
27. VW, p. 261; see M. Ahmed Cronin, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Conception of ‘True Taste’ and Its Role in Egalitarian Education and Citizenship,” European Journal of Political Theory 18, no. 4 (2019): 508–528.
28. For a useful overview of Wollstonecraft’s views on education, see Ferguson, “Theories of Education.”
29. Her letters to the painter Henry Fuseli have not survived. See Janet Todd on this subject, Letters, pp. xvi–xvii.
30. The first Opie painting is dated c. 1790–1791 by Tate Britain, its current owner. The portrait attributed to John Williamson is in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. See Eileen Hunt Botting, “The Earliest Portraiture of Wollstonecraft, 1785–1804,” in Portraits of Wollstonecraft, edited by Eileen Hunt Botting (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
31. Letters, p. 167.
32. See Pop, Antiquity, Theatre, and the Painting of Henry Fuseli, pp. 159–166.
33. Letters, pp. 194–195.
34. Analytical Review, Vol. 5 (1789), Works, Vol. 7, p. 160.
35. On Gilpin’s aesthetic and theology, see Mayhew, “William Gilpin and the Latitudinarian Picturesque.” On Wollstonecraft’s responses to the picturesque and him, see Bahar, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Social and Aesthetic Philosophy, pp. 152–153 and 161–162.
36. Hints first appeared in Posthumous Works, Vol. 4. The notes were intended for the projected second part of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft’s only mention of Schiller is in a review of Volume 1 of The Spectator (1790), which appraises German tragedians, Analytical Review, Vol. 9 (1791), Works, p. 361.
37. Analytical Review, Vol. 5 (1789), Works, Vol. 7, p. 161.
38. Ibid., p. 162.
39. Ibid., p. 197.
40. Ibid., p. 387.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., pp. 456–457.
43. VM, pp. 41–42.
44. Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford, Vol. 8, edited by L. G. Mitchell and William B. Todd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 72.
45. Works, Vol. 4, p. 18. See M. Ahmed Cronin, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Conception of ‘True Taste’ and Its Role in Egalitarian Education and Citizenship,” European Journal of Political Theory 18, no. 4 (2019): 508–528.
46. Cronin, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Conception of ‘True Taste,’ ” Works, Vol. 4, p. 415.
47. Works, Vol. 4, p. 18.
48. Ibid. Janet Todd writes that when Lady Kingsborough gave “Wollstonecraft, then governess to her children, tickets for both days of the Handel commemoration—the Messiah had first been performed in Dublin—Wollstonecraft first admitted herself “ ‘obliged.’ ” Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life, p. 105.
49. In Works, Vol. 1, p. 51.
50. Ibid., p. 161.
51. Analytical Review, Vol. 4 (1789), Works, Vol. 7, p. 114.
52. Analytical Review, Vol. 6 (1790), Works, Vol. 7, p. 211.
53. See Smither, A History of the Oratorio, p. 200.
54. In Works, Vol. 6, p. 308.
55. Analytical Review, Vol. 6 (1790), Works, Vol. 7, pp. 210–211.
56. Ibid., p. 211.
57. Ibid., p. 213.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Ibid., p. 214.
61. Ibid.
62. See Wolfson, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Poets,” pp. 160–188.
63. N. 3, March 17 (1796) in The Collected Work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, p. 91. I am grateful to Lee Borocz-Johnson for drawing my attention to this and to Bruce Baugh for his comments on her influence on the Romantics
64. See Susan J. Wolfson, Romantic Interactions: Social Being and the Turns of Literary Action (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), pp. 93–109.
65. William Hazlitt, “My First Acquaintance with Poets” (1823), in Hazlitt, Selected Writings, edited by Ronald Blythe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 59.
66. See Richard Holmes, “Introduction,” in Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of “The Rights of Woman,” edited by Richard Holmes (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987), pp. 36, 39–42.
67. Jonathan Livinston Lowes, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination (Boston: Houghton & Mifflin, 1955 [1927]), pp. 148, 161–62, 545 n.127; Holmes, “ ‘Introduction’ to Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark,” pp. 39–41.
68. Richard Holmes, Coleridge: Early Visions (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1989), p. 236.
69. VM, p. 28.
70. Ibid.
71. Hints, p. 300.
72. Ibid.
73. For a discussion of this work, see Devine, “ ‘A Kind of Witchcraft,” pp. 235–245; Hodson, Language and Revolution.
74. Works, Vol. 7, p. 7.
75. Ibid.
76. Ibid., p. 8.
77. Ibid. The reference is to Revelation, pp. 21, 22.
78. Ibid. p. 9.
79. Ibid.
80. VM, p. 28.
81. VM, p. 29.
82. Ibid.
83. Hints, pp. 301–302.
84. VW, p. 261.
85. Letters, p. 375.
86. Works, Vol. 7, p. 45; Vol. 1, pp. 93 and 94.
87. Works, Vol. 6, p. 25.
88. Works, Vol. 7, pp. 42–43.
89. Ibid., p. 44.
90. Works, Vol. 4, p. 21.
91. Analytical Review, Works, Vol. 7, p. 283.
92. She is increasingly read for her stance on the environment; see Seeber, “Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘Systemiz[ing] Oppression,’ ” pp. 173–188.
93. Letters, p. 27.
94. Ibid., p. 14; Janet Todd notes that “[w]hen Wollstonecraft later remembered the good time at Beverley she mentioned the walks with Jane Arden on Westwood Commons,” p. 14, n.36.
95. Ibid., pp. 133–134.
96. Ibid., p. 33.
97. Ibid., p. 315.
98. Ibid., p. 316.
99. Ibid., p. 417.
100. Ibid., p. 415.
101. Analytical Review, Vol. 2 (1788), in Works, Vol. 7, p. 55. This refers to Henry Home, Lord Kames’s (1696–1782) Diversity of Men and of Languages, sketch 1 in Progress of Men, Book I, Sketches of the History of Man (1774).
102. Works, Vol. 7, p. 382.
103. Letters, p. 27.
104. Ibid. See Janet Todd’s comment, p. 26, n.63.
105. Ibid., p. 37.
106. Ibid., p. 110.
107. Ibid., p. 23. Wollstonecraft was relatively open about the financial and social adversity brought about by her father, whom she described as having a “violent temper and extravagant turn of mind.” What is more, she made no secret that his neglect and physical violence had broken her.
108. Ibid., pp. 28–29.
109. Hints, p. 302.
110. Wolfson, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Poets,” pp. 160–188.
111. Works, Vol. 2, p. 290.
112. Works, Vol. 4, p. 20.
113. Ibid.
114. Ibid.
115. For a seminal assessment of her own novels, see Claudia L. Johnson, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Novels, in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, pp. 189–208.
116. Letters, p. 98.
117. Ibid., pp. 222–223, n.520; see Tysdahl, William Godwin as Novelist; Andrews, “Women and Emigrants: Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay,” in The Rediscovery of America, 170–186; Verhoeven, Gilbert Imlay: Citizen of the World.
118. Letters, p. 283 and n.641.
119. Wrongs of Woman, Works, Vol. 1, p. 84.
120. Ibid., p. 96.
121. Analytical Review, Vol. 7 (1790), Works, Vol. 7, p. 281.
122. Analytical Review, Vol. 24 (1796), Works, p. 474.
123. Ibid., p. 472.
124. VM, p. 58. She is referring to Laurence Sterne (1713–1768), author of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759).
125. Letters, p. 38.
126. Ibid., p. 110.
127. Works, Vol. 6, p. 190, for one example.
128. Letters, Janet Todd, “Introduction,” p. xvi.
129. Ibid., p. 25.
130. Ibid., p. 24, n.57.
131. Ibid., p. 426.
132. Ibid., p. 272.
133. Ibid., p. 253.
134. Ibid., p. 254.
135. Ibid., p. 265.
136. Ibid., p. 258.
137. Ibid., p. 269.
138. See Todd, Death and the Maidens.
139. Letters, p. 417.
140. Ibid., p. 374.
141. VW, p. 267.
142. Ibid.
143. See Taylor, “The Religious Foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminism”; Jones, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Literature of Advice and Instruction,” pp. 112–116 and 119–120; Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination.
144. Works, Vol. 4, p. 30.
145. Letters, p. 230 n.539.
146. Ibid., p. 375.
147. Ibid., p. 297.
148. VW, pp. 227–228.
149. Letters, p. 297. For more on this and cognate subjects, see Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination.
150. Works, Vol. 6, pp. 226–227. In VW (p.152), she wrote: “Bread, the common food of life, seldom thought of as a blessing, supports the constitution and preserves health; still feasts delight the heart of man, though disease and even death lurk in the cup or dainty that elevates the spirits or tickles the palate.”
151. VW, p. 82.
152. Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, Works, Vol. 6, p. 327.
153. Martina Reuter’s “Reason, Imagination, Passion,” and Isabelle Bour’s “Epistemology,” in The Wollstonecraftian Mind, edited by Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting, and Alan Coffee (London: Routledge, 2019).
154. Taylor, “The Religious Foundations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Feminism,” The Cambridge Companion of Mary Wollstonecraft, pp. 99–118; Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, pp. 95–142.