Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the most distinctive letter writers of the eighteenth century. Her works from her juvenile productions as a young girl in the Yorkshire town of Beverley to her final notes to her husband and future biographer William Godwin are instantly recognizable. Indeed Wollstonecraft’s value is as much in letter writing as in public authorship; often she seems almost to live through her correspondence, expressing within it her numerous roles: child, daughter, companion, friend, teacher, governess, sister, literary hack, woman of letters, lover, wife, rationalist, and romantic. She wrote incessantly throughout her life, priding herself on her frank expression and often berating her correspondents for not rising to her expansive standards. She might have said with Amelia Opie, a friend from her final years, “If writing were an effort to me I should not now be alive . . . and it might have been inserted in the bills of mortality – ‘dead of letter writing A. Opie.’”1
Wollstonecraft’s letters were self-aware certainly but they were also dashed off as the overflow sometimes of joy, more often of bitterness, ennui, and self pity. They are occasionally funny, often engaging, but most frequently moving in their self-centered vulnerability. In them Wollstonecraft grows from the awkward child of fourteen to the woman of thirty-eight facing her death in childbirth. One can see where she matured and where she remained entangled in childhood emotions, noting in the swift reading of a lifetime’s writing the unity in temperament from beginning to end, the eerie consistency of tone. At different times the letters reveal her wanting to reconcile different irreconcilables – integrity and sexual longing, the needs and duties of a woman, motherhood and intellectual life, fame and domesticity, reason and passion – but all are marked by similar strenuousness, a wish to be true to the complexity she felt. As a result she never seems quite to have said the last word: there are numerous PSs in her letters, mentions of the paper or letter itself and her need to write to its end, to fill in, to dominate her pages. No space should be left empty, no mood untouched by expression: “I can hardly bid you adieu, till I come to the bottom of my paper,” she wrote. A letter will conclude by promising silence, only to be followed by another begun a few hours later.
Wollstonecraft’s letters were not written with half a glance at the public in the manner of some of the Romantic poets like Lord Byron, who expected a place in literary history. At the same time no letter writer of the time assumed complete one-to-one privacy. Runs of letters were kept, handed around among coteries or colleague groups. When Wollstonecraft asked for her letters back from a correspondent, she was confident that she would receive them intact. Yet inevitably for the modern reader there is a sense of intrusion in reading private writing, even after so long. Those anxious about the tastelessness of the act might look at the words of another friend of her latter years, Mary Hays. Unlike Wollstonecraft, Hays lived long enough to collect her own correspondence, and she wrote, “Should this book fall into the hands of those who make the human heart their study, they may, it is possible, find some entertainment, should the papers continue legible, in tracing the train of circumstances which have contributed to form a character, in some respects it may be singular and whimsical, yet affording I trust something to imitate, though more to warn and pity.”2
Wollstonecraft, like Hays, was aware that she was expressing an inner reality. Inevitably there were outside influences: some letters mentioned reading, usually of improving books, but mostly the modern reader grasps little of the world around – much more appears in her sister Eliza’s letters. For Wollstonecraft’s response to the great events of her time, the French Revolution and the English reaction, or the deaths of literary and political figures we must turn to the published writings, to her three polemical works: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution or to her journalism with The Analytical Review. But she does not, by contrast in her letters, describe a domestic private world outside the public political one; unlike most eighteenth-century letter writers, especially women, she did not give immense detail of interiors, gardens, consumer objects, dresses, and materials. The letters of Jane Austen and Frances Burney are full of muslins, gauzes, and hats, as well as of shops and streets they have entered and walked down. Wollstonecraft’s letters, often sent from the same fashionable locations, reveal mostly her thoughts, sensations and emotions. In many respects offending the canons of good letter writing, she was rarely concise, graphic, direct, realistically detailed, or detached.
Good letter writing of the time was described by the Scottish literary critic Hugh Blair, whose popular Letters on Rhetoric Wollstonecraft discovered when she was a governess in Ireland in 1786 and 1787. She valued the work but the remarks on letter writing had little influence on her practice. Blair had expressed the Augustan notion of correspondence as good conversation, sprightly, witty, and seemingly natural, above all entertaining, with a constant eye to the recipient. Although she tended to be more open about her feelings with some correspondents than others, these were not always especially appropriate for confidence or especially close in family or friendship. Indeed she seems to have had little concern for the particular effect of her writing on her correspondent; for example, she remarked to an old friend, George Blood, that he might dread hearing from her if she continued moaning; yet this fear did not inhibit further complaint. She simply did not accept the Augustan advice to calibrate tone and detail according to the recipient. Great letter writers in this tradition such as Horace Walpole took a single event and reported it in different ways for different correspondents. Wollstonecraft was not a leisured and literary letter writer like this; she did not have Walpole’s temperament nor his time and space; she was writing on the hoof, in cramped lodgings, on swaying boats, in the wilds of Scandinavia or in freezing Paris before queuing for bread, or between reviewings in London, or indeed before plunging into the Thames in an attempt to end her life. In such circumstances she was concerned with expressing her emotions as she felt them, not entertaining or worrying about her effect. So she could reveal herself fully to men such as her future publisher Joseph Johnson when she hardly knew him or display her melancholy to a chance acquaintance like the clergyman Henry Gabell.
Perhaps her secret determination to become a writer gave all her communications value in her eyes, however self-obsessed and repetitive they might sound to her correspondent. Just occasionally she sought to entertain – when she replied to her sister Eliza, whom she knew to be gloomy, she tried “fabricat[ing] a lively epistle” – but this was a rare aim and, if her letters to her other sister are anything to judge by, she soon fell back on her preachy homiletic style or her habit of detailing her moods almost as if conversing with herself rather than another. She was concerned to get herself across to herself as well as to both private recipients and public readership, whatever the cost. As a result of this self-concern there was less distinction than one might have expected between her letters to her lover and those to her sisters or distant friends.
The main impression given by her letters, then, is of self-absorption but not lack of self-awareness; often, they seem more like a diary than correspondence, a communion with the self or perhaps a self-created other. Wollstonecraft talked and thought on paper. The strengths of the letters were that, while they were not witty entertainments, they were also not sentimental or exaggeratedly exclamatory in the contemporary feminine mode – letters from Mary Hays or Mary Robinson are examples – nor did they use prepackaged phrases. Instead they sought to dramatize feelings, tease out the meaning from sensations, enacting moods on paper rather than simply describing them. Indeed the letters themselves often formed a large part of the drama of her life. Wollstonecraft would begin to write in one state and end in another or write herself into dramatic misery. She portrayed herself awaiting the post, then hearing that nothing had arrived; her fiery brain burnt and she rushed from the room for air. All was captured on paper.
Wollstonecraft’s letters create a distinctive world, a sense of inner vitality, revealing a consistent character. Unhappy in Scandinavia, she told her forsaking lover Gilbert Imlay,
there is such a thing as a broken heart! There are characters whose very energy preys upon them; and who, ever inclined to cherish by reflection some passion, cannot rest satisfied with the common comforts of life. I have endeavoured to fly from myself, and launched into all the dissipation possible here, only to feel keener anguish, when alone with my child.3
Her huge sense of the “I” is always believable and fully present. It is quite unlike the self image of, for example, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu or the bluestocking writers such as Elizabeth Carter and Catherine Talbot. The bluestockings wrote to each other as friends, but their letters, which seem designed to be passed around among a coterie, have a public quality lacking in Wollstonecraft. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had a very different temperament from Wollstonecraft, as she disclosed when she wrote her wonderfully sharp and witty letters earlier in the century. Although both struggled for self-mastery – Wollstonecraft through religion in the beginning, then through rationalism – unlike Lady Mary she was not concerned in her letters to discipline her sorrows or to distance her subject matter from herself. She did not try to express herself stoically.4 Part of the difference lay in their different circumstances. Montagu had her aristocratic status to uphold where Wollstonecraft had little social status but a great deal of valued identity to express.
As her letters indicate, Wollstonecraft believed in getting to truth through investigating her own experience; so her mode of writing was in the main intensely personal. She argued the value of her expression with Godwin, who had been critical of her raw careless style,
I am compelled to think that there is some thing in my writings more valuable, than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm elogiums – I mean more mind – denominate it as you will – more of the observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination – the effusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials procured by the senses and imagination of other writers.
(Letters, no. 242)
Her points remain valid for her public writings or her personal letters.
Wollstonecraft’s extant letters begin in 1773 when she was still a child and end on 30 August 1797, a few hours before the childbirth that would kill her. They are scattered in libraries in the US and England but the bulk of them exists in two collections, the larger among the Abinger manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and the smaller, including the juvenile letters, in the Pfortzheimer Library in New York. In addition, the letters to the Liverpool philanthropist William Roscoe are in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. The edition by Ralph M. Wardle in 1979 lists 346 letters; my edition will have 354, including a recently discovered letter to Catharine Macaulay whom Wollstonecraft praised in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and to whom she sent a copy of her The Vindication of the Rights of Men. Many of the letters are undated; consequently their placing depends on an interpretation of the life.5
Wollstonecraft’s letters survive where someone else wished them to do so. For all his rebuffing, Gilbert Imlay chose to save and then return his lover’s letters. His successor, Godwin, read them and found them wonderful and passionate, seductive of the later reader if not of their first recipient; they were in keeping with his image of Wollstonecraft as an author of genius. So, remarkably for the times, as proof of this genius he chose to print an intimate record of the intense obsessive love felt by his wife for a former lover. Perhaps we also owe to Godwin the unflagging intensity of the letters. He liked to see Wollstonecraft as an emotional writer and was less interested in her as a political and economic commentator. Consequently he cut out the sections of the letters from Scandinavia that concerned the business on which Wollstonecraft was traveling (his excisions might also be due to the nature of this business, which was the pursuit of a case arising out of French efforts to circumvent the British blockade during the war between the two countries). As a comparison of these letters with others to her family suggests, he also made them more coherent and corrected the punctuation.
Two other series of letters over which Godwin had control were those between himself and Wollstonecraft and those from Wollstonecraft to her publisher and friend Joseph Johnson. The former he did not publish but largely kept intact. Many of the interchanges simply consist of notes about quotidian matters, appointments, cold dinners, arrangements for Wollstonecraft’s little daughter by Imlay. Others are longer or more serious, describing the new deep love for Godwin in fleeting voluptuous or tender moments, combined, as always in Wollstonecraft, with moods and displays of neediness and self-assertion. The others to Johnson Godwin published together with the Imlay letters in Posthumous Works.6 These also sometimes discuss business – literary assignments and the debts which Wollstonecraft was constantly running up with Johnson – but they also reveal again her troubling mixture of independence and dependence, her conflicting desire to rely on and impress another. Like the Imlay letters, the originals of the Johnson letters were presumably destroyed by Godwin once he had prepared them for publication. There are thus no manuscripts from which to check his editing.
In Godwin’s view, the great absence from the letters he was publishing were the extant letters Wollstonecraft wrote to the artist and cultural critic Henry Fuseli, for whom she had had what she described as a “rational passion” during the early 1790s. They would certainly have been of value since they must have been a record of her mind when she was writing her great polemical works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; in addition they would have thrown light on her tortuous efforts to reconcile reason and passion. When she had been at a low ebb after her suicide attempt in 1795, Wollstonecraft had asked Fuseli as well as Imlay to return her letters. Imlay complied but Fuseli did not. After her death when Godwin was writing his Memoirs in loving if undiplomatic remembrance of his wife, he asked Fuseli – whom he knew well but without intimacy – if he might see these letters. Although he had not even opened some of them, so importunate and repetitive had they become in his mind, he had retained them. He showed them in a drawer to Godwin but refused him access; they remained among his papers at his death in 1825. They then became the property of his executor and biographer, John Knowles. Since his subject was Fuseli not Wollstonecraft, Knowles quoted only briefly from them in his 1831 biography.7 After his death they came into the hands of his son, E. H. Knowles, who announced his possession in 1870.8 In 1884 E. H. Knowles sold them to Sir Percy Florence Shelley, Mary Shelley’s son and Wollstonecraft’s grandson. As the child of scandal, brought up to value restraint and propriety, Sir Percy is unlikely to have acquired them for their literary value but rather to stanch the poison of notoriety that seemed to afflict his family – they were after all intense personal letters written from an unmarried woman to a married man. Sir Percy refused Elizabeth Robins Pennell permission to use them for her biography in 1885. Since then they have disappeared and it has long been presumed by scholars that the Shelleys – Sir Percy’s wife Jane survived him and was much concerned with the family’s legacy – destroyed them.9
The letters to Godwin can be explicated through Godwin’s own letters, which he also saved; the letters to Imlay have no replies except the fragments quoted within them; the letters to Fuseli exist only in a few quotations by Knowles; one other series of romantic letters surfaces even more shadowily in a newspaper account. Joshua Waterhouse, a clergyman don from St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge, unmentioned in Wollstonecraft’s extant letters, was visiting the fashionable spa of Bath where young Mary was working as a lady’s companion. After his murder in 1827, a cache of love letters was discovered in his possessions:
Amongst the many fair ones to whom the singular rector of Stukeley paid his addresses was the once-famous Mary Wollstonecraft, distinguished during the period of the French Revolution for her democratical writing. . . . How far the rev. gentleman sped in his wooing with this intellectual amazon we have not been able to ascertain. . . .10
The letters have since disappeared.
The greatest gap for our understanding of Wollstonecraft’s emotional development is neither the letters to Fuseli nor the supposed ones to Waterhouse but those to Fanny Blood, the main love of her youth. Wollstonecraft was clear about Fanny’s significance in a letter she wrote to Jane Arden:
I enjoyed the society of a friend, whom I love better than all the world beside, a friend to whom I am bound by every tie of gratitude and inclination: To live with this friend is the height of my ambition . . . her conversation is not more agreeable than improving. . . .
To Godwin Wollstonecraft later described it as “a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of [my] mind.”11 Unhappily not a single letter between the pair survives from this period of Wollstonecraft’s accelerated emotional and intellectual development.
What does survive is the series of letters to Fanny Blood’s younger brother, the enthusiastic George, as well as those to her own youngest sister Everina, these latter perhaps the most revealing of all she wrote since they are rarely inhibited except about the objects of her affections and they cover the longest period of her life. Everina held on to these letters until her death in 1843. They were therefore not available to Godwin when he wrote his Memoirs, although he had requested them. Everina refused access because she felt she had already suffered enough from her sister’s scandalous life – she believed her employment prospects damaged by the relationship. Also she neither liked Godwin nor wished to cooperate on what she regarded as an unwise display of her sister’s failings – “stripping his dead wife naked” as the poet Southey termed it.12 The counterpart to the Everina letters is the much smaller series to the third sister Elizabeth Bishop, the most troublesome of the family correspondents and the nearest in temperament and yearnings to Wollstonecraft herself; since Eliza Bishop became thoroughly alienated from her famous sister, even pretending that she was dead through several periods of her life, she probably destroyed some of this correspondence; only one letter survives from Wollstonecraft’s later years and it was copied in outrage for her sister Everina to read.
The letters to Everina Wollstonecraft and George Blood have a similar tone; they are often complacent, dominating, dogmatic, frank, complaining and self-assertive: they are deeply interested in the welfare of their recipients but they also blame both for their failures as correspondents and occasionally they make it clear that Wollstonecraft regarded herself as their intellectual and temperamental superior. To George Blood she became remarkably close after Fanny Blood’s death, before she awkwardly withdrew from what was perhaps more compromising than she had meant. At other times she felt comfortable berating George for his and his family’s failings as if she had really been his older sister or mother. On his side he seems to have given unqualified admiration: Wollstonecraft became the “Princess,” a nickname she relished since she referred to it in several of her letters. Without the crucial correspondence with Fanny Blood, this with her brother best charts Wollstonecraft’s love affair with the Blood family and her alienation from them as she came to realize their severe limitations (selfishness and fecklessness) and intellectual shortcomings. Poor George, who had been her main comfort through periods of anguish at the loss of Fanny, was later told not to read books above his capacities. The letters to George, like those to her sisters, trail off as Wollstonecraft emotionally outgrew both family and surrogate family.
With her sister Everina, frequently called a “girl” despite her adult status, Wollstonecraft could be frank and bossy:
your mind certainly requires great attention – you have seldom resolution to think or exert the talents nature, or to speak with more propriety, Providence has given you to be improved – our whole life is but an education for eternity – virtue is an acquirement – seek for the assistance of Heaven, to enable you now to be wise into Salvation, and regret not the time which is past, which, had others taken the greatest pains to form your mind could only have opened it to instruction – and made you capable of gaining experience – no creatures are so situated but they may obtain His favor from whom only TRUE comfort flows if they seek it.
(Letters, no. 51)
While often being dogmatic and homiletic, the letters to her sisters, especially those to Everina, are revelatory and in many ways moving, revealing the transformation of all three of them from vital yearning young girls to sour melancholic women, a character which only Wollstonecraft escaped with her genius and dramatic action. Depression and self-dramatization marked all the siblings – except the youngest brother Charles – as well perhaps as a certain resilience of which, curiously, Wollstonecraft herself seems to have had the least amount. But the letters reveal more than shared temperament: they also display a family of obligations. Each must circulate the last pound when necessary though each is entitled to grumble about his or her generosity. If a brother turns up broke on any sister he will be fed and helped; in return he will leave his dreams with the women who cannot go to sea or speculate in land. When they earn money the younger brothers think of their sisters – as they do again when they lose it. And always there is the parental black hole beneath the tracery of the letters – the father who ruined their childhood and then soaked up whatever money any of them managed to save, the father who often with all his vices and faults was not quite repudiated – not even by Mary, who refused to see him. Johnson rightly emphasized how much Wollstonecraft gave to her siblings and parent – as she did herself. The placing of her letters among those of her family displays how intricate was the network of dependence. Eliza Bishop gave to her father when she herself was almost destitute. Everina sent money to Mary in France as Mary had sent money to her before. In marked contrast, Imlay, outside the blood family, never gave anything to the sisters as a proper husband should have done, nor did he honor the bond for his daughter.13
Finally, there are letters to miscellaneous friends and colleagues. The most interesting are a series to her girlhood friend in Beverley, Jane Arden. These letters are a remarkable record of a young girl’s hopes and fears, her development and lack of development – for in many ways the bemused, emotional girl of fourteen, who begins the series, is not much different from the woman of twenty who ends it. At one point in the correspondence Wollstonecraft accused Jane Arden of not valuing her letters. In fact, while Jane Arden’s letters have not survived, those from Wollstonecraft were carefully preserved. Later in Wollstonecraft’s life other letters went to literary colleagues, a few to liberal men like the United Irishman, Archibald Hamilton Rowan, or the Liverpool abolitionist, William Roscoe, more to other literary women written in the last years of her life when she was a celebrity and regarded as such by her fellow writers. Her letters to these women were familiar, often bossy. She came over as both friend and professional, strenuous, formidable, frank, and sometimes downright rude. She could be both helpful and haughty towards a fellow writer like Mary Hays whose tone she found irritating, then slightly priggish but affectionate to the quirky, overfamiliar young Amelia Alderson, who she rightly feared held conventional attitudes beneath her modish radicalism.
The Arden letters begin in 1773 or early 1774 and address Jane when she is away staying with a friend in Hull; they continue on her return when Mary is hurt and jealous at Jane’s attentions to other girls: “I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none,” she wrote. Jane argued that a person could have many equal friends but Mary doubted it and the girls quarreled and refused to speak to each other. So Mary dashed off an aggrieved note:
I once thought myself worthy of your friendship; – I thank you for bringing me to a right sense of myself. – When I have been at your house with Miss J – the greatest respect has been paid to her; every thing handed to her first; – in short, as if she were a superior being: – Your Mama too behaved with more politeness to her.
(Letters, no. 5)
Such letters with their authentic tone of aggrieved adolescence deliver a prickly, needy but proud girl, eager to prove her value. She was keen to suggest her cultural awareness – her letters were at times a tissue of quotations from writers young people were supposed to read, mingled with doggerel from local poets – as well as her worth as a writer. She might not have the proper pens or have been taught as formally as Jane, but she knew she was expressing authentic “true” emotion. She also knew that writing was powerful and that she might control others with her words.
The youthful letters already indicate her sense of her dysfunctional family. The eldest girl in a family of seven, she had been caught in her parents’ downward social spiral and in her own envy for her eldest brother Ned, who had been singled out by their mother’s favor and by their grandfather’s excluding will, which left a third of his estate to this one child. By the time the Arden letters commence her family had already moved from London, where her father had been an apprenticed weaver, to a farm in Essex, where he had played gentleman farmer, then to another farm in Beverley. With each move be became more drunken and violent and it was clear to onlookers that he was incapable of flourishing or managing what had once been an adequate inheritance. “Many people did not scruple to prognosticate the ruin of the whole family, and the way he went on, justified them for so doing” (Letters, no. 10).
The Beverley period ended abruptly in 1775 when Edward Wollstonecraft returned south with his family. The gloom of this move was lightened for his daughter only by her meeting with the engaging Fanny Blood, with whom she soon dreamt of making a life. Her family meanwhile continued its wandering and decline, and it was with relief that she left home at the age of nineteen to become a companion in Bath. There she reestablished contact with Jane Arden, now a governess in Norfolk. Her letters, expressing her love for Fanny, revealed continuities with the childhood letters but also a temperamental change. She had become strenuously pious and there was a new depressive strain that would dog her throughout her life:
Pain and disappointment have constantly attended me since I left Beverley. I do not however repine at the dispensations of Providence, for my philosophy, as well as my religion will ever teach me to look on misfortunes as blessings, which like a bitter potion is disagreeable to the palate tho’ ’tis grateful to the Stomach. . . . Young people generally set out with romantic and sanguine hopes of happiness, and must receive a great many stings before they are convinced of their mistake, and that they are pursuing a mere phantom; an empty name.
(Letters, no. 10)
The sulky demanding girl of Beverley had become a scornful and depressive young lady, a “spectator” of pleasure, an alienated being marginalised in an uncaring society: “I wish to retire as much from [the world] as possible – I am particularly sick of genteel life, as it is called; – the unmeaning civilities that I see every day practiced don’t agree with my temper; – I long for a little sincerity, and look forward with pleasure to the time when I shall lay aside all restraint” (Letters, no. 12). Yet, despite the moaning, she had kept intact a sense of “consequence,” now expressed as a pride in puritanical austerity and in proper alienation among the trivial.
Wollstonecraft’s time as companion was interrupted by family disasters. Her mother was ailing and she returned home to help with nursing. Shortly after Mrs Wollstonecraft’s death, the second daughter Eliza married Meredith Bishop. Wollstonecraft regarded her as too young for marriage and was unsurprised when, after the birth of a child, Eliza fell into deep melancholy. Wollstonecraft’s response was vigorous: she removed her sister from her new husband and baby. The event was delivered in a series of breathless notes to the third sister Everina, brilliantly capturing the shifting moods and fears provoked by the drama: “I knew I should be the . . . shameful incendiary in this shocking affair of a woman’s leaving her bed-fellow,” Wollstonecraft wrote at one moment; at another, “[Eliza] looks now very wild – Heaven protect us – I almost wish for an husband – for I want some body to support me.”
To help keep Eliza, herself – and in due course her friend Fanny Blood and her sister Everina – she founded a small school in the progressive Dissenting community of Newington Green. The next years are sparsely covered by letters – which is a pity since it was a time of considerable intellectual growth. The period and the school came to an end when Wollstonecraft left for Portugal to be with Fanny Blood during her confinement – consumptive, Fanny had quit the school to be married the year before. After Fanny’s death, Wollstonecraft returned to England depressed and lonely; the school collapsed and she accepted a diminished future as governess to the daughters of Lord and Lady Kingsborough in Ireland. The letters during these months and those following, addressed to Fanny’s brother George Blood and to Everina Wollstonecraft, primarily describe a prolonged and deep depression, unmitigated by the continuing piety. “I am here shut out from domestic society – my heart throbs when I see a hand written by any one to whom my affections are attracted,” she lamented. The triviality of life in Mitchelstown Castle and the Dublin townhouse appalled her: “conversations which have nothing in them” and rituals of dress that consumed time. “I see Ladies put on rouge without any, mauvais honte – and make up their faces for the day – five hours, and who could do it less in – do many – I assure you, spend in dressing – without including preparations for bed washing with Milk of roses &c &c.” Her letters, always much concerned with her sensations, now became more specific about her mental and physical ailments:
Don’t smile when I tell you that I am tormented with spasms – indeed it is impossible to enumerate the various complaints I am troubled with; and how much my mind is harrassed by them. I know they all arise from disordered nerves, that are injured beyond a possibility of receiving any aid from medicine – There is no cure for a broken heart!
(Letters, no. 54)
During the time in Ireland Wollstonecraft added a new correspondent, Joseph Johnson, the London bookseller who had published her book on education, written on her return from Portugal. He had become a kind of confidant, but he may also have symbolized for her an independent future; so her letters tried to impress him with both her intellect and sensibility. Certainly they eased her forward to a new life which began in 1787, when Lady Kingsborough dismissed her. Declaring herself excitedly to Everina as “the first of a new genus,” Wollstonecraft then went to work for Johnson as an author and reviewer on his new periodical the Analytical Review. The letters to Everina and George Blood became fewer, more aware of growing intellectual distance. They revealed her continuing care for her family and surrogate family, but now mingled with a growing irritation at their failure to flourish independently; her irritation made her franker and more astringent than she had been when she needed their comfort.
One discrete series gives an idea of her developing sense of herself: it was written to Everina during a short vacation in Warminster with the clergyman schoolteacher Henry Gabell, whom she had met on her way to Ireland. Now closeted with him and his new wife, she cast a jaundiced eye on the couple’s married bliss, revealing in the process her own ambivalent attitude to coupledom and domesticity, as well as her awareness of her own intellectual gifts:
Whenever [I] read Milton’s description of paradise – the happiness, which he so poetically describes fills me with benevolent satisfaction – yet, I cannot help viewing them, I mean the first pair – as if they were my inferiors – inferiors because they could find happiness in a world like this – A feeling of the same kind frequently intrudes on me here – Tell me, does it arise from mistaken pride or conscious dignity which whispering me that my soul is immortal & should have a nobler ambition leads me to cherish it?
(Letters, no. 95)
Her detailed sense of her intellectual progress during this time was kept primarily for Fuseli, with whom she must have discussed her two polemical triumphs of the early London years, the Vindications, both written as sort of public letters in angry reaction to texts by men she considered both powerful and wrong-headed, especially Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Rousseau’s Emile.
Wollstonecraft must have been writing to Fuseli constantly to create the stack of letters Godwin later glimpsed and it was thus a considerable emotional wrench when, repulsed by him and his wife in her efforts to form a ménage à trois, she left for France. It was the fourth year of the Revolution and the Jacobin Terror was about to begin. Vulnerable and yearning for old friends, she soon replaced the middle aged enfant terrible Fuseli with a very different man, an American merchant, speculator and liberal author, the tall handsome Gilbert Imlay. Their love burgeoned. When the French grew antagonistic to English wellwishers after the declaration of war between the two countries, she had to move from Paris to a nearby village. There she began the long series of letters to Imlay which would chart her next few haunted years. They tell a dismal story: of the growth, short flowering and long decline of their relationship through Paris, Le Havre, where their child Fanny was born, through a sad reunion in London, through the first suicide attempt, the business trip to Scandinavia, the dreary return and further suicide attempt, to the slow recovery of health and peace.
“Everybody allows that the talent of writing agreeable letters is peculiarly female,” remarked the ironic hero of Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Letter writing certainly filled up a good deal of the literate woman’s time but the great letter writers of society were perhaps more men than women, Walpole or Byron, rather than the bluestocking ladies. But, when it came to the emotional personal letter, the exemplary exponent was agreed to be the seventeenth-century French Madame de Sevigné, whose love object was her daughter. Only fiction matched this intensity in Wollstonecraft’s period and it was the male hero, Werther, in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther who had become the standard of passion. In the letters to Imlay Wollstonecraft bears comparison with Madame de Sevigné and Werther.
Indeed the latter parallel was made by Godwin. The Imlay letters contained “possibly . . . the finest examples of the language of sentiment and passion ever presented to the world.” He went on, “in the judgement of those best qualified to decide upon the comparison, these Letters will be admitted to have the superiority over the fiction of Goethe. They are the offspring of a glowing imagination, and a heart penetrated with the passion it essays to describe” (LI 6:367). The letters were variously crafted, sometimes dashed off and sometimes carefully composed; sometimes they had a literary ring, as though Wollstonecraft were aware of her place among celebrated and passionate female letter writers such as Ovid’s fictional Heroides or the medieval nun Heloise. She was often pleading and abject; at the same time she displayed a very real self-respect: Imlay was berated as lover and failed reader for misunderstanding her message and value. Frequently she broke off in passion, in frustration at her lover’s obtuseness and her own desire. Her longings vacillated between neediness and dependence on the one hand and longing for freedom and autonomy on the other. Constantly they grappled with the problem of female sexual desire within society and addressed the value, power and seduction of the imagination within human relationships:
Ah! my friend, you know not the ineffable delight, the exquisite pleasure, which arises from a unison of affection and desire, when the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination, that renders every emotion delicate and rapturous. Yes; these are emotions, over which satiety has no power, and the recollection of which, even disappointment cannot disenchant; but they do not exist without self-denial. These emotions, more or less strong, appear to me to be the distinctive characteristic of genius, the foundation of taste, and of that exquisite relish for the beauties of nature, of which the common herd of eaters and drinkers and child-begeters, certainly have no idea. You will smile at an observation that has just occurred to me: – I consider those minds as the most strong and original, whose imagination acts as the stimulus to their senses.
Well! you will ask, what is the result of all this reasoning? Why I cannot help thinking that it is possible for you, having great strength of mind, to return to nature, and regain a sanity of constitution, and purity of feeling – which would open your heart to me. – I would fain rest there!
(Letters, no. 180)
The correspondence with Imlay was returned by him when she requested it; although it must have increased her pain, perhaps when she reread it she realized that letter writing was her forte, her form. In her final years her works use the epistolary structure repeatedly: for example in her most successful unison of political commentary and personal experience, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, as well as in the fragment “Letters on the Management of Infants.” Letters also form the largest part of her unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman.
Wollstonecraft had met William Godwin when she had been in her robust vindicating phase; he had found her strident and unprepossessing. Now in 1796 they met again and he was impressed with her grief-induced mellowness. They rapidly became close friends and within a few months lovers. Occasionally over the period of courtship and commitment she wrote to him the kind of erotic notes she had earlier addressed to Imlay:
Now by these presents let me assure you that you are not only in my heart, but my veins, this morning. I turn from you half abashed – yet you haunt me, and some look, word or touch thrills through my whole frame – yes, at the very moment when I am labouring to think of something, if not somebody, else. Get ye gone Intruder! though I am forced to add dear – which is a call back –
When the heart and reason accord there is no flying from voluptuous sensations, I find, do what a woman can.
(Letters, no. 247)
On other occasions they read too much into each other’s words and ended in emotional tussles. Once Wollstonecraft sent Godwin a fable of a sycamore in which she tried to express her vulnerability and fears about another attachment after the disaster with Imlay; Godwin was obtuse and read the letter as a desire to end the relationship. Or they quarrelled and Godwin would try to remonstrate in a reasoned letter about her extreme irrational spoken words. Mostly, however, they wrote short notes making arrangements, sending over cold dinners, complaining about household duties, or organizing visitors. Both relished a secret life going on below the public meetings, for, until their marriage in March 1797, they kept up a fiction that they were friends but no couple. Always theirs was a literary relationship, whose intimacy was embodied in the communal bottle of ink. Ever impecunious and distracted by domestic details, Wollstonecraft asked Godwin to send her some ink because she had run out. Later he asked for his bottle back and one can imagine it traveling between the two unconventional households as, now married and about to be parents, they fiercely guarded their independence and signified both their togetherness and separation in their habit of writing rather than speaking – though they saw each other daily and were only a few doors apart.
During the last months of Wollstonecraft’s life, two series of letters are revelatory of her newfound strength yet continuing insecurity and vulnerability to melancholy and suicidal moods. The first concerned her anxiety over Godwin’s apparent flirtation with Miss Pinkerton. She remonstrated with him, bringing up the past and reliving her rejections; then she herself wrote the letter of dismissal, leaving Godwin to emend and send it. The other series arose out of Godwin’s visit to the Wedgwoods in Etruria. He had always been self-conscious about his more elaborate letters, for example at the outset of their relationship trying out various forms of love letter, not always to Wollstonecraft’s taste. This time he thought hard about an appropriate style and decided at first on a jocular man-to-man one, varied with more intimate tones, “Take care of yourself, my love. . . .”14 As the visit progressed, however, he hid the social embarrassments he was suffering in Etruria and adopted a detached tone of travel narrative. It did not suit Wollstonecraft, who regarded his letters less as addressed to her and more of an aide memoire for himself. She might cajole her readers, but she rarely forgot them altogether, as she accused Godwin of doing. It was epistolary vanity and self-indulgence she thought.
The letters to Godwin tragically end with the short notes written by Wollstonecraft just hours before the birth which would kill her. Her last recorded writing provides a moving conclusion to her life in its echo of the dying words of her own mother. Mrs. Wollstonecraft had declared, “A little patience, and all will be over!” her daughter’s final written words were, “Mrs Blenkinsop [the midwife] tells me that I am in the most natural state, and can promise me a safe delivery – But that I must have a little patience” (Letters, no. 354).
Wollstonecraft is now mainly delivered as an Enlightenment feminist – as indeed she was. In this role she echoes many of the sentiments of the thinking women of her day both liberal and conservative. The life and opinions delivered in the letters are more revolutionary and distinctive however. The desultory and experiential form suited her style, allowing for her devotion to candor. So in the letters she grapples with the complexities of woman’s lot as she rarely does in the published work: their emotional neediness as well as their desire for independence, their anxiety over motherhood as well as their enthusiasm, and their attraction to the romance they might theoretically despise.
The letters sometimes appear melodramatic and self-indulgent but part of this is the fashion of the times, and they need to be judged beside the extreme self-dramatizing of her sister Eliza for example or indeed of her friend Mary Hays, similarly caught up in unrequited love. Taken together they form a remarkable autobiographical document. Unlike a diary or retrospective, they record not a finished ordered life but the dynamic process of living and experiencing, and inevitably they tell a tale no biography can truly match. They do not reveal the hindsight of commentary, nor do they show the steady progress towards a full articulateness of any vision; instead they reveal flashes of the genius that makes their writer worth recording and reading in the twenty-first century. The novelist Samuel Richardson believed the “converse of the pen” made distance presence and “even presence but body, while absence becomes the soul . . .” At their best, this is the effect of Mary Wollstonecraft’s letters.
1. J. Menzies-Wilson and Helen Lloyd, Amelia: the Tale of a Plain Friend (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), v.
2. Love-Letters of Mary Hays, ed. A. F. Wedd (London: Methuen, 1925), 13–14.
3. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd (Penguin: 2002), no. 193.
4. After Wollstonecraft there are other women writers whose private letters reveal a similar intimate self-dramatizing, self-revealing quality. For example, Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf.
5. My proposed dates differ on many occasions from Ralph Wardle’s in his 1979 edition; for example I have used the dates of Wollstonecraft’s mother’s death and of the births of her brother Edward’s children to reassign several of the letters to Jane Arden.
6. Posthumous Works, 6: 349–446.
7. Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (London, 1831), 3 vols.
8. Notes and Queries 1870 (November 19), 434.
9. See Richard Garnett, ed., Letters about Shelley (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1917).
10. See T. Lovell, Narrative of the Murder of the late Rev. J. Waterhouse (1827).
11. Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London, 1798), 19.
12. Ford K. Brown, The Life of William Godwin, London: Dent, 1926, 134.
13. I have made this family network a major theme of my biography, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000).
14. Note to letter 329.