CHAPTER THREE

AN UNSENTIMENTAL EDUCATION

Shortly after Casanova arrived in Paris following his escape from the Leads, a man named Robert-François Damiens tried to kill Louis XV at Versailles. Damiens barely managed to scratch the king but faced the full force of the law nonetheless. The punishment for the attempt on the king’s life was a brutal death by torture, held in a public square. On the morning of Damiens’s death, Casanova and a mixed party of men and women went by carriage to the Place de Grève to watch the execution from an apartment window overlooking the scaffold. Space at the window was limited, so the three women stood in a row, their elbows on the windowsill, their feet on a little ledge. The men stood behind them, their feet sharing the same ledge, craning their heads over the women’s for a glimpse of the bloody spectacle.

Damiens’s death was an extensive, baroque affair. Bound to a bier at the scaffold, his body was pierced all over with red-hot pincers and then covered liberally with a boiling mixture of oil, resin, wax, and molten lead. The hand that held the knife that cut the king was burned with sulfur His body was to be torn apart by horses, one animal attached to each limb by a length of rope. This took so long to accomplish that eventually the executioners had to slash his joints and tendons with a blade. This worked, and the horses were finally able to detach his arms and legs from his body. The trunk and head was then thrown onto a fire. According to some eyewitnesses his jaw could still be seen moving amid the flames.¹ Casanova watched some four hours of this butchery. At some point the sight of Damiens’s agonies was so appalling that he turned his eyes in revulsion. Dropping his gaze he noticed that the pair of friends to his side were seemingly unaffected by the execution playing out in front of them.

Tiretta kept Madame XXX so strangely occupied during the whole execution that it may have been only on his account that she never dared to stir or look around.

Being behind her and very close to her, he had raised her dress so as not to step on it, and that was all very well. But later, looking toward them, I saw that he had raised it a little too high; … I heard the rustling of the dress for two whole hours, and finding the whole thing most amusing I never swerved from the resolve I had taken. I admired Tiretta’s appetite even more than his boldness, for in that respect I had often been as daring as he.

When at the end of the execution I saw Madame XXX straighten up, I turned too. I saw my friend as lively, fresh, and calm as if nothing had happened.²

By the time Casanova wrote these words, the Bourbon regime that Louis XV had bequeathed to his son Louis XVI had been swept away by the French Revolution. The sensual world of Europe’s courts and palaces were being replaced with an austere modernity with its own code of conduct and morality. The new world sat in harsh judgment of the sexual mores of the old. Casanova’s account of fashionable aristocrats fornicating at the public quartering of a failed regicide encapsulated the connection many drew between tyranny and debauchery. In the revolutionary era of the 1790s, sexual questions would become political questions while political rhetoric and iconography would be saturated with sexual imagery and gendered language. The sexual politics of the French Revolution would be parsed best by another writer who stood at another Parisian window in 1793 with a prospect on Louis XVI going to face revolutionary justice. Mary Wollstonecraft’s life and work would be a study on both the revolutionary and the reactionary potential for sex and seduction.

Wollstonecraft’s long road to that window in Paris had begun in London’s Essex hinterland, where she was born in April 1759, the second of seven children of Edward and Elizabeth Wollstonecraft. Her father had started out with a not-insubstantial fortune that he frittered away in pursuit of chimerical agricultural schemes that never returned the expected profits. The background to Wollstonecraft’s childhood was her family’s gradual descent from lower-upper-middle-class respectability to the most precarious of genteel poverties, a downward social trajectory played out against ever-changing backdrops—London, East Riding, London, South Wales, London—as her father dragged his family across the country on the hunt for his latest doomed scheme. Edward had a furious temper and a taste for alcohol that combined in acts of attempted and realized violence against his wife. Some of Wollstonecraft’s earliest memories were of trying to prevent this violence, going so far as to sleep across the boundary of her mother’s door when she feared her father might come home drunk that night. These experiences, later reinforced by a Protestant taste for temperance in all things, gave her a lifelong appreciation for the evils of alcohol and a keen eye for the details of male slovenliness.³ Her father’s boorishness was made all the more grotesque by the social sanction he was granted through no earned merit as a man, a husband, and a patriarch. The generational recurrence of this injustice was symbolized by the special privileges ladled out to Wollstonecraft’s brothers while the daughters were left largely to fend for themselves. Denied any systematic education, she sought out her own, and from the earliest age showed an appetite for reading, writing, and an exchange of ideas and sentiments. Some of her earliest surviving letters—written when she was just fourteen—are poignant examples of this hunger for intellectual engagement. They also point toward some of her abiding interests, ones that she would carry with her from her adolescence to her adulthood. “I have a heart that scorns disguise,” she wrote to her first friend, Jane Arden, “and a countenance which will not dissemble:—I have formed romantic notions—I have been once disappointed:—I think if I am a second time I shall want only some infidelity in a love affair, to qualify me for an old maid.”⁴ These were prophetic words. Wollstonecraft’s life was walked on a tightrope kept taut by the tension between her rational self and her passionate self, between the need for independence and intellectual achievement and her hunger for emotional attachments and her dread of loneliness.

Wollstonecraft was a loyal sister and a constructive meddler in her siblings’ lives, but the self-evident failure of the Wollstonecraft family unit made it clear to her that relationships born of mutual affection arrived at by rational decision-making were preferable to those imposed and sustained by gothic customs. Her first great experiment in new modes of social living was conducted in concert with Fanny Blood, whom she met in the mid-1770s while living in the village of Hoxton, just outside London. Hoxton was home to a large dissenting community, observant Protestants who worshipped outside the established Church of England, and who were at the forefront of commercial enterprise, progressive reform, and political activism. The dissenting tradition emphasized personal improvement through formal education and private studies and encouraged the thorough interrogation of established norms across every dimension of human experience. It was through connections made in Hoxton that Wollstonecraft was introduced to Blood and the two were soon inseparable, Wollstonecraft traveling from Hoxton to her friend’s home in Newington Butts, south of the Thames, whenever the opportunity afforded. Wollstonecraft, who always wanted more from her relationships, claimed that “to live with this friend is the height of my ambition,” but life intervened. Her father moved them briefly to Laugharne in South Wales; less than a year later they were back in London, this time in Walworth, closer to the Bloods, but financial exigencies and a fierce need to flee her dysfunctional family home led Wollstonecraft, then nineteen, to take up a job as the companion to an elderly lady, based first in fashionable Bath and then in Windsor. Wollstonecraft found the work both demeaning and stultifying, but it marked a necessary first foray into the outside world. Whenever she could, she returned to London to spend time with Fanny Blood. Near the end of 1781, Wollstonecraft’s mother fell terminally ill, and she quit her work as a companion to tend to her through her long final sickness. Her death in April 1782 liberated her daughter to pursue a daring experiment in economic independence and female collaboration.

In February 1784 Wollstonecraft declared her intention to set up a girls’ school. She raised money for the venture from within the dissenting community, recruited her sisters Eliza and Everina and Fanny Blood to staff it, and, after a false start in Hoxton, established their school in Newington Green. The school was on perilous financial footings from the outset and continued to be so throughout its near three-year existence. For Wollstonecraft, whose twin needs were independence and usefulness, it provided a vital function.⁵ It also brought her into close contact with the community of dissenters, radicals, and writers who made their home in the area. She began attending the lectures and sermons of Dr. Richard Price, a polymath, a quasi–Unitarian minister, and a prolific writer of tracts calling for reform. She befriended Mrs. Burgh, the widow of progressive politician and activist James Burgh, author of the influential educational text, Thoughts on Education (1747). She met and bonded with the Reverend John Hewlett, an aspiring writer whose links to publishers and literary taste-makers in Paternoster Row would later serve Wollstonecraft well. Someone in this milieu took her to have tea with an ailing Samuel Johnson, shortly before his death in the winter of 1784. Wollstonecraft’s integration into this world was disrupted by her need to tend to Fanny Blood. In January 1785, Blood, who was suffering from consumption, traveled to Lisbon for treatment with her fiancé, Hugh Skeys. Without Blood, Mary’s interest in the school waned; when she learned her friend was both pregnant and still persistently consumptive she decided her place was at her side. In a move she certainly knew would result in the school’s closure, she borrowed money from Mrs. Burgh and embarked for Lisbon in November 1785.

These were tense, fretful times. She was abandoning her community, her school, and her sisters. She was borrowing money to attend to a quixotic, sentimental mission. For all this, she was young and starting on an overseas adventure. “When going to Lisbon,” she would later write, “the elasticity of my mind was sufficient to ward off weariness, and my imagination still could dip her brush in the rainbow of fancy, and sketch futurity in glowing colours.” Not that she saw many signs for future hope upon arrival in Lisbon. She detested the sclerotic Catholic culture, disdaining Portugal as “the most savage part of Europe, where superstition still reigns.” Characteristically for her, the retrograde state of the nation was reflected in its convents, places where women were imprisoned, deluded by religion, and denied an education, where the “rust of the mind” would accrue, layer by layer, never to be “rubbed off by sensible conversation, or new-born affections of the heart.” Her unfavorable impressions were doubtless enhanced by the presence of personal tragedy. Wollstonecraft arrived in Lisbon as Fanny went into labor. Neither mother or son survived, and after an illicit midnight burial in a Protestant graveyard Mary returned to London.

The year that followed was one of depression and financial misery. The school was shuttered, and Mary was harried by creditors. Out of this barren period, however, was born literary opportunity. Encouraged by Mrs. Burgh and with the generous use of Reverend Hewlett’s literary connections, Wollstonecraft won a princely ten-guinea advance from the illustrious liberal publisher Joseph Johnson for a commission to write a short book on education. The result was Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, published in early 1787. As an educational book by a woman for women, Thoughts was progressive by default. The substance of Wollstonecraft’s argument, however, hinted at a germinating radical thesis that linked reason and passion, education and sex, independence and submission. At the heart of the book was a sustained critique of a model of female education that encouraged the development of a passing knowledge of peripheral subjects like music, art, and geography and a dedication to wholly inutile interests such as cards, fashion, and saccharine literature. What was missing from this education was the cultivation of reason. This was a fatal absence, Wollstonecraft wrote, because “reason must often be called in to fill up the vacuums of life; but too many of our sex suffer theirs to lie dormant.” In contemporary society, little thought was given to that vacuum, as girls were expected to marry and then busy themselves with children and housekeeping. However, in the gap between her maturity and her marriage, a girl without an education was “in great danger of being seduced,” as there were plenty of men ready “to take advantage of the artless tenderness of a woman who loves” but loves without logic. It was not that Wollstonecraft disdained emotion, it was that she feared its power if left unchecked by the countervailing imperatives of reason. A woman who could not divine the difference between a sincere suitor and a cynical libertine faced ruin. The application of reason would filter out the rakes and allow for a more impassioned commitment to a good partner. “We should always try to fix in our minds the rational grounds we have for loving a person,” she counseled.

Her book was a moderate success and, combined with her previous educational venture in Newington Green, established her as something of a pedagogue. This reputation, in conjunction with persistent financial need, qualified her for a job as governess to the daughters of Robert King, Viscount Kingsborough, the largest Protestant landowner in Ireland. Lord and Lady Kingsborough were, by the standards of their class, progressive in their attitudes and attentive to the needs of their impoverished Catholic tenants. By the summer of 1787, when Mary accepted a position in their household at Mitchelstown, County Cork, they had produced close to a dozen children together, a fecundity that belied the strength of their marriage.⁶ A few years earlier, their household had been roiled by scandal when it was alleged that Lord Kingsborough’s agricultural advisor, the famed agronomist (and later accidental chronicler of the French Revolution) Arthur Young, was courting Lady Kingsborough over the chessboard after dinner while the children’s governess, Mrs. Crosby, was carrying on an adulterous relationship with the viscount himself.⁷ Their new governess was well placed to detect whatever traces of conjugal strife might have lingered when she arrived in the household after a painless crossing in October. For after a period of initial excitement, Wollstonecraft lapsed into a characteristic funk, and by the time she crossed the threshold of the fairy-tale Kingsborough pile at Castle Mitchelstown—set on 1,200 acres of woods, gardens, vineyards, and mountains—her thoughts had taken a melancholy turn. She told her sister Everina, that “there was such a solemn kind of stupidity about this place as froze my very blood—I entered the great gates with the same kind of feeling as I should if I was going into the Bastille.’”⁸

Her misgivings found expression in a contentious relationship with her employer, Lady Kingsborough. In her letters home she disdained her as a frigid mother who cared more for her dogs than her daughters and as a shallow, vain woman, who preferred to pamper herself with expensive dresses and imported Italian cosmetics rather than to tend to her proper duties as a wife and mother. She despaired at the miseducation the King daughters were receiving (they were “literally speaking wild Irish, unformed and not very pleasing”) and described the daughters of some other relatives, who also lived in the castle, as “fine girls, just going to market, as their brother says.” She saw herself as a savior and a substitute mother to the girls and was drawn particularly strongly toward Margaret King, a spry fourteen-year-old whom she judged to be living in terror of her mother and whom she lovingly nursed back to health when she fell poorly at Christmas. Whatever solaces there were in her role, the uneasy place of the governess in the hierarchy of any grand household was exactly designed to play on her class anxieties. In a ruminative letter to Everina, she described herself sitting alone in her room, the family spending time alone together somewhere in the house while from the cellars came the sounds of the Irish servants dancing to a fiddle. “I am treated like a gentlewoman,” she wrote, “but I cannot easily forget my inferior station—and this something betwixt and between is rather aukward [sic].”⁹ The solitude forced her into her books, and she was soon teaching herself French by reading Madame de Genlis’s wildly popular educational tract, Adèle et Théodore (1782), which she found “wonderfully clever.” Her subsequent reading led her to one the most important intellectual relationships of her career. By March 1788, the family moved to Dublin, and in her letters she was telling Everina that she had moved on to Rousseau’s Émile, or On Education. That Wollstonecraft responded positively to this initial encounter with Rousseau is noteworthy as a general contempt for his work permeates much of her later writings. There is scarcely a work of hers that does not contain a snipe at the then revered Frenchman. Wollstonecraft mocked his “fanciful state of nature” and abhorred his views on women’s education and his biological determinism as “wild chimeras.”¹⁰ However contentious Rousseau’s substance, his style was immensely influential on his contemporaries, even those who disagreed with him on everything else. Like Byron after him, Rousseau pioneered a certain personal aesthetic—independent, authentic, unabashedly emotional—that cast a spell on a whole generation of Europeans, including Wollstonecraft. “I love his paradoxes,” she wrote to her sister, “he was a strange inconsistent unhappy clever creature—yet he possessed an uncommon portion of sensibility and penetration.”¹¹ Her antipathy toward Lady Kingsborough and her admiration for Rousseau were united by a sense of her own burgeoning sensibility, a treasured aspect of her own personality, and one that she thought went squandered in her loveless existence. In the same letter that she praised Émile, she lamented of herself that it was “a sad pity that so sweet a flower should waste its sweetness on the Desart air, or that the Grave should receive its untouched charms.” She signed off “Yours an Old Maid.”¹²

During her time with the family, Wollstonecraft remained in contact with Joseph Johnson in London and worked on the manuscript of Mary, A Fiction. It was evident to her, however, that her literary ambitions were not going to blossom in the service of the Kingsboroughs, and her conviction that her intellectual and sexual potential was going to waste made her an unhappy presence in the family. Her standing with Lady Kingsborough steadily diminished. When in the summer of 1788, the family and their entourage went to England as part of a leisurely tour to France, Wollstonecraft was let go at Bristol after less than a year in the role. It was a setback and an opportunity. At twenty-eight she now had no excuse not to pursue her vocation as a writer. Throwing herself on Johnson’s generosity, she roomed in his home for several weeks until he had found her suitable, if very humble, lodgings on George Street on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge.

Only twenty years before, the patch of South London she now called home had been open countryside, meadows that lay between Lambeth and Southwark. The area had been transformed with the construction of the original Blackfriars Bridge in 1769 and in a relatively short time had become a densely built, densely inhabited working-class neighborhood. Poverty and precarity were visible and audible from George Street. The sounds of an organ grinder make their way into her letters, and the numberless beggars and the crowds of out-of-work mechanics invaded her political writings and her political consciousness. In its short history, the neighborhood had acquired something of a rough-and-ready reputation as the epicenter of the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots in 1780. It was also home to a significant number of philanthropic institutions, including two whose proximity to her new home must have resonated with her. The Asylum for Female Orphans in Lambeth had been established in 1758 by Sir John Fielding and was little better than a workhouse whose treatment of its inmates appalled William Blake, who lived on the same street. A few streets south down Great Surrey Street was the Magdalen House, the rescue house for seduced girls and women that doubled as a site of prurient entertainment for well-off Londoners, who paid to attend the services held there on the weekends to goggle at the fallen women. Their carriages would have rattled past her window each Sunday.¹³ For her part, Wollstonecraft was living simply. She had one servant and a very limited wardrobe. She scarcely ate meat and spent nothing on entertainments. A rather condescending account of her physical appearance survives from this period that attests to her asceticism: “Her usual dress being a habit of coarse cloth, such as is now worn by milk-women, black worsted stockings, and a beaver hat, with her hair hanging lank about her shoulders.”¹⁴ More generous chroniclers described a hale, passionate young woman, with a thick mass of russet hair, and recognized her careless dressing as part of her radical aesthetic. More precious than any of this was her arrival at a state approximating self-sufficiency. “I must be independent,” she wrote to Everina from her desk at George Street,

I am not without hope—And freedom, even uncertain freedom—is dear… . You know that I am not born to tread in the beaten track—and the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.

Johnson published Mary, A Fiction to little fanfare in 1788 and was soon keeping her busy with translation work. She also became a prodigious reviewer for the Analytical Review, Johnson’s monthly periodical with a radical bent. Over the next four years she would contribute hundreds of pieces, mostly short and pungent,¹⁵ on topics as diverse as boxing, bridge design, and French history. She enjoyed the activity and the place it secured her in literary circles, but the possibility of becoming little more than a Grub Street hack loomed large. As her husband would later note, “This sort of miscellaneous literary employment, seems, for the time at least, rather to damp and contract, than to enlarge and invigorate, the genius.” The writer whose work only serves the “mere mercantile purpose of the day” risks being touched by “the torpedo of mediocrity.”¹⁶ Wollstonecraft needed a larger canvas to work on. In the summer of 1789 a revolution in France provided one.

For much of 1789, the British establishment was cautiously optimistic about political developments across the Channel. The prime minister, Pitt the Younger, initially greeted the revolution as an opportunity for “good order and good government,” continuing that “France would stand forward as one of the most brilliant Powers in Europe; she would enjoy just that kind of liberty which I venerate.” Many statesman agreed, choosing to draw parallels between events in France and events in England during the Glorious Revolution.¹⁷ This sentiment held through the fall of the Bastille and through a turbulent summer of riots, conspiracies, and rural anarchy. The event that led a good part of the British elite to oppose the French Revolution was an action by a group of Parisian woman that autumn. On October 5, 1789, the fisherwomen of Paris, the famous poissardes, heard a rumor that the king’s bodyguards were planning some kind of strike against the revolution. A huge crowd of them gathered at the Hôtel de Ville, where they looted weapons and then, dragooning in female bystanders as they went, marched out of the city to Versailles. There they demanded a meeting with the king, skirmished with his bodyguard, and finally “secured” the royal family and brought them back to Paris in triumph the next day.

For some the Women’s March on Versailles (as it came to be known) was one of the first great episodes of female agency in the French Revolution. For others, it was a travesty, a subversion of gender roles and political norms. Edmund Burke was very much in the latter group. Burke was a writer and Whig member of Parliament, long admired by artists for his treatise on the sublime and by liberals for his defense of the American revolutionaries. It was well-known that Burke was writing a response to events in France, and his essay was much anticipated by liberals, who believed he would affirm the actions of French revolutionaries in a like manner to his warm support for the American revolutionaries. This was not to be. Burke had been repelled by the anarchy he saw in France, which for him was encapsulated in the chaotic events of the poissardes’ march on Versailles to claim the king, on October 5 and 6, 1789. Similarly, he was aghast at the gushing reaction to the French Revolution in English liberal and radical circles, whom he regarded as abandoning the finest traditions of the English constitution. Burke’s twin criticisms met on the occasion of a speech given by Dr. Richard Price, Mary Wollstonecraft’s friend and mentor from Newington Green, at the Old Jewry Meeting-house in London on November 4, 1789. Addressing the London Revolution Society, a political club that commemorated the political triumphs of the Glorious Revolution, Price reflected on the “imperfect state in which the Revolution left our constitution” before declaring that first the American Revolution and now the French Revolution (“both glorious”) had given him new hope for the possibilities of political change in England, in Europe, and all over the world. “I see the ardor for liberty catching and spreading,” he concluded, “a general amendment beginning in human affairs; the dominion of kings changed for the dominion of laws, and the dominion of priests giving way to the dominion of reason and conscience.”¹⁸ For Burke, Price’s utopian reveries were “unfounded, dangerous, illegal, and unconstitutional,” an affront to tradition, law, and civility. What angered him even more was the timing of Price’s address. Exactly a month after the Women’s March, when, for Burke at least, all hope for a positive outcome in France was lost, Price had seen fit to praise “these Theban and Thracian orgies, acted in France and applauded only in the Old Jewry.”¹⁹ Burke went on to attack the march of the poissardes in gendered terms, conjuring up the image of

the royal captives who followed in the train … slowly moved along, amidst the horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell in the abused shape of the vilest of women.

The preposterousness of the revolution in France was symbolized by these women who dared to participate in politics. Sexual subversion and political subversion were now joined in a new rhetoric of reaction, one that saw in the politics of the French Revolution a universe where female “sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason.”

“The age of chivalry is gone,” Burke declared, “all homage paid to the sex in general … is to be regarded as romance and folly.”²⁰

Reflections on the Revolution in France was published on November 1, 1790. Besides her anger at what she perceived as his betrayal of his earlier support for the rights and liberties of the American revolutionaries—which was widely shared in her circle—as well his unrestrained assault on the benevolent Dr. Price, the content of what Burke wrote, especially as it touched on questions of gender, could have been little better designed to infuriate Wollstonecraft. In a white heat of wrathful inspiration, she took up her pen and within a month had written and published—by Joseph Johnson, of course—a scathing response to Burke’s polemic. In its sheer vitriol, its naked ad hominem style, A Vindication of the Rights of Men was like nothing Wollstonecraft had written before or would write after. Her attacks on Burke’s person are by turns inventive and hilarious; their gendered nature, though, is a curious choice of rhetorical strategy, given that the first edition of Vindication was published anonymously, and one that sits uneasily with her own intellectual project of dismantling sexual stereotypes. There are layers of irony to a radical female writer using the shield of anonymity to treat a conservative male political theorist like a swooning girl, mocking his “infantine sensibility,” his “pampered sensibility,” and joking that she fears she might “derange your nervous system by the bare mention of a metaphysical enquiry.” She was on firmer ground when defending the rights of the poissardes, whom she characterized with as much dignity as simplicity as “women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had had any advantages of education” in the face of Burke’s savage contempt. This stout defense led her argument back to her favored subject—the need to edify women through the illuminating powers of reason—where she welcomed the end of the cult of sensibility that Burke so lachrymosely lamented, declaring that it had turned women into “vain inconsiderate dolls, who ought to be prudent mothers and useful members of society.”

Vindication made Wollstonecraft famous and its financial success relieved her of some of her money woes, allowing her to move lodgings to Bedford Square and to buy a new dress. Its publication in December 1790 also marked the moment when Englishwomen manned the barriers of political debate. That month, two responses to Burke’s Reflections were published, both by radical women—Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay Graham—and Helen Maria Williams published the first volume of her eyewitness account of the French Revolution, Letters Written in France, in which she welcomed events in Paris as “the triumph of human kind.” The presence of this many women in the political arena drew predictable scorn from conservatives, who mocked them as the “Amazon Allies” of the French Revolutionaries and as “our poissardes”—some of the first outings of disdainful gendered language that would soon become widespread, but it announced the arrival of women at the radical table.²¹ Quite literally in Wollstonecraft’s case. In November 1791 she was invited to attend a dinner at Johnson’s in honor of Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense, who was then writing another reaction to Burke, The Rights of Man. Also present was Wollstonecraft’s future husband, the radical philosopher William Godwin. Paine ate his food in silence as Godwin and Wollstonecraft sparred over subjects as various and divisive as “monarchy, Tooke, Johnson, Voltaire, pursuits and religion.”²² Wollstonecraft had found her political voice and would never again be silenced.

For all the attention it brought her, Wollstonecraft had misgivings about the substantiveness of her reply to Burke. She had written it too quickly and had made half-hearted attempts to stop its publication. Success mollified her, but the desire to offer the world a more complete and more considered declaration of her beliefs remained. Once again it would be events in France that moved her to take up her pen. Throughout the summer of 1791, the French National Assembly had been finalizing the wording of the new constitution that would turn the country into a British-style constitutional monarchy influenced by the American model of the division of powers. This was the end of a two-year process of barter, negotiation, and crisis. In June 1791, the king had tried to escape the country with his family to join the counterrevolutionary forces amassed at France’s borders. He had come within a hundred kilometers of freedom before he was captured in Varennes and returned to Paris under armed escort. Shortly after his reinstatement in the capital, the National Assembly formally pardoned the king of the accusation that he had tried to go into exile and instead approved the ludicrous fiction that he had been kidnapped. This obvious falsehood led to a split in the Jacobin Club. The day after the king’s exoneration, radical Jacobins staged a protest at the Champs-de-Mars in Paris, calling for the abolition of the monarchy and the creation of a republic. The protest turned violent, and soldiers opened fire on the crowds. Martial law was subsequently declared, and the more radical elements within the simmering Parisian political milieu went underground. It was in this period of relative political moderation that the National Assembly sought to finish the constitutional process.

Frenchwomen had been following the framing of the new constitution closely. From the first days of the revolution women had been political agents, participating in protests, submitting petitions, and writing works of political theory and political journalism. Their demands were consistent. They wanted a resolution to the perennial shortages of basic goods (possibly accompanied by some kind of organized system of welfare), a program of national education that would be open to women as well as to men, and a reform of divorce laws. Women met to discuss these matters in political clubs like the Cercle Social, the Société fraternelle, the Cordeliers Club, and, later, in the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. The more radical among them identified with the rough-and-ready street activists of the Parisian sections, the more genteel were allied with the Girondin faction within the National Assembly. Whatever their allegiance, politically engaged women had a stake in the outcome of the wrangling over the constitution and tried to influence the debates as far as they could. In the summer of 1791, as individuals and as part of clubs and delegations, women let the Assembly know what mattered to them. In one such address, Etta Palm called for marital reform and educational opportunities in language that chimed with many of Wollstonecraft’s own thoughts on the matter. “Conjugal authority should be only the consequence of the social pact,” Palm said, and that pact ought to be a legal rather than a spiritual one; the law “must give equal protection and maintain a perpetual balance between the two married people.” The protection of women’s rights, she argued, was inseparable from the larger cause of French liberty:

Abuse of liberty is a natural consequence of the oppressive regime of the indissolubility of marriage and of the dull and enervated education of the cloisters, haunts of ignorance and fanaticism which you destroyed in your wisdom. You will complete your work by giving girls a moral education equal to that of their brothers; for education is for the soul what watering is for plants; it makes them fertile, causes it to bloom, fortifies it, and carries the germ productive of virtue and talents to a perfect maturity.²³

The constitution that was passed in September was silent about these concerns. The suffrage provisions assigned women the role of “passive citizens,” unable to vote. When Talleyrand submitted a report on education to the Assembly, he couched his argument for the separate treatment of men and women in the educational system in familiar Rousseauian terms. Women “ought not to aspire to exercise rights and political functions,” he stated. “One must seek their best interest in the will of nature.”²⁴ There was no move to institute divorce laws. The betrayal of French women’s political aspirations produced one of the first great feminist manifestos of the 1790s. Olympe de Gouges was an actress and political activist associated with the Girondins. Shortly after the ratification of the constitution she published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman, a blistering document that echoed the emancipatory proclamations of the American revolutionaries. Her pamphlet was “a solemn declaration of the natural, inalienable, and sacred rights of woman” and called for women to have the same rights and responsibilities as men. Like Etta Palm and Mary Wollstonecraft, she saw sex and education as being intimately linked, as the central axis on which the condition of women turned. “Woman, wake up,” she wrote, “the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights.”

Under the Old Regime, all was vicious, all was guilty… . Reason finds other examples that are even more touching. A young, inexperienced woman, seduced by a man whom she loves, will abandon her parents to follow him; the ingrate will leave her after a few years, and the older she has become with him, the more inhuman is his inconstancy; if she has children, he will likewise abandon them… . Marriage is the tomb of trust and love … the way can be prepared through national education, the restoration of morals, and conjugal conventions.²⁵

The French context is the key to understanding much of Wollstonecraft’s thinking as she began work on her most famous book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Written in the winter of 1791, and published in the new year, her second Vindication was framed as a response to events in France just as her first Vindication was framed as a response to Edmund Burke. This second, more substantial work was dedicated to Talleyrand, whom she met in London between the publication of the first and second editions of Vindication (entertaining him at her flat, she served the famously sybaritic aristocrat wine in teacups), with the intention of dissuading him of the views on education that he had expressed in his Rapport sur l’instruction publique to the National Assembly.²⁶ What began as a debate concerning French education policy became a rich, idiosyncratic, and at a times digressive text that resists easy classification. The core of her book was on the relationship between education and sex, the advancement of women, and the concomitant advancement of humanity. “Contending for the rights of women,” she wrote, “my main argument is built on this simple principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge.”²⁷ One of the main intellectual obstacles she had to surmount in pursuit of this argument was the prevalence of physiological beliefs that women by virtue of their biology simply could not be educated to the same level as men. Consequently some of her heaviest rhetorical salvos were reserved for this kind of crude biological chauvinism and the men who expounded it. “I will allow that bodily strength seems to give man a natural superiority over woman,” she wrote,

and this is the only solid basis on which the superiority of the sex can be built. But I still insist, that not only the virtue, but the KNOWLEDGE of the two sexes should be the same in nature, if not in degree, and that women, considered not only as moral, but rational creatures, ought to endeavour to acquire human virtues (or perfections) by the SAME means as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of HALF being, one of Rousseau’s wild chimeras.²⁸

However much she may have wished to, Wollstonecraft did not make the dismantling of essentialist views on sexual difference the cornerstone of her debate. The matter was of vital importance but debating pseudo-science with pseudo-scientists was as sterile a pastime as it was ineffective. Wollstonecraft’s watchword was usefulness, and the testimony of her own life experience was that women were best served by attaining an education and, through that, independence. As a result, large parts of Vindication deal with the importance of education, pursued under “the sober steady eye of reason,” which she contrasts continually with the facile miseducation of women under the influences of “novels, music, poetry, and gallantry,” which conspire to “to make women the creatures of sensation.” Within the prevailing social norms and structures of her day this “false system of education” could not but have sexual implications. It was a system, she wrote, that was more “anxious to make [women] alluring mistresses than rational wives.”²⁹ This was foolish on two counts. Firstly, ill-educated wives made for unhappy marriages. Female fripperies might be forgiven by a husband in the summer of youth, Wollstonecraft wrote, but “the woman who has only been taught to please, will soon find that her charms are oblique sun-beams … when the summer is past and gone.” A woman with a well-stocked mind would be better placed to handle “the more important years of life, when reflection takes place of sensation” and intimacy subsides into companionship.³⁰ More worrying yet were the risks of seduction faced by a population of women raised to be giddy ingénues. “Men of wit and fancy are often rakes,” she wrote, “and fancy is the food of love.”

Such men will inspire passion. Half the sex, in its present infantine state, would pine for a Lovelace; a man so witty, so graceful, and so valiant; and can they DESERVE blame for acting according to principles so constantly inculcated?³¹

To be sure, Wollstonecraft believed that seducers should be held financially responsible for the women they seduced and abandoned.³² She was skeptical, however, of the sentimental trope that women should devote themselves to reforming men. Instead, she believed women were better protected from seduction and better served in life by seeking to elevate themselves through education. “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners,” she declared, “time to restore to them their lost dignity, and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.”³³

That reader who comes to Wollstonecraft’s writing in search of consistency is bound to be disappointed. Wollstonecraft had a questing mind, ill-disposed to dogma. She freely (though never casually) changed her mind as she accrued more experience of the world. There were, besides, too many conflicting strands to her own biography—her wretched, roving childhood, her precarious ascent to recognition, the rival influences of her dissenting faith and her freethinking milieu, her intellectual pride and her material poverty—to permit her to perch too complacently on any one philosophical position. Permeating all of this was her own keenly felt psychological volatility. She had felt the tug-of-war between reason and passion since childhood and tussled with it through to the end of her life. “I am a mere animal,” she wrote to Johnson, at a low ebb in the autumn of 1792, “emotions too often silence the suggestions of reason.”³⁴ Yet it was this awareness of the simultaneous attractions of contradictory attitudes that made her such a brilliant analyst of the human heart. She once defined love as “the common passion, in which chance and sensation take place of choice and reason.” Love involved a loss of control; that was part of its thrill and its terror. Conversely, in Wollstonecraft’s view, reason could always reassert itself, the logical mind stealing back ground from the tumultuous passions. The ideal state was a kind of equilibrium between the parts that produced neither a lusterless partnership nor a firestorm of uncontrolled ardors. These “rational desires,” as she termed them, held out the best hope for female love, free from subjugation and indignity. Much of this nuance is lost in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which stakes out a vision of sexual relations that is far more ascetic and suspicious than Wollstonecraft allowed for in her own private life. Even as she was giving expression to the minatory streak in her sexual politics in Vindication, Wollstonecraft was herself immersed in an experiment associated with the theory and practice of Free Love.

In the 1790s notions of Free Love were neither widespread nor fully fleshed-out. There was no key text on the subject, no recognizable groupings, no identifiable movement. The doctrines of Free Love, as far as they were even known, were treated as subversive and degenerate, the domain of cranks and madmen. Wollstonecraft had links to this disparate network of sexual radicals. The 1791 edition of her children’s book, Original Stories from Real Life, featured engravings by William Blake, another client of Joseph Johnson’s. Blake was a radical’s radical, and the extensive body of mystical poetry he produced was replete with obscurely phrased paeans to sexual liberation. In Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) he sang of “Love! Love! Love! happy happy Love! free as the mountain wind!” and unfettered by the bonds of law or custom. His friend George Cumberland wrote The Captive of the Castle of Sennaar (1798), which depicted a perfect community living on the fictional island of Sophis in the lake of Zambree somewhere in the middle of Africa. Here a system of free love was practiced with no concept of marriage. When the narrator explains the English system of marital relations the inhabitants recoil and tell him it is a “brutal commerce” and a “legal prostitution.” Instead every man and woman should be allowed to “act freely; subject to no restraint while they violate not the innocent will of another.”³⁵

Such imagined sexual utopias were inspired by the apparently real sexual utopias discovered in the South Pacific, especially in present-day Tahiti. The example of Tahiti inspired poets Robert Southey and Samuel Coleridge, who in 1793–94 planned to leave for America and set up a model society, the Pantisocracy, which would incorporate elements of Free Love into its organization.³⁶ The Pantisocrats were also influenced by Wollstonecraft’s future husband, William Godwin, who in 1793 published his seminal work, Political Justice. This book’s early editions contained Godwin’s condemnation of the institution of marriage and his call for reformed sexual relations that was as close as the Free Love coterie came to having a catechism. In its pages Godwin attacked marriage as a despotic and irrational institution that captured in miniature all the failings of society at large. “Marriage is law, and the worst of all laws,” he thundered, “marriage is an affair of property, and the worst of all properties.” He proposed the abolition of marriage, the abolition of surnames, the free mingling of men and women, and the communal parenting of the children who were subsequently produced. In this condition, he believed, “the intercourse of the sexes will in such a state fall under the same system as any other species of friendship.” Each man would “assiduously cultivate the intercourse of that woman whose accomplishments shall strike [him] in the most powerful manner,” and each woman would do likewise. If several men formed meaningful affections for the same women, “this will create no difficulty.”

We may all enjoy her conversation; and we shall all be wise enough to consider the sensual intercourse as a very trivial object. This, like every other affair in which two persons are concerned, must be regulated in each successive instance by the unforced consent of either party.³⁷

The extent of Wollstonecraft’s own participation in these utopian imaginings varied over the course of her life. Under the influence of Dr. Price and the Newington Green dissenters, she had been something of a prude. At the height of the revolutionary fever in 1792 and 1793, she was an enthusiastic proponent of sexual liberation. Later, jaded by political and romantic failure, her attitudes mellowed into a qualified commitment to the principle of individual sexual freedom. She was throughout a consistent critic of existing marital arrangements and a convinced enemy of the stigmas that surrounded so-called fallen women—the seduced, the abandoned, the ostracized. She wanted to believe in the possibility of a liberated sexual order but also struggled with the suspicion that it would degenerate into mindless sensualism and the further exploitation of women. It was a model that could only work among people with cultivated sentiments, a thorough education, and moral and psychological temperance. So many elements had to be present to ensure that Free Love could work that hers was ultimately an elitist vision of sexual liberation, practicable only by a small minority. “Affection requires a firmer foundation than sympathy,” she wrote, “and few people have a principle of action sufficiently stable to produce rectitude of feeling.” This is less a criticism of her thought than of her age, which bred radicalism out of what is now considered prosaic. All Wollstonecraft believed was that consenting men and women should be allowed to enter into voluntary sexual relations conducted on terms of equality, dignity, and respect, and untroubled by social censure or legal intervention. If this seems banal today, then that speaks to the visionary simplicity of her thought. As Virginia Woolf observed, Wollstonecraft’s “originality has become our commonplace.”

Wollstonecraft’s own experiments with Free Love were almost exactly coextensive with the first portion of the French Revolution and provided the emotional backdrop against which she encountered developments in France. Much like the revolution itself, her attempts to live out a new vision of sexual relations was a tale of boundless optimism turned to bitterest despair. It was a shared interest and enthusiasm for events in France that first drew her to Henry Fuseli, the brilliant Anglo-Swiss artist whom Wollstonecraft met at Joseph Johnson’s dinner table not long after she arrived in London and whom she began to pursue in earnest in the autumn of 1791—just as she began composing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Wollstonecraft was thirty-two, famous, and approaching the acme of her radicalism. She had never had a lover. Fuseli was fifty. A short, irascible man with a strong German accent who was wholly convinced of his own genius, his own career had only taken off recently, with a successful exhibition of Shakespeare illustrations in 1788, but he was undoubtedly one of the singular artistic talents of his age. His dramatic gothic compositions shared some of the physical drama of William Blake’s (who distrusted Fuseli, describing him as “both Turk and Jew”) and much of the otherworldliness of Caspar David Friedrich’s. Neither his talents nor his interests were limited to art. Fuseli was fiercely proud of his republican Swiss pedigree and freely advertised his radical credentials around Johnson’s table. He had immersed himself in the English literary tradition, and his encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare and Milton profoundly influenced his art. He was also a partisan of Rousseau and an obsessive reader of Richardson, who never failed to move this otherwise quite cruel man to tears. For Wollstonecraft, who knew nothing much of art, his political and literary passions provided some common ground with the man, for whom, whatever his failings, and there were many, she was perfectly primed to fall. She was keen to love and drawn to genius. For his part, Fuseli was prideful man who enjoyed his fame and fancied himself something of a womanizer. He took some wicked pleasure in Wollstonecraft’s pursuit of him. Well aware of the intensity of her passion, he would not respond to or even open and read her letters to him. Whether she detected it in his art or in his person, Wollstonecraft seemed cognizant of this sadistic streak in Fuseli. A glimpse of this comes in a letter to the Liverpudlian lawyer and radical William Roscoe. Committed, as ever, to being useful, Wollstonecraft was dutifully helping to raise subscriptions for Fuseli’s latest project, a series of prints inspired by Milton. In a letter to Roscoe in January 1792, she provided an update on Fuseli’s artistic activities that was rich in suggestion:

Fuseli is going on with more than usual spirit—like Milton he seems quite at home in hell—his Devil will be the hero of the poetic series; for, entre nous, I rather doubt whether he will produce an Eve to please me in any of the situations, which he has selected, unless it be after the fall.³⁸

The Fuseli imbroglio was made all the more wretched by the fact that he was married to a pretty young actress named Sophia. Consequently, Fuseli could encourage her pursuit when it took his fancy, rise above the fray by playing faithful the husband when it did not, and let Wollstonecraft embarrass herself with her passion for a family man. This was not a healthy cycle to be trapped in. By the spring of 1792, Wollstonecraft’s friends were well aware of her debilitating obsession with Fuseli. Johnson occasionally tried to goad her out of London and away from him; he worried about her mental health and her declining literary output. As rumors spread, Wollstonecraft slid deeper into debt and began to nurture ever more unlikely hopes about her future with him. In awe of his intellect, she began to harbor hopes for a purely platonic relationship where she might “unite herself to his mind.”³⁹ This was not a realistic solution. As Godwin later observed, “Mary was not of a temper to live upon terms of so much intimacy with a man of merit and genius, without loving him.” Even if she was, one can only imagine what Sophia Fuseli might have thought—had she been consulted—on the proposed inclusion of Wollstonecraft in her household. As the affair began to spiral into scandal, Fuseli (allegedly) tried to reason with her and talk her out of her obsession. “If I thought my passion criminal,” she supposedly replied, “I would conquer it, or die in the attempt. For immodesty, in my eyes, is ugliness.”⁴⁰ The correspondence between the two did not survive, so the truth of Wollstonecraft’s attachment to Fuseli is lost, hidden in the penumbra of burnt letters, partisan memoirs, and incomplete archives. What we know glancingly does suggest an all-consuming passion on her part and an equivocal interest in his.

The existence of this unequal and destructive dynamic made their next step even less explicable. On June 20, 1792, Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister Everina that she, Johnson, and the Fuselis had planned a six-week excursion to Paris, where they hoped to meet their revolutionary idols, drink in the atmosphere, and, in her case, bask in the success of the recent French translation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. France may have also afforded the promise of a new setting for her courtship of Fuseli. The date for their trip was set in early August. On the day, their party set out for Dover by carriage only to learn at the seafront that events in Paris had overtaken them. On August 10, Jacobin radicals and the Parisian sections staged a coup, resulting in a massacre of the royal bodyguard at the Tuileries Palace and the arrest of the royal family.⁴¹ This was not a time to go sightseeing, and the party turned back for London. The disappointment of the French venture seemed to impress on Wollstonecraft the need for a new frankness in her relations with Fuseli. She knew how she felt, and she knew what she wanted. Reason dictated that she make her position clear to him. If the account of his biographer is to be believed, the critical moment came near the end of that summer, when “Mrs. Wollstonecraft appears to have grown desperate,”

for she had the temerity to go to Mrs. Fuseli, and to tell her, that she wished to become an intimate in her family; and she added, as I am above deceit, it is right to say that this proposal “arises from the sincere affection which I have for your husband, for I find that I cannot live without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with him daily.” This frank avowal immediately opened the eyes of Mrs. Fuseli, who being alarmed by the declaration, not only refused her solicitation, but she instantly forbade her the house.⁴²

Thoroughly humiliated, Wollstonecraft apologized to Fuseli and swore off further contact. The chaos in Paris was looking more preferable than the chaos in London, and Wollstonecraft became fixated on traveling to France at the earliest possible date. The upheaval there was immense. On August 29 the French citadel at Verdun fell to the Prussians and the road to Paris was momentarily clear. Amid legitimate panic that the city would be put to the sword, the Jacobins orchestrated a bloody purge, murdering several hundred prisoners with knives and clubs on the night of September 2. They also issued orders for the arrest and murder of the Girondin leadership. These went unfulfilled, but the fear of lustration now loomed large over that faction. Madame Roland, one of the leading female politicians of the day, wrote to a colleague that “Robespierre and Marat have a knife to our throats.”⁴³

Roland’s friend and English champion, Helen Maria Williams, whose hotel had a prospect onto the storming of the Tuileries on August 10, was aghast at the violence and was in no doubt that it had been carefully organized. In a letter to Hester Thrale Piozzi on September 4—to which she was too terrified to even sign her name for fear of interception—she described the orgy of violence in Paris as “a dark stain on the annals of the revolution—you will hear accounts of it as if it were the mob—but it is a well-known fact that the plan was laid & the list of the proscribed marked by those to whom the people have been an instrument.”⁴⁴ The memory of the September Massacres, as they came to be known, were soon swept up in the torrent of events that followed. On September 20 the Prussian advance was halted by French artillery at the Battle of Valmy. The same day the National Assembly legalized divorce and decreed marriage to be a civil matter. On the twenty-first, the National Assembly abolished the monarchy. On November 6, the French army defeated the Austrians at Jemappes, effectively ending the immediate military threat from outside powers and unleashing patriotic euphoria in Paris. Amid this riot of historical activity Wollstonecraft composed an extraordinary letter to William Roscoe in Liverpool. “I intend no longer to struggle with a rational desire,” she wrote, alluding to Fuseli,

so have determined to set out for Paris in the course of a fortnight or three weeks; and I shall not now halt at Dover, I promise you; for as I go alone neck or nothing is the word.

In her absence, she urged him to stay true to his radical beliefs even as public sentiment turned against the French Revolution with news of the September Massacres. Displaying an astonishing indifference to the brutality of recent events, she joked that “children of any growth will do mischief when they meddle with edged tools” and that he ought not abandon “immutable principles, because some of the mere instrument[s] of the revolution were too sharp.” Then, with a nod to the recent divorce law, she returned to romantic matters:

At Paris, indeed, I might take a husband for the time being, and get divorced when my truant heart longed again to nestle with its old friends.⁴⁵

Desire and politics had merged. Whatever revolution was being forged in Paris would necessarily have sexual implications. She was soon to find out. A month later she disembarked at Calais.

Wollstonecraft arrived in Paris in mid-December with a cold. The days were short, and the city was shrouded in an icy fog. Like all British visitors she was appalled at the filthy streets and was bewildered by the tangle of lanes and alleys, crammed full of teetering timber-frame dwellings that constituted the medieval center. Her own lodgings, on 22 Rue Meslay, between the recently rechristened Place de la Republique and the king’s prison cell at the Temple, were far grander than she expected, six floors staffed by a troupe of servants. Her hostess was absent, and so she had the house to herself. Sick, lonely, and ill at ease being waited on in a stranger’s house, Wollstonecraft was in no mood to strike out alone into the city. Paris was not, in any event, at its most welcoming. On December 10 the National Assembly brought a formal indictment against the former King Louis XVI, known since the abolition of the monarchy in September as Citizen Louis Capet. When Wollstonecraft arrived, the trial of the king had begun in a paranoid atmosphere of invasion scares and royalist conspiracies. The streets were filled with soldiers recently returned from the front and tetchy National Guardsman. The septembriseurs, the citizen-murderers of the prison massacres of late summer, mingled anonymously with the mob that Wollstonecraft had eyed skeptically as she entered the city. As chance would have it, Wollstonecraft did not need to seek out history. The attic window of her tall home on Rue Meslay afforded a prospect over the road that took the former king from prison to courthouse. On December 26 she wrote a striking letter to Johnson in London describing her first encounter with revolutionary justice:

About nine o’clock this morning, the king passed by my window, moving silently along (excepting now and then a few strokes on the drum, which rendered the stillness more awful) through empty streets, surrounded by the national guards, who, clustering round the carriage, seemed to deserve their name. The inhabitants flocked to their windows, but the casements were shut, not a voice was heard, nor did I see anything like an insulting gesture. For the first time since I entered France, I bowed to the majesty of the people.

The dignity of the former king made a profound impression on her and his stoicism in the face of his reckoning filled her with foreboding:

I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made the tears flow insensibly from my eyes, when I saw Louis sitting, with more dignity than I expected from his character, in a hackney coach, going to meet death, where so many of his race have triumphed… . I cannot dismiss the lively images that have filled my imagination all the day… . twice, lifting my eyes from the paper, I have seen eyes glare through a glass-door opposite my chair, and bloody hands shook at me… . I wish I had even kept the cat with me! I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy.⁴⁶

Voting began on Louis’s fate in mid-January. The final tally was 361–360 in favor of the death penalty—the deciding vote having been cast by his first cousin and the richest man in France, the Duc d’Orléans. Paris was shuttered the morning of January 21, when Louis was driven in a bottle-green carriage through thick fog to the guillotine at the Place de la Révolution. Wollstonecraft did not see his execution, nor did she see Louis pass through the streets lined with 130,000 soldiers, but sitting in her deserted house she would have heard the solitary, sepulchral drummer that went before his carriage as he traveled to his death. It was the first of many executions during her time in Paris. Already in February she was wondering in a letter to Johnson whether “the turn of the tide has left the dregs of the old system to corrupt the new.”⁴⁷ Around the same time she wrote this gloomy forecast, she was offered a place in a carriage back to London. She refused it. Whatever her doubts, she was committed to experiencing as much of the revolution as events would allow.

Britain declared war on France on February 1, 1793, effectively stranding Wollstonecraft in Paris for the foreseeable future. She was not alone in her exile. There was a large English contingent in Paris at the time, all enthusiasts of the revolutionary project. Wollstonecraft had connections to some of them through Joseph Johnson, and many of them would have been familiar with her through her writings. The British Club, based at White’s, was home to Thomas Paine (who had fled the prospect of treason trial in England in 1791 and was now a deputy to the National Convention despite his nonexistent French) and Joel Barlow, an American writer she had known in London, whose wife, Ruth, Wollstonecraft’s friend, would soon join him in Paris. Among this group was a colleague from the Analytical Review, Thomas Christie, who, along with his wife, Rebecca, hosted gatherings of expatriates.

Another expatriate hotspot was the salon of Helen Maria Williams, a chronicler of the French Revolution, whom Wollstonecraft met shortly after her arrival in Paris. “Miss Williams has behaved very civilly to me,” she wrote to her sister Everina, “and I shall visit her frequently, because I rather like her, and I meet french company at her house.” Williams was a committed supporter of the imperiled Girondin faction and the French company that gathered at her house included many of its luminaries. There Wollstonecraft mingled with Jacques Pierre Brissot, Madame Roland, Lazare Carnot, and Nicolas Chamfort. Through Williams she likely met Madame de Genlis, the educational writer she had read and admired, who at that time was sporting a remarkable new necklace, a polished stone taken from the Bastille, studded with diamonds that spelt out Liberté.⁴⁸ Aside from the society she provided, she had much else in common with Williams. They were both writers, they were both committed activists who believed in the contribution women could make to revolutionary politics (Williams once wrote that that “whatever the imperious lords of the creation may fancy” women “act in human affairs like those secret springs in mechanism, by which, though invisible, great movements are regulated”), and both believed that the revolution, in Williams’s words, was “an affair of the heart.”⁴⁹ Williams was engaged in a scandalous, if somewhat obscure, connection with another expatriate Englishman, John Hurford Stone, a merchant, a member of Dr. Price’s Hackney congregation, and a divorcé.⁵⁰ Eager to forget the Fuseli fiasco in London, Wollstonecraft was keen to immerse herself in a revolutionary fling of her own. She had an inconclusive flirtation with another revolutionary tourist, the Silesian Count Gustav von Schlabrendorf, who left a breathless account of Wollstonecraft at this time. “There was enchantment in her glance, her voice, and her movement,” he wrote, she was “the noblest, purest, and most intelligent woman I have ever met.”⁵¹ She was fast losing any reservations about the proper place of desire in the brave new world of the revolution. Schlabrendorf overheard her brusquely inform a Frenchwoman that sexual pleasure was “un défaut de la nature.”⁵²

The man who her ardor alighted upon was Gilbert Imlay, a rangy and charming American whom she met at one of the Christies’ gatherings upon his arrival in Paris in April 1793. Imlay was a land agent by trade. He had written a widely read book on the opportunities available for settlement and cultivation in the American territories, especially in Kentucky. He had also written a sentimental epistolary novel, The Emigrants, that had made progressive noises about the need for divorce reform and the abolition of slavery while discoursing on other modish subjects such as the perfectibility of society, the merits of living close to nature, and the evils of excessive commerce.⁵³ There was no small irony in his proclaimed suspicion of commerce as his novel as well as his work of topography were props in his sales pitch. Imlay was a land speculator. He was selling the dream of utopia on the American frontier to would-be colonists desperate to escape European tyranny. He was also a man on a political mission. He had secured permission from Brissot to investigate, alongside Joel Barlow, the possibility that the American government might want help in securing Louisiana from British incursion now that the wars of the revolution were spreading into the Atlantic.

Imlay’s literary and political pedigree appealed to Wollstonecraft far more than his suspect commercial enterprises. He had besides an energy and an easy humor and had the sexual appetite and experience that she desired so much for herself. For his part, Imlay thought her a glamorous radical celebrity in media res of an erotic awakening in revolutionary Paris.⁵⁴ By April 19, Joel Barlow was gossiping to his wife that Wollstonecraft “has got a sweetheart.” “A very sensible man,” in his estimation.⁵⁵ Later events would cast some doubts on this judgment, though Wollstonecraft had no complaints at the outset. After thirty-four years alone, she was finally in the throes of the love affair she had always sought. She was a woman transformed, “playful, full of confidence, kindness and sympathy.”

Her eyes assumed new lustre, and her cheeks new colour and smoothness. Her voice became cheerful; her temper overflowing with universal kindness; and that smile of bewitching tenderness from day to day illuminated her countenance, which all who knew her will so well recollect, and which won, both heart and soul, the affection of almost every one that beheld it.⁵⁶

She would need the cheer. The first blossoming of her romance with Imlay coincided with the outbreak of fratricidal infighting between the Girondins and the Jacobins. Those spring days were thick with intrigue. That March the Vendée rose in rebellion against the revolutionary regime in Paris. In response the Convention introduced a slew of authoritarian measures through the month, expanding the number of capital offenses, introducing the Revolutionary Tribunal to expedite trials, and ordering the creation of Surveillance Committees in every municipality. In early April, the Girondin General Charles François Dumouriez defected to the Austrians. Marat and Robespierre, operating through the recently organized Committee of Public Safety, now moved decisively against the Girondins. Many of those whom Wollstonecraft had met at salons and parties were fighting for survival. As the internecine warfare raged through April and May, many of her friends fled Paris either for Switzerland or the provinces. Wollstonecraft herself moved to a cottage in Neuilly-sur-Seine, just north of the Bois de Boulogne. Here she worked on her latest project, a history of the French Revolution, ambled in the woods, and practiced her French on the gardener. In the evenings she would meet Imlay, who had remained in Paris, for assignations at the Longchamp tollgate at the city limit. The two were planning to emigrate to America, and she was consumed with visions of the blissful future that awaited them there. “You can scarcely imagine,” she wrote to him late that August, “with what pleasure I anticipate the day, when we are to begin almost to live together.”⁵⁷

As summer turned to autumn, things fell apart, both romantically and politically. By September the first flush of their romance had passed, and a new, sharper edge emerges in her letters to Imlay. “Of late we are always separating.—Crack!—crack!—and away you go.” She was still utterly infatuated with him but was growing restive at the amount of time they spent apart and complained that he did not do enough to try to remedy the situation. Her concerns about his commitment increased further in November when she realized that she was pregnant. Sharing in the widely held belief that a mother’s emotional state influenced the health of the fetus, Wollstonecraft declared in her letter to Imlay informing him of the pregnancy that she aimed to be “very attentive to calm my mind” to ensure the health of a child “in whom we are to have a mutual interest”⁵⁸ This was to prove challenging. Imlay remained aloof in Paris through to December, seemingly immune to Wollstonecraft’s pleas and barbs. Shortly before the New Year, he moved to the Channel port of Le Havre. Plans to emigrate to America had been postponed. Imlay had spied a new mercantile opportunity born of the exigencies of war. The Royal Navy was now blockading French ports, leading to shortages throughout the country. Imlay set himself up as a blockade-runner, building connections with traders in neutral Scandinavia who would accept French silver as payment. Wollstonecraft loathed all of this. She missed his presence; she shuddered at his commercial schemings. She wrote him scathing letters, where she called him a tyrant, and then wrote additional letters pleading for forgiveness. The sexual confidence that had animated her less than a year before was dwindling, replaced by increasingly wretched bids for his affection. “I do not want to be loved like a goddess,” she wrote to him on New Year’s Day, 1794, “but I wish to be necessary to you.”⁵⁹

Her relationship with Imlay faltered at the same time as disillusionment with revolutionary politics set in. That October, as she was becoming aware of the first stirrings of her pregnancy, the political center collapsed. At the end of the month, Imlay visited Neuilly with news from Paris. Brissot had been guillotined along with two dozen leading Girondins. A good portion of the glamorous French reformers whom she had moved among in her first hopeful months in Paris had been executed in one go. Their faces rose unbidden in her mind, “but before she was conscious of the effect of the picture, she sunk lifeless on the floor.”⁶⁰ The Jacobins had finally triumphed over the Girondins; Robespierre was delivering on his promise to make terror “the order of the day.”

The coming of the Terror was accompanied by a reconfiguration of the sexual politics of the Revolution. The Girondins had been largely susceptible to the idea that the state could improve the lot of women through better educational opportunities and the extension of social and political liberties to them. The Jacobins held rather different ideas about the place of women in society. The principle influence on the new leaders of France was Rousseau, who had preached the merits of a stark sexual order. In Rousseau’s view, the Bourbon state had been corrupted by the influence of women in the halls of power. The stew of mistresses, courtesans, and unfaithful wives at Versailles had turned the politics of the ancien régime into a parlor game manipulated by women. The regeneration of the state and, by extension, of national morality, could be accomplished by simply banishing women from politics and confining them to the home. “If women would only deign to nurse their children,” he wrote, “morals would reform of themselves.” This insight led naturally to a new equation: sexual virtue equaled political virtue. Mistresses had corrupted the monarchy; mothers would renew the republic.⁶¹ This idea had been on the march since 1789. Any number of political figures had stated in unambiguous terms their opposition to female participation in public life. The 1792 constitution had cemented this principle by denying women the vote. Throughout, the pill of female exclusion was sugared with paeans to their superior virtue. Olympe de Gouges caustically observed that “women are now respected and excluded; under the old regime they were despised and powerful.” The ascent of the Jacobins was merely the most extreme manifestation of this outlook. They were intent on purging women from politics, and they relied upon a very crude, gendered political rhetoric to do so.⁶²

Ironically, the Jacobins were propelled to hegemony in the high summer of 1793 by just the kind of female political intrusion that they despised. On July 13 a Girondin sympathizer named Charlotte Corday traveled to Paris and murdered the Jacobin propagandist Jean-Paul Marat while he reposed in his bathtub. Marat’s assassination and his prompt canonization as a secular martyr to the revolutionary cause further brutalized Parisian politics and further strengthened Jacobin resolve. It also bolstered the conviction that women had to be disbarred from political life. After a dramatic trial Corday was guillotined on July 17. Her body was barely in the ground when women political activists began to notice a sea change in attitudes toward them. Claire Lacombe and Pauline Léon both noted in August that the fear that “they might be designated as new Cordays” was being used to silence politically engaged women.⁶³ These were prophetic words. What followed were months of murder and misogyny. At the trial of Marie Antoinette in October the former queen’s political meddling was constantly linked to her supposed sexual transgressions. The high-water mark of the prosecution’s campaign of prurient slander was the allegation that the queen and her lady-in-waiting had taught the dauphin how to masturbate. These fantastical charges were wholly unnecessary in the pursuit of a guilty verdict—which was readily secured—but central to the rhetorical project of connecting sexual deviance to monarchical, counterrevolutionary sentiment.⁶⁴ She was executed on October 16.

In the same period, many prominent women were either arrested or fled the country. Among them were many of Wollstonecraft’s friends and acquaintances, including Helen Maria Williams, Madame Roland, and Madame de Genlis. On October 30, the National Convention outlawed clubs and popular societies for women, a move that was justified by recourse to the Rousseauian language of impermeable sexual difference. Deputy André Amar, in explaining the need for the ban, relied on common conventions concerning the proper role of women in society. “We believe,” he told the Convention, “that a woman should not leave her family to meddle in affairs of government.” If they did involve themselves in revolutionary politics the result would be chaos and corruption:

If we consider that the political education of men is at its beginning … that we are still stammering the word liberty, then how much more reasonable is it for women, whose moral education is almost nil, to be less enlightened concerning principles? Their presence in popular societies, therefore, would give an active role in government to people more exposed to error and seduction. Let us add that women are disposed by their organisation to an over-excitation which would be deadly in public affairs and that interests of state would soon be sacrificed to everything in which ardour of passions can generate in the way of error and disorder.⁶⁵

A few days later, Olympe de Gouges, who in Article X of her Declaration of the Rights of Woman had claimed for women “the right to mount the scaffold,” went to the guillotine. She was followed soon after by Madame Roland. The bloody enforcement of the new sexual order was accompanied by the introduction of a new iconography. In the new Jacobin France, the temptress of the ancien régime and the street-fighting poissarde were comparably subversive. “Liberty is not a nymph from the opera, it is not a bonnet rouge, or a dirty shirt,” one Jacobin orator proclaimed, “liberty is happiness, reason and equality.” Realistic portrayals of women as actors and agents of revolution were replaced by bland allegorical images that purveyed the Jacobin orthodoxy of the serene mother, breast exposed, offering France the milk of liberty.⁶⁶

Wollstonecraft was protected from the bloodletting by a typically astute maneuver on Imlay’s part. Early in September he had her registered as his wife at the American embassy in Paris. This had no legal bearing, and they were never married, but it did afford her de facto recognition as an American citizen and kept her safe amid the mayhem of the Terror.⁶⁷ Her relative security did not conceal the fear and violence all about her. She visited her imprisoned friends in the overcrowded jails, haunted by the rattle of the tumbril, and she witnessed with her own eyes blood running across the cobblestones after yet another execution. There is a judicious silence on such matters in her letters to Imlay—she was not so secure that she could risk expressing her revulsion in print—but the murderous atmosphere of Paris in those months stayed with her for the rest of her life. It doubtless contributed to her hunger for the stability of domestic life with Imlay and her rage at his departure for the coast.

The issue of geography was resolved in January, when she moved to join him in Le Havre. The following months were ones of relative harmony as the couple established a household on the Rue de Corderie by the harbor and prepared for the arrival of their child. Fanny Imlay was born on May 14, 1794. In a letter to Ruth Barlow, Wollstonecraft reported that their French midwife, who was evidently on-message, had quipped that “I ought to make children for the Republic, since I treat it so lightly.” She continued that the “little Girl begins to suck so manfully that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the Rights of Woman.”⁶⁸ This period of family communion around the newborn child was painfully short-lived. Imlay’s byzantine commercial dealings were consuming ever more of his time. He spent the summer going back and forth between Paris and Le Havre. Then, in September, he was obliged to travel to London in pursuit of information about a business deal gone awry. Rather than remain alone in the dreary coastal town, Wollstonecraft and Fanny went to Paris, where the Jacobins had been crushed amid a final, apocalyptic round of beheadings at the Place de la Révolution at the end of July. The city was safe now. The rounds of visits and gatherings resumed, albeit with the ranks of the radical depleted and their confidence in their beliefs diminished. The passage of the Terror allowed each a moment of personal reckoning. Wollstonecraft had now been in France for just under two years. Her belief in the merits of rational desires and uncertain freedoms had been tested beyond any limit that she might have imagined as a writer on the make in London. France had given her love, a daughter, and a wealth of experience but at the expense of her idealism. Her experiment in radical love outside the bonds of marriage and the bounds of respectable society had forced her to confront some basic truths about human relationships. They could neither be rationalized or managed. Freedom to love meant freedom to lose. Men could rove, but a woman with a child in her womb or at her breast faced certain constraints. Imlay was now roving an awful lot. Confronted with the compromised state of her sexual beliefs, she nourished herself on elysian memories of the first pangs of her romance. “There is nothing picturesque in your present pursuits,” she wrote to Imlay that September.

My imagination then rather chuses to ramble back to the barrier with you, or to see you coming to meet me, and my basket of grapes.—With what pleasure do I recollect your looks and words, when I have been sitting on the window, regarding the waving corn!

…

If you call these observations romantic … I shall be apt to retort, that you are embruted by trade, and the vulgar enjoyments of life—Bring me then back your barrier-face, or you shall have nothing to say to my barrier-girl; and I shall fly from you, to cherish the remembrances that will ever be dear to me.⁶⁹

This was false bravado. Imlay was flying from her, and she was perceptive enough to detect that in their correspondence. She waited for him in France until the spring of 1795, subsisting on a starvation diet of false hope and pat nostalgia. In his letters to her, Imlay breathed faintly on whatever embers of mutual affection still glimmered, but he remained stubbornly in London. At the beginning of April Wollstonecraft’s patience finally broke and she resolved to return to England after a two-and-a-half-year hiatus. On April 7, 1795, Wollstonecraft wrote a curt letter to Imlay informing him to expect her and his daughter in Brighton within the week.

In London, Wollstonecraft learned that Imlay had taken up with a young actress and tried to commit suicide. The details of the attempt are unclear, though she did not succeed and word of her desperate condition reached Imlay, momentarily dragging him back into her affairs. His response was self-serving. He suggested that Wollstonecraft and Fanny might travel to Norway on his behalf to uncover the fate of a lost ship of his that had been engaged in running the British blockade. Wollstonecraft agreed, and by early June she was in Hull awaiting passage to Gothenberg. The journey was repeatedly delayed by bad weather, and she peppered Imlay with letters to stave off boredom. In one such letter, she sketched a nascent theory of love that seemed to her to explain why their relationship had failed. Passion was the raw material of love, she wrote, and reason was the necessary cement. The problem was that “the common run of men,” which presumably included Imlay, had to “have variety to banish ennui.” Lasting love, “a unison of affection and desire,” could only be achieved through the addition of a third ingredient: the imagination. The exercise of the powers of the imagination allowed the lover access to a higher state of romantic experience “that renders every emotion delicate and rapturous.” Not all people could arrive at this state, it was “the distinctive characteristic of genius” to be able to attain this superior kind of love. She was hopeful though that Imlay had the potential to reach it “which would open your heart to me. I would fain rest there.”⁷⁰

These musings on the imaginations stayed with her throughout her travels in Scandinavia. She arrived in Gothenburg on June 27 and embarked on a circuitous tour of the peninsula, which took her north up the coast, then across the Skagerrak strait to Risør, a remote coastal outpost in southeast Norway, then northeast to Christiania (now Oslo), before heading south through Gothenburg and thence to Elsinore, Copenhagen, and Hamburg. Her journeys through the wild terrain of rural Scandinavia provided a kind of natural cure for her after months of trauma. She unspooled herself in the landscapes of Sweden and Norway. Communing with nature in the daytime, with only Fanny for company, she jotted down her impressions in the evenings, the polar nights so luminous that she could write without the aid of a candle. These notes in time gathered to become her greatest work, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), a strange and powerful piece of writing, structured as a series of letters to Imlay, who is never named and whose role in her life is never properly explained. Indeed, there is very little biographical exposition provided, so that the casual reader would be only faintly aware of phantoms hovering above the page as she discourses on nature, politics, commerce, and love. There is a tidal quality to the Letters; Wollstonecraft allows herself to range out into new waters, testing out ideas, considering images, exploring channels of thought, then the weight of personal tragedy tugs her back in toward familiar shores—the anxieties of motherhood, political disillusionment, heartbreak. A constant in all the letters is the transformative powers of the imagination, which seemed to offer if not an escape route from her troubles then at least a means of momentarily transcending them. The encounter with nature was the catalyst for these episodes of metaphysical release:

In the evening they also die away; the aspen leaves tremble into stillness, and reposing nature seems to be warmed by the moon, which here assumes a genial aspect. And if a light shower has chanced to fall with the sun, the juniper, the underwood of the forest, exhales a wild perfume, mixed with a thousand nameless sweets that, soothing the heart, leave images in the memory which the imagination will ever hold dear.

In the grip of these reveries her imagination was borne off to mystic territory. Wandering across the heath she heard the specter of Fanny Blood calling out to her across the years. Walking among the groves of firs and pines at dusk, she seemed to sense their souls. Cruising down the coast from Helgeroa to Risør she surveyed the barren shore and had a vision of the day when the world would be so overpopulated that even these blighted places would be crowded with humans.

Imagination went still farther, and pictured the state of man when the earth could no longer support him. Whither was he to flee from universal famine? Do not smile; I really became distressed for these fellow creatures yet unborn. The images fastened on me, and the world appeared a vast prison.⁷¹

In their scope and lyricism, Letters represented a bound forward in Wollstonecraft’s literary abilities. With her meditations on the role and power of the imagination she was exploring poetic territory that would later be charted more completely by the Romantics—but the discovery was hers.⁷²

“If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author,” William Godwin wrote of Letters, “this appears to me to be the book.” Nothing could make Gilbert Imlay anymore disposed to love Mary Wollstonecraft. As she traveled south to Denmark she tried to persuade him to meet her in Hamburg so that they could travel on to Switzerland as a family. When it became clear this was not going to happen she accepted her lot with prideful resignation. “I am content to be wretched; but I will not be contemptible,”⁷³ she wrote from Hamburg in late September. She was at Dover by October 4 and in London soon afterward. There she met Imlay and learned that he had a new mistress. All her hopes for the renewal of their love—it was now thirty months since their first meeting—were dashed. The crisis was insuperable. Wollstonecraft had been thinking about suicide for months now. At Hull she had considered the sea as a potential tomb for her worries. At a waterfall at Frederichstadt, she had felt the lure of the thundering water and had “asked myself why I was chained to life and its misery.” She had always loved Hamlet, identifying with the lugubrious Dane, similarly unlucky in love and family and politics. In the end she played Ophelia, the tormented lover who took too much water in her grief. On the wet night of October 10, she took a boat down the Thames to Putney, where she walked up and down the banks until her dress was heavy with rainwater. Then she mounted the bridge and hurled herself into the dark swift river.

In April 1796 Mary Wollstonecraft walked through the lush meadows that covered the way from her new home in Islington to Somers Town, near King’s Cross. Seven months after she had been fished out of the Thames and revived by a member of the Humane Society, Wollstonecraft was ready to experiment with love once more. She was heading to the house of William Godwin, the bachelor philosopher, to make a social call, unannounced and unaccompanied, in characteristic defiance of etiquette. At forty, Godwin was a stubby man with a lumpy nose and lumpy chin, as disinterested in social niceties as her, though a little more prone than she to allowing dry philosophical disquisitions to intrude upon regular conversation. He shunned both the rococo clothing fashions of the day and the austere radical chic favored by many in his circle in favor of the fusty, somewhat peculiar sartorial choices of a provincial eccentric—a green coat, a scarlet waistcoat, and pointy red morocco slippers—which in several respects he was. He had neither the natural charm nor the lanky good looks of Imlay. Still, Wollstonecraft and Godwin had much in common both socially and intellectually, as well as a shared past as supper guests of Joseph Johnson—not that these encounters had sparked anything like desire in either of them. In January the two had met at the house of Mary Hays, another female writer who had been courting Wollstonecraft’s approval for some time. They had met on a couple of occasions since. Now, striding through the fields on the approach Wollstonecraft was consciously escalating the terms of their acquaintance.

Godwin’s diary recorded his daily activity in telegraphic style (“Thursday 21st February 1793: Read the Amorous Cynic. Wedgwood’s Concert: sup at Holcroft’s.”) and as of that January meeting Wollstonecraft had appeared only three times in it. After her April visit, the terse mentions of her presence rapidly increase, charting the rising pulse of their relationship. They struck up a correspondence that soon graduated from the literary to the flirtatious to the amorous. “It was friendship melting into love,” Godwin would later write,⁷⁴ a process that he nonetheless nearly scuppered by attempting to impose his philosophical precepts on their courtship. This was, nonetheless, the most rational desire either had ever entertained. By the end of August they were lovers. By the New Year she was pregnant. As her condition began to show in the spring of 1797 they decided—with heavy radical hearts—to marry. Godwin thought the need for a ceremony ridiculous and “contrary to the genuine march of sentiment.” Wollstonecraft was rather more concerned with the gossip it would give rise to. She had been going by Mrs. Imlay for several years now. Legally marrying Godwin would reveal that she had never been married to Imlay, that she had been nothing more than his mistress. Her fears were borne out. Following their April marriage several of their friends refused to be seen in society with them. There was much wagging of tongues besides about the union of two of Britain’s most scandalous philosophers. “You have not, perhaps, heard,” Henry Fuseli wrote to a friend, “that the assertrix of female rights has given her hand to the balancier of political justice.”⁷⁵

Conforming to convention, they now moved in together at Somers Town, but otherwise theirs was a most unusual marriage. They socialized separately or together as the fancy took them. Godwin rented another apartment in Somers Town, where he would work from morning till evening, seeing his wife only at dinner. Godwin was also an affectionate stepfather to Fanny Imlay, refusing, in line with his principles, to indulge in the stigma surrounding bastard children. In his memoir of this period, Godwin was proud of their very rational domestic arrangements. “We were both of us of opinion, that it was possible for two persons to be too uniformly in each other’s society,” he wrote. By fragmenting the time they spent together while also keeping a traditional household they successfully combined “the novelty and lively sensation of visit, with the more delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life.”

It was during this new and welcome period of marital and domestic stability that Wollstonecraft began to write her most radical work, one that foreshadows the concerns of contemporary feminism far more than A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The prescience of Maria: or, The Wrongs of Woman is made all the more remarkable given that it was never completed and contains a number of dead ends and fragmentary plot connections that she never had time to correct. For all this, Maria is far more compelling a read than her earlier novel Mary—yet another sign of her flourishing literary talents. The novel is set in a madhouse, where three characters—a man and two women—tell the tragic tale of their lives. Seduction lies at the center of the life stories of the two women, Jemima and Maria, although the narratives each tell subvert in different ways the tradition of the seduction narrative. Jemima is from a working-class background. Her mother was seduced and abandoned and then died less than two weeks after giving birth to her. Raised in the direst poverty, at sixteen Jemima went into service, where she was raped by her master and, when she became pregnant by him, was evicted from his household. She had a backstreet abortion and became a prostitute. Later she was taken into the house of a gentleman and became his kept woman. “Fate dragged me through the very kennels of society,” Jemima says of her life. “I was still a slave, a bastard, a common property.” The depiction of Jemima is innovative as it was uncommon to use seduction narratives to focus on the plight of the poor, still less of poor women who were capable of coolly analyzing the circumstances of their oppression. For Jemima is a fierce and astute critic of British society. Whereas most sentimental heroines focus on questions of virtue and appeal to the reform of men through the inculcation of Christian morality, Jemima focuses on the structural problems facing women, especially economic ones:

“How often have I heard,” said Jemima, interrupting her narrative, “in conversation, and read in books, that every person willing to work may find employment? It is the vague assertion, I believe, of insensible indolence, when it relates to men; but, with respect to women, I am sure of its fallacy, unless they will submit to the most menial bodily labour; and even to be employed at hard labour is out of the reach of many, whose reputation misfortune or folly has tainted.”⁷⁶

The problems she faced, in other words, ran across more than one vector. The problems of poverty were made different by the fact of her gender. This was intersectionality two hundred years before the fact.

The unremittingly brutal world faced by women that Jemima describes makes Wollstonecraft’s depiction of Maria even more remarkable. Unlike Jemima, she is from a respectable, well-off family. Her life arc seems to trace that of the typical sentimental heroine since Clarissa. As a young woman in thrall to romantic notions she learned from novels, she is courted by George Venables, an apparently upright young man from a wealthy family. Little does she know, but “in London, George had acquired habits of libertinism, which he carefully concealed from his father and his commercial connections.” She finds out his true nature too late. They are wed, only for Maria to discover that George is a boor, a drunk, and a habitué of the meanest sort of brothels. “Marriage had bastilled me for life,” Maria tells her friends. Unlike most women, Maria decides to fight back. A woman of sensibility and reason, she decides that her marriage is effectively rendered void by her husband’s coarse, unloving behavior. In a brilliant passage she describes what her ideal partner would be like:

A man of feeling thinks not of seducing, he is himself seduced by all the noblest emotions of his soul. He figures to himself all the sacrifices a woman of sensibility must make, and every situation in which his imagination places her, touches his heart, and fires his passions.⁷⁷

She escapes her unhappy home and heads for London, where she meets and falls in love with Henry Darnford. Maria and Darnford live together for a period, enjoying their outlaw passion, until her husband catches up with them. George sues Darnford for adultery and seduction. Under English law, husbands could sue men who intruded in their marriage, often as a prelude to securing a divorce. Women were considered passive objects in these legal events, alluded to but not given voice.⁷⁸ Maria chooses to upend this system by involving herself in Darnford’s defense. She instructs his lawyers to plead guilty to the charge of adultery but to deny the charge of seduction. Forbidden by law to give evidence in person, Maria writes a testament that she hopes will be read out in court. In writing this document, “she only felt in earnest to insist on the privilege of her nature” caring nothing for either the letter of unjust laws or for the censure of an hypocritical society. At the core of her argument is an attack on a “false morality” that makes “all the virtue of women consist in chastity, submission, and the forgiveness of injuries.” Maria insists on challenging the charge of seduction because she exercised her own powers of reason to love Darnford of her own free will. She agrees that she was a victim of society in many ways but refuses to go along with a legal fiction that assumes she could not make her own mind as to whom to leave and whom to love:

I met the man charged with seducing me. We became attached—I deemed, and ever shall deem, myself free… . To this person, thus encountered, I voluntarily gave myself, never considering myself as any more bound to transgress the laws of moral purity, because the will of my husband might be pleaded in my excuse, than to transgress those laws to which [the policy of artificial society has] annexed [positive] punishments.⁷⁹

This carefully modulated defense of Free Love was one of the last things Mary Wollstonecraft ever wrote. On August 30 she gave birth to a daughter, Mary Godwin. The birth initially seemed to have gone well. There were, however, hidden complications. Some sections of the placenta had become caught in her womb. After several days they began to rot, eventually leading her to develop septicemia. She took ten agonizing days to die. Godwin tended to her to the best of his abilities. In moments of lucidity she spoke to him of Fanny and Mary. Otherwise he busied himself with finding doctors and minding the children while she lay on the bed, racked with fevers. The end came on the evening of September 10, an event Godwin recorded with fearful brevity in his diary. “20 minutes before 8,” followed by a long ellipsis.

Following his wife’s death, Godwin decided to memorialize her in a biography. He immersed himself in her letters and manuscripts before setting about writing the story of her life. He worked at a furious pace. Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in January 1798. It was intended as an homage to a radical life. He did not shy from any fact of her existence. Everything was within its pages: her pursuit of Henry Fuseli, her extramarital affair with Gilbert Imlay, their false wedding in Paris, her illegitimate child by him, their separation and her two suicide attempts, her unusual courtship and premarital sexual affair with Godwin. He was unapologetic about the book’s candor. “There are no circumstances of her life, that, in the judgment of honour and reason, could brand her with disgrace,” he wrote. “Never did there exist a human being, that needed, with less fear, expose all their actions, and call upon the universe to judge them.”⁸⁰ Posterity may have arrived at the same conclusion, but in the short term his unbowdlerized account of her life was a public relations disaster of the first order. Even those disposed toward Godwin could not understand why he would publish such things about his recently deceased wife. The poet Robert Southey wrote that Godwin exhibited “a want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked.”⁸¹ Joseph Johnson had pleaded with him not to publish it in its final form. For conservatives, his revelations about the private life of one of their most implacable foes were read with relish. Wollstonecraft’s sex life was used to discredit her political principles.⁸² In his poem “The Unsex’d Females” (1798), the Reverend Richard Polwhele put Wollstonecraft at the head of a

A female band despising NATURE’s law,

As ‘proud defiance’ flashes from their arms,

And vengeance smothers all their softer charms

I shudder at the new unpictur’d scene,

Where unsex’d woman vaunts the imperious mien;

Where girls, affecting to dismiss the heart,

Invoke the Proteus of petrific art.

The “unsex’d woman” was politically engaged and sexually liberated—both characteristics were to be feared and condemned in equal measure. As in France, now in England, sexual virtue was equated with political virtue. “The moral sentiments and moral conduct of Mrs. Wollstonecroft [sic],” the Anti-Jacobin Review wrote in its review of Godwin’s Memoirs, “exemplify and illustrate JACOBIN MORALITY.” Wollstonecraft’s travels to France and her early sympathy for the French Revolution were deemed comparable to her irregular relationships. Promiscuity and treason made easy bedfellows. In its index, the Anti-Jacobin Review listed her under “Prostitution. See Mary Wollstonecraft.”⁸³ The cruelest posthumous blow came not from the reactionary press but from the man who had loved her most. In later life, William Godwin disavowed much of his youthful radicalism, in particular the sections of Political Justice that dealt with Free Love. His memoirs then were also edited in order to tone down their sexual content. “Is truth then so variable?” William Hazlitt wrote in a sketch of Godwin in 1825. “Is it one thing at twenty, and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814?”⁸⁴ Yet Godwin was not alone in growing conservative with the years. Many of the radicals of the 1790s made a similar journey toward the center ground of British politics. Whether Wollstonecraft would have joined them there is unknowable. Nonetheless, their subsequent defection made her example look all the more anomalous and all the less encouraging. The prospects for the survival of her beliefs in the powers of reason, the pleasures of the passions, and the rights of individuals would reside in the next era. Her shade would not have to look far. Though she and her daughter Mary had met only in passing at life’s boundary, it was enough to ensure that the line of succession went unbroken. For whatever piece of the daughter lodged in the mother, a greater portion of the mother lodged in the daughter, and the questions that had animated her life were passed along to a new generation.