Tomalin - The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

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First published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1974

Published in Pelican Books (without illustrations) 1977

Reprinted in Penguin Books 1985

Reprinted with revisions, illustrations and revised notes and bibliography 1992

Copyright Claire Tomalin, 1974, 1992

Front cover: Portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by J. Opie, reproduced by courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery. Figures: London Musee Carnavalet/ Leemage/ Lebrecht Music & Arts

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-14-191226-4

F OR N ICK

W IT in women is apt to have bad consequences; like a sword without a scabbard, it wounds the wearer and provokes assailants. I am sorry to say the generality of women who have excelled in wit have failed in chastity.

Elizabeth Montagu, 1750

The more I see of radical women, the less I desire to increase their number. I went to a Radical dinner party last week, and the bold, unfeeling faces of some of the ladies, and their reckless talk, quite shocked me.

Emily Davies, founder of Girton, writing to Barbara Bodichon in 1867

Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century the distinguished woman had almost invariably been an aristocrat. It was the great lady who ruled and wrote letters and influenced the course of politics. From the huge middle class few women rose to eminence, nor has the drabness of their lot received the attention which had been bestowed upon the splendours of the great and the miseries of the poor. There they remain, even in the early part of the nineteenth century, a vast body, living, marrying, bearing children in dull obscurity, until at last we begin to wonder whether there was something in their condition itself in the age at which they married, the number of children they bore, the privacy they lacked, the incomes they had not, the conventions which stifled them, and the education they never received which so affected them that, though the middle class is the great reservoir from which we draw our distinguished men, it has thrown up singularly few women to set beside them.

Virginia Woolf, 1927

Free thought has always been the perquisite of the aristocracy. So has the intellectual development of women.

Bertrand Russell writing to Gilbert Murray, 1943

I SHOULD like to acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the London Library; the GLC archivists; the Public Record Office, London; the Dr Williams Library; the Library of the Society of Friends in London; the Guildhall Library; University College Library, London; Stoke Newington Library; the Wellcome Medical Library; the British Museum; the Bodleian; the Archives de France; the department of archives, Ville du Havre; the Kunsthaus, Zrich; the Liverpool City Libraries and the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; the Mitchell Library, Sydney, Australia; and the county archivist of the East Riding of Yorkshire.

I am indebted to Lord Abinger for allowing me to examine microfilms of the manuscripts in his possession.

I should like to express my gratitude to Captain Douglas King-Harman for friendly assistance in looking through his family papers for me.

Bernard Mason kindly allowed me to quote from his late brother Eudo Mason's The Mind of Henry Fuseli; and the Carl Pforzheimer Library and Oxford University Press permitted quotations from Shelley and his Circle, edited by K. N. Cameron.

I am grateful to Thomas Pakenham for drawing my attention to a reference to Mary's relationship with the Kingsboroughs in the manuscript letters of Bishop Percy of Dromore, and to Professor Gert Schiff for assuring me that there is no drawing of Mary by Fuseli in existence.

I should like to acknowledge assistance and encouragement from Edward Thompson, Professor Eric Hobsbawm, Professor D. V. Glass and Professor Richard Cobb in directing my attention to various sources of information I should otherwise have missed.

The medical aspect of Mary's death was most kindly illuminated for me by David Morris, MD , FRCS , MRCOG .