Todd Janet - Mary Wollstonecraft A Revolutionary Life

A Revolutionary Life

Revised 2014 edition

Janet Todd

For Elizabeth

Since I worked on this biography in the 1990s I have edited The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (Columbia University Press, 2003); I have however left the notes and references in their original form in this work. Subsequently a further letter has come to light: to Count Bernsdorf in 1795. This was discovered by a Norwegian historian Gunnar Molden and it makes clear Wollstonecrafts close involvement in Imlays commercial dealings. A full account of this important document is given in The treasure seeker by Lyndall Gordon and Gunnar Molden, in The Guardian, 8 January 2005. I have made a few revisions in my biography to incorporate this important letter and its implications. In addition I erroneously assumed that Wollstonecrafts brother Ned was a special beneficiary of his grandfathers will; this is not the case and I have corrected this now. Otherwise I have largely left the biography as it was written fifteen years ago.

Cambridge 2013

In 1796 Amelia Alderson met the famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. She had been disappointed by most things in life but You & the Lakes of Cumberland have exceeded my expectations, she wrote. I am not born to tread in the beaten track, said her new friend.

Virginia Woolf called Wollstonecrafts life an experiment; in 1885 the Athenaeum breathlessly termed it one of the most thrilling romances. It was also a scandal: she loved a woman and at least three men, bore an illegitimate child during the French Revolution and was vilified by the nation as a whore and an unsexd Female. Yet, despite being sexual and passionate, she was profoundly, often irritatingly, moral and puritanical. Her dilemmas remain unresolved: how to reconcile the individual and the community? How to adjust motherhood to intellectual life and sexual desire? Is the price a woman pays for indulged sex too high?

For most writers, their writings matter most; this is so with her contemporary, Jane Austen. But Wollstonecraft insists we attend to her life. In her first book, she declared, the chosen few wish to speak for themselves; in the last work published in her lifetime, she confessed, I found I could not avoid being continually the first person the little hero of each tale. Her voice is most insistent in her letters, which she wrote as child, daughter, companion, friend, teacher, governess, sister, literary hack, author, lover and wife. She talks and thinks on paper, using it as therapy, occasionally for self-mastery. She writes on the move, in boats, in remote Swedish inns, in freezing revolutionary Paris, before plunging suicidally into the Thames, and after her rescue. She dedicates herself to expressing her Self.

In Wollstonecrafts writings a new female consciousness comes into being, one that valued and reflected endlessly on its own workings, refusing to acknowledge anything absurd in the stance. No one living before her moment in the late eighteenth century, either man or woman, so clearly conveys this consciousness, one so sure of its significance, individuality and authenticity, its self-absorbed right and need to display itself for the attention of others. The huge sense of the I in Mary Wollstonecrafts work is often infuriating but it is undeniably modern.

There are many books on Wollstonecrafts thought alone; I have not tried to duplicate them because I see her ideas as inextricably linked to her experience. She is at her best and most original when her writing interacts with her life. The loves of Mary Wollstonecraft have often been written. Here I stress also her tortured relations with her family, especially her two sisters, whom she mothered and smothered. All are part of a network of dependence, a family which circulated its pounds and grumbled about the necessity. Because they shared her volatile, depressive and self-dramatising temperament and were caught up in her tumultuous life, the sisters letters reveal what Mary might have been without her special zest, and how she might have lived had she not made much of herself and taken the momentous step of becoming the first of a new genus, a professional woman writer.

The absence or presence of letters has dictated what periods have been emphasised in the story. The girlhood relationship with Fanny Blood was intense and long-lasting, but no letters survive between the pair and the tie is shadowy. The letters she wrote to the Swiss artist Fuseli existed into the late nineteenth century when they were handed over to the Shelley family and disappeared. So this relationship too remains unclear. Her main lover, Gilbert Imlay, can be seen only through Wollstonecrafts demanding (and edited) letters, while William Godwin, her first biographer, husband, and the publisher of her posthumous works, exists both in his own and in her words. Since this final one is the only relationship so thoroughly documented, it looms large in the story, but it lasted for just sixteen months of Wollstonecrafts thirty-eight year life. The extant letters have survived with the approval of their owners: Godwin let the public have only those which he thought worthy, and her last living sister, Everina, censored and probably destroyed what was too revealing.

The posthumous life of Mary Wollstonecraft changes with fashion. In different decades different aspects seem important. I have depended a good deal on excellent past biographies, beginning with Godwins Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, written in 1798, the year following his wifes death. Grieving and expecting others to grieve with him, he mistakenly thought the nation would welcome a candid view of the woman he had surprisingly come to love. In the late nineteenth century, after decades of abuse, partly arising from Godwins unusual frankness, Charles Kegan Paul in 1878 and Elizabeth Robins Pennell in 1885 used their biographies largely for vindication.

With the twentieth century it was possible to describe Wollstonecraft without too obvious an agenda. Ralph Wardles ground-breaking biography in 1951 provided the first full account of the life, writings and context. In 1979 Wardle also published an edition of the letters; I have made full use of this and of the few extra letters discovered in the Pforzheimer Collection, New York.

When Wardle wrote his book Mary Wollstonecraft was largely unknown. By the 1970s, however, she was being celebrated as the mother of feminism. In this decade several biographies appeared, all adding something to her picture: Margaret George (1970), Edna Nixon (1971), Eleanor Flexner (1972), Claire Tomalin (1974), Emily W. Sunstein (1975), and Margaret Tims (1976). All were eager to show the formation of the feminist and the genesis of the public works, especially, of course, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, now coming into prominence through early feminist criticism. Adding to these, William St Clair treated Wollstonecraft within a quadruple biography of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1989).

I am indebted to all these past biographies and to the biographical and critical work of Kenneth Neill Cameron, Mary Favret, Moira Ferguson, Bridget Hill, Richard Holmes, Mary Jacobus, Vivien Jones, Elaine Jordan, Harriet Devine Jump, Gary Kelly, Roger Lonsdale, Jane Moore, Mitzi Myers, Jane Rendall, Virginia Sapiro, Ashley Tauchert, Barbara Taylor and Eleanor Ty, among others. I have a personal debt for help and advice to Bruce Barker Benfield, Antje Blank, Katherine Bright-Holmes, Marilyn Butler, Robert Clark, Jon Cook, John Davies, Elizabeth Denlinger, Derek Hughes, Ruth Inglis, Tim OHagan, Rosie Palumbo, James Raven, Tom Lloyd, Miranda Seymour, William St Clair, Elizabeth Spearing, Emily Sunstein, Sylvana Tomaselli, Claire Tomalin, Gina Luria Walker, and John Windle.