Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)
Kandice Sharren, University of Saskatchewan
June 2024
Almost since the moment of her death in September 1797, the political implications of Mary Wollstonecraft’s biography have been a source of public debate. As one of the most prominent radical voices of the 1790s, her publications were already the subject of public scrutiny; when her husband William Godwin published Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the year following her death, that scrutiny intensified. Written with the candour that was a hallmark of Godwin’s radical project, the Memoirs made public the details of her unconventional life, which included extramarital affairs and suicide attempts. Wollstonecraft’s critics leapt on the opportunity to declare her anathema; in The Unsex’d Females, Richard Polwhele figured her as the leader of “A female band, despising NATURE’s law” (6), while the Anti-Jacobin Review accused her of “prostitution” (97). Despite being condemned wholesale by conservative writers, Wollstonecraft’s books and reputation remained a source of fascination for the curious and the unconventional; Eileen Hunt notes her nineteenth-century “impact in Britain on radicals, socialists, and chartists such as William Thompson, Anna Wheeler, Frances Wright, and the Owens” as well as “a steady and increasingly warm reception” in the United States and elsewhere (54). If, to her more conservative contemporaries, Wollstonecraft’s life exemplified the dangers of her radical ideology, that is far from the only interpretation of her life and writings. “Every feminist generation,” notes Barbara Taylor, “reinvents her” (9).
Many of Wollstonecraft’s political concerns responded to her personal experience of domestic violence and her struggle to gain economic independence. Born in London on April 27, 1759, Mary Wollstonecraft was the second of seven children and throughout her life would take responsibility for their wellbeing, especially that of her sisters Everina and Eliza. Her father’s family were prominent Spitalfields silk-weavers. Inherited wealth enabled her father to set up as a gentleman farmer a few years after her birth, first in Essex and, after the first farm failed, in Yorkshire. However, financial mismanagement meant that by the time Wollstonecraft reached adulthood he had spent his entire inheritance, and they had been forced to move several times in search of new opportunities. As the family fortunes declined, Edward Wollstonecraft turned to alcoholism and became physically abusive to his wife and children: in the Memoirs, Godwin describes how Wollstonecraft slept outside of her parents’ bedroom so that she could protect her mother from his outbursts, a passage that publisher Joseph Johnson “altered ... to try and mitigate the effect of the portrait of Edward Wollstonecraft as a wife-beater” (Franklin 3). Despite Wollstonecraft’s protectiveness, her relationship with her mother was also fraught, in large part because of her mother’s preference for Mary’s elder brother Edward (Ned).
During her childhood, Wollstonecraft’s formal education was limited to what she gained from a day-school in Beverley, but she also benefitted from informal connections. Describing Wollstonecraft’s autodidactic adolescence, Caroline Franklin notes, “Bright girls like Wollstonecraft who had to educate themselves often found male mentors” (6), which she did, first John Arden, a public lecturer in popular science who lived in Beverley, Yorkshire, and, once her family moved to Hoxton in 1775, the reclusive Reverend John Clare. These connections also structured her intense friendships with two young women, Arden’s daughter Jane and Fanny Blood, introduced to Wollstonecraft by Clare’s wife. Her deep and sometimes turbulent relationships with Jane Arden and Fanny Blood followed the model of what Todd describes as a “fantasy of sentimental friendship,” like that found in popular fiction in the second half of the eighteenth century (18), but their importance to her intellectual and emotional development is evident in the friendships that the heroines of her two works of fiction form with women.
By the time she was nineteen, her father’s continuing financial troubles meant that she gave up her share of her inheritance and began searching for a form of employment by which she could support herself. However, her early attempts at independence were frustrated by the limited professional opportunities for middle-class women, and she became the paid companion to a wealthy widow, a position she held for four years until called home by her mother’s illness, which resulted in her death in April 1782. Elizabeth Wollstonecraft’s death was followed by a crisis in sister Eliza’s marriage, which resulted in Mary removing Eliza from her husband and infant daughter; the infant died shortly after. In 1784 Mary, Everina, Eliza, and Fanny Blood established a girl’s school at Newington Green, a London suburb with a strong Dissenting community. Although Godwin presented Wollstonecraft as a non-believer, Barbara Taylor and Caroline Franklin among others have argued that her close ties to the Dissenting community in Newington Green played an important role in her intellectual development, even if the school itself was short-lived. The school’s failure in mid-1786 was hastened by Wollstonecraft’s absence; in November 1785 she travelled to Lisbon to support Blood, who had married Hugh Skeys earlier that year, through her pregnancy. Blood’s death in childbirth had a long-lasting effect on Wollstonecraft. A decade later, she lamented, “The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath” (39). Her next position as a governess for the Kingsborough family in Ireland was also short-lived: in under a year, Lady Kingsborough dismissed her, jealous of the affection her daughters had developed for Wollstonecraft.
With the end of Wollstonecraft’s career as an educator came the beginning of a professional literary career. She had published her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, in 1787 while still employed by the Kingsborough family. Drawing on her experience as a founder of the Newington Green school and a governess, Wollstonecraft drew attention to the restrictions placed on educated women without means. The book also marked the beginning of her longstanding relationship with publisher Joseph Johnson, who encouraged her to return to London to work as a writer. Her description of herself as “the first of a new genus” in a letter to Everina captures the novelty of her role as a female staff writer (Letters 139), responsible for penning articles for Johnson’s new monthly journal The Analytical Review and translating new French and German works, including Jacques Necker’s On the Importance of Religious Opinions (1788), Madam de Cambon’s Young Grandison (1790), and Christian Gotthilf Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, for the use of children (1790–93). While historically Johnson’s support of Wollstonecraft has been seen as an instance of his characteristic generosity, E.J. Clery has sought to “reconstruct their asymmetric economic positions” and thereby highlight Wollstonecraft’s precarity as an indebted worker (32). Her early years working for Johnson continued to be marked by persistent financial problems, but they also enabled her to encounter many of the literary and artistic luminaries who attended the weekly dinners Johnson hosted, where he created “a place where writers of contrasting politics and personalities could come together” (Hays 5). These years were also remarkably productive; in addition to reviews and translations, she published Mary, A Fiction (1788), which fictionalized her friendship with Fanny Blood; Original Stories from Real Life (1788), a collection of tales for young readers, especially notable for adding illustrations by William Blake to the second edition; The Female Reader (1789), an anthology purporting to be edited by an elocutionist; Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), a direct attack on Conservative MP Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France; and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), her most enduring work.
In December 1792, Wollstonecraft travelled to Paris to witness first-hand the progress of the French Revolution—and to escape a personal crisis that the married painter Henry Fuseli was at the heart of, which she described in a letter to William Roscoe as a “struggle with rational desire” (Letters 206). Historically interpreted as a one-sided passion that Fuseli rejected, Lyndall Gordon and E.J. Clery have questioned the reliability of Fuseli’s account, with Clery proposing that Fuseli’s treatment of Wollstonecraft may have been more akin “to the sexual intimidation routinely faced by working-class girls and women” (36). What was intended to be a six-week trip to report on the state of France turned into a residence of nearly a year and a half, during which she moved in progressive expatriate circles with fellow writers such as Thomas Paine and Helen Maria Williams. She also met Gilbert Imlay, an American businessman, who became her lover and the father of her first child. Wollstonecraft’s arrival in Paris had followed the September Massacres, in which approximately 1400 prisoners were killed by troops, guardsmen, and civilians. By February 1793, England and France were at war and in May of the same year the moderate Girondin party fell; these events combined to make Paris hostile to foreigners—especially British expatriates—and Wollstonecraft moved to a town outside Paris, where she began writing a history of the French Revolution between visits from Imlay. The onset of the Terror in September 1793 resulted in French persecution of British residents. To save Wollstonecraft from imprisonment Imlay registered her as his wife, although they remained unmarried; she returned to live with him in Paris, but he left shortly after to pursue a new speculative venture. In early 1794 she joined him in Le Havre, where her first daughter Frances, named for the still-mourned Fanny Blood, was born in May, less than a month after Wollstonecraft had finished writing her first book since Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Published in 1794, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution grappled with the fallout by “minutely analyz[ing] the Revolution in order to discover how it went wrong and what lessons could be learned from it” (Furniss 68).
In April 1795, Wollstonecraft followed Imlay to London, where he tried to end their relationship. After arranging for her daughter’s care, she drafted a suicide note and may have attempted to overdose on laudanum but was prevented by Imlay either “before or after the attempt” (Todd 287). In June, seeking to distract Wollstonecraft from her distress, Imlay commissioned her to travel to Scandinavia in search of a missing ship carrying French silver, which he suspected had been stolen by his agent, Peder Ellefsden. With her thirteen-month-old daughter and a Parisian nurse, Marguerite, Wollstonecraft boarded a ship in Hull. After eleven days at sea, they landed in rural Sweden and traveled by land to Gothenburg, then north to Halden, where she left Marguerite and Fanny. Wollstonecraft continued into Norway, where she spent weeks, primarily in Tønsberg, but with trips to Risør and Christiana (present-day Oslo). After reuniting with Marguerite and Fanny in Sweden, she traveled with them south to Denmark and then the German province of Hamburg, where she received a letter from Imlay making clear that although he would accept financial responsibility for her and Fanny, their relationship was over. On her return to London, she found him living with another woman and she attempted suicide by jumping into the Thames from Putney Bridge. This time, her resolution was frustrated by fishermen, who pulled her out of the river and brought her to an inn to be revived. Afterwards, she rejected further aid from Imlay, found new lodgings, and requested he return her letters, which formed the basis of a new literary project.
Despite the deep depression occasioned by the drawn-out end of her relationship, Imlay’s commission had provided rich material. Her missives to him during her travels were repurposed for Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), Wollstonecraft’s most widely respected work during her lifetime. Combining acute social and political observations with intimate, emotional depictions of both erotic and maternal love, the narrator of Letters “comes to embody what Stan van Hooft calls an ‘ethic of caring’, a philanthropic commitment to the well- being of others that stems from sentiment but can be reconciled with the principles of justice” (Kirkley 158). Its publication also prompted William Godwin to revise his opinion of her. When they first met in Joseph Johnson’s dining room in 1791, Godwin had been unimpressed, but Wollstonecraft’s Letters invited him to reconsider. He later remarked, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book” (129). By the spring of 1797 Wollstonecraft was pregnant, and she and Godwin married on March 29. In the months following, she began work on her second novel, which she would not live to see completed.
On August 30, she gave birth to her second daughter—the future Mary Shelley—but died less than two weeks later of an infection. Following her death, the grieving Godwin assembled her manuscript materials, including the unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman, or, Maria, for publication as Posthumous Works of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman alongside his Memoirs of Wollstonecraft. The first two volumes included the unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman; or, Maria and ten short “Lessons,” described as “The first book of a series which I intended to have written for my unfortunate girl.” Godwin’s enthusiasm for the Scandinavian Letters was reflected in his choice to include Wollstonecraft’s correspondence with Imlay in the third and fourth volume, which he edited to avoid overlap with the earlier book. The fourth volume continues the letters to Imlay, as well as collecting her correspondence with Johnson, essays, and other unpublished fragments. While the initial response to the Memoirs and Posthumous Works was negative, reflecting Britain’s increasingly reactionary political climate, Godwin’s impulse to present Wollstonecraft for posterity has proven well-founded.
Works Cited
Clery, E.J. “Revising the Professional Woman Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Precarious Income.” Huntington Library Quarterly, Volume 84, Number 1, Spring 2021, pp. 27–38.
Franklin, Caroline. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Literary Life. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Furniss, Tim. “Mary Wollstonecraft’s French Revolution.” The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Claudia L. Johnson, Cambridge UP, 2004, pp. 59–81.
John Gifford, ed. “Review of Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, or, Monthly Political, and Literary Censor vol. 1, no. 1, 1798, pp. 94–102.
Godwin, William. Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman. London: Joseph Johnson, 1798.
Gordon, Lyndall. Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft. Virago, 2006.
Hays, Daisy. Dinner with Joseph Johnson: Books and Friendship in a Revolutionary Age. Chatto and Windus, 2022.
Hunt, Eileen. “Nineteenth-Century Critical Reception.” Mary Wollstonecraft in Context, edited by Nancy E. Johnson and Paul Keen, Cambridge UP, 2020, pp. 50–56.
Kirkley, Laura. Mary Wollstonecraft, Cosmopolitan. Edinburgh UP, 2022.
Polwhele, Richard. The Unsex’d Females: a poem, addressed to the author of The Pursuits of Literature. London: Cadell and Davies, 1798.
Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge UP, 2003.
Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. Columbia UP, 2000.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Edited by Janet Todd. Allen Lane, 2003.
Wollstonecraft, Mary. Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Edited by Tone Brekke and Jon Mee. Oxford UP, 2009.
Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1900)
GODWIN, Mrs. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759–1797), miscellaneous writer, born 27 April 1759, was granddaughter of a rich Spitalfields manufacturer of Irish extraction. Her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, spent the fortune which he had inherited, tried farming, took to drinking, bullied his wife, and rambled to various places, sinking lower at each move. By his wife, Elizabeth Dixon, an Irishwoman (d. 1780), he had six children. Edward, the eldest, was an attorney in the city of London. There were three daughters, Mary, Everina, and Eliza; and two other sons. Mary and Eliza had much talent, though little education. Mary in 1778 became companion to a Mrs. Dawson. In 1780 her mother died, and the sisters, finding their father's house intolerable, resolved to become teachers. Mary went to live with a friend, Fanny Blood, whose father was as great a scamp as Wollstonecraft, and who helped to support her family by painting. Her mother, Mrs. Blood, took in needlework, in which Mary Wollstonecraft helped her. Everina Wollstonecraft kept house for her brother Edward; and Eliza, although still very young, accepted a Mr. Bishop, in order to escape misery at home. Bishop's brutality made her wretched. Her life is described in her sister's ‘Wrongs of Women.’ Mrs. Bishop went into hiding till a legal separation was arranged, when about 1783 she set up a school at Newington Green with Mary Wollstonecraft. It lingered for two years. During this period she acquired some friends, and was kindly received, shortly before his death, by Dr. Johnson. Fanny Blood, who lived with the sisters for a time, married Hugh Skeys, a merchant, and settled in Lisbon. She died in childbed soon afterwards (29 Nov. 1785). Mary went out to nurse her, but arrived too late. After her return she wrote a pamphlet called ‘Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,’ for which Johnson, the publisher in St. Paul's Churchyard, gave her 10l. 10s. She then became governess (October 1787) in the family of Lord Kingsborough, afterwards Earl of Kingston. She thought him a coarse squire and his wife a mere fine lady. Lady Kingsborough was jealous of the children's affection for their governess, and dismissed her after a year. She then settled in London, showed a story called ‘Mary’ to Johnson, and was employed by him as reader and in translating from the French. She worked for five years, liberally helped her sisters and brothers, sending Everina to France, and saw some literary society. Here, in November 1791, she met William Godwin [q. v.] for the first time, when he disliked her because her fluent talk silenced the taciturn Thomas Paine, who was of the company. She published her ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women’ in 1792. It had some success, was translated into French, and scandalised her sisters. She proposed to visit France in company with Johnson and Mr. and Mrs. Fuseli. Knowles (in his ‘Life of Fuseli’) says that Mary Wollstonecraft had fallen in love with Fuseli, who was already married; that she got rid of her previously slovenly habits of dress in order to please him, and that she proposed to stay in his house in order to be near him. Mrs. Fuseli hereupon, he adds, forbade her the house, and she went to Paris to break off the attachment. Mr. Paul (Mary Wollstonecraft, p. xxxi) denies the story, chiefly on the ground that she remained a ‘close friend’ of Mrs. Fuseli. Knowles quotes some phrases from her letters to Fuseli, which are certainly significant, but he does not give them in full. She went to Paris alone in December 1792. Here she met Gilbert Imlay, who had been a captain in the American army during the war of independence, had written letters descriptive of the north-west territory (published in 1792, 2nd edit. 1797), and was now engaged in commercial speculations. She agreed to live with him as his wife—a legal marriage for an Englishwoman being probably difficult at the time, and not a matter of importance according to her views (Letters to Imlay, p. xxxix). She joined him at Havre at the end of 1793, and on 14 May 1794 gave birth to a child, called Fanny. She published an ‘Historical View of the French Revolution’ soon afterwards. Imlay's speculations separated him from her for long periods, and her letters soon show doubts of his affection and suspicions of his fidelity. She followed him to England in 1795, and in June sailed to Norway to make arrangements for some of his commercial speculations. Passages of her letters to him, descriptive of the country, were published in 1796. Returning to England in the autumn she found that he desired a separation, and was carrying on an intrigue with another woman. She tried to drown herself by leaping from Putney Bridge, but was taken out insensible by a passing boat. According to Godwin, she still listened to some proposals from Imlay, and was even willing to return to him upon degrading terms. She finally broke with him in March 1796. She refused to take money from him, but accepted a bond for the benefit of her daughter. Neither principal nor interest was ever paid. She returned to writing, resumed her friendship with Johnson, and went into literary society. She soon became intimate with Godwin, who had been favourably impressed by the ‘Letters from Sweden.’ Though both of them disapproved of marriage, they formed a connection about September 1796. The expectation of a child made a legal union desirable; and they were married 29 March 1797 [see Godwin, William]. Their relation, in spite of some trifling disagreements due to Godwin's peculiarities, was happy. The birth of her child Mary was fatal to her, and she died 10 Sept. 1797. She was buried at Old St. Pancras churchyard, and her remains were moved in 1851 to Bournemouth. She is described as Marguerite in her husband's ‘St. Leon.’
Mrs. Godwin was an impulsive and enthusiastic woman, with great charms of person and manner. A portrait, painted by Opie during her marriage and engraved by Heath in 1798, was in the possession of the late Sir Percy Shelley. Another, also by Opie, was engraved by Ridley for the ‘Monthly Mirror’ in 1796, and is now in the possession of Mr. William Russell. Engravings of both are in Mr. Paul's ‘Mary Wollstonecraft.’ Her books show some genuine eloquence, though occasionally injured by the stilted sentimentalism of the time. The letters are pathetic from the melancholy story which they reveal. Her faults were such as might be expected from a follower of Rousseau, and were consistent with much unselfishness and nobility of sentiment, though one could wish that her love-affairs had been more delicate.
Her works are: 1. ‘Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,’ 1787. 2. ‘Original Stories from Real Life, with considerations calculated to regulate the affections,’ 1788, 1791, and edition illustrated by Blake, 1796. 3. ‘Vindication of the Rights of Men,’ a letter to Edmund Burke, 1790. 4. ‘Vindication of the Rights of Women,’ 1792, vol. i. (all published). 5. ‘Historical and Moral View of … the French Revolution,’ vol. i. 1794 (all published). 6. ‘Letters written in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark,’ 1796. 7. ‘Posthumous Works,’ 1798 (vols. i. and ii. ‘The Wrongs of Women, or Maria’ (fragment of a novel); iii. and iv. ‘Letters and Miscellaneous Pieces’). 8. ‘Letters to Imlay,’ with prefatory memoir by C. K. Paul, 1879. She also translated Salzmann's ‘Moralisches Elementarbuch’ (‘Elements of Morality’) in 1790, illustrated by Blake, who adapted fortynine out of the fifty-one German illustrations (Notes and Queries, 6th ser. i. 493).
[Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Women, by William Godwin, 1798; A Defence of the Character and Conduct of the late Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin … in a series of letters to a lady (author unknown), 1803; William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, by C. Kegan Paul, 1876, i. 163–291; Mary Wollstonecraft, with prefatory memoir by C. Kegan Paul, 1879; Knowles's Life of Fuseli, i. 159–69.]
L. S.
Encyclopædia Britannica 11th edition (1911)
GODWIN, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1759–1797), English miscellaneous writer, was born at Hoxton, on the 27th of April 1759. Her family was of Irish extraction, and Mary’s grandfather, who was a respectable manufacturer in Spitalfields, realized the property which his son squandered. Her mother, Elizabeth Dixon, was Irish, and of good family. Her father, Edward John Wollstonecraft, after dissipating the greater part of his patrimony, tried to earn a living by farming, which only plunged him into deeper difficulties, and he led a wandering, shifty life. The family roamed from Hoxton to Edmonton, to Essex, to Beverley in Yorkshire, to Laugharne, Pembrokeshire, and back to London again.
After Mrs Wollstonecraft’s death in 1780, soon followed by her husband’s second marriage, the three daughters, Mary, Everina and Eliza, sought to earn their own livelihood. The sisters were all clever women—Mary and Eliza far above the average—but their opportunities of culture had been few. Mary, the eldest, went in the first instance to live with her friend Fanny Blood, a girl of her own age, whose father, like Wollstonecraft, was addicted to drink and dissipation. As long as she lived with the Bloods, Mary helped Mrs Blood to earn money by taking in needlework, while Fanny painted in water-colours. Everina went to live with her brother Edward, and Eliza made a hasty and, as it proved, unhappy marriage with a Mr Bishop. A legal separation was afterwards obtained, and the sisters, together with Fanny Blood, took a house, first at Islington, afterwards at Newington Green, and opened a school, which was carried on with indifferent success for nearly two years. During their residence at Newington Green, Mary was introduced to Dr Johnson, who, as Godwin tells us, “treated her with particular kindness and attention.”
In 1785 Fanny Blood married Hugh Skeys, a merchant, and went with him to Lisbon, where she died in childbed after sending for Mary to nurse her. “The loss of Fanny,” as she said in a letter to Mrs Skeys’s brother, George Blood, “was sufficient of itself to have cast a cloud over my brightest days. . . . I have lost all relish for pleasure, and life seems a burden almost too heavy to be endured.” Her first novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788), was intended to commemorate her friendship with Fanny. After closing the school at Newington Green, Mary became governess in the family of Lord Kingsborough, in Ireland. Her pupils were much attached to her, especially Margaret King, afterwards Lady Mountcashel; and indeed, Lady Kingsborough gave the reason for dismissing her after one year’s service that the children loved their governess better than their mother. Mary now resolved to devote herself to literary work, and she was encouraged by Johnson, the publisher in St Paul’s churchyard, for whom she acted as literary adviser. She also undertook translations, chiefly from the French. The Elements of Morality (1790) from the German of Salzmann, illustrated by Blake, an old-fashioned book for children, and Lavater’s Physiognomy were among her translations. Her Original Stories from Real Life were published in 1791, and, with illustrations by Blake, in 1796. In 1792 appeared A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the work with which her name is always associated.
It is not among the least oddities of this book that it is dedicated to M. Talleyrand Périgord, late bishop of Autun. Mary Wollstonecraft still believed him to be sincere, and working in the same direction as herself. In the dedication she states the “main argument” of the work, “built on this simple principle that, if woman be not prepared by education to become the companion of man, she will stop the progress of knowledge, for truth must be common to all, or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence or general practice.” In carrying out this argument she used great plainness of speech, and it was this that caused all, or nearly all, the outcry. For she did not attack the institution of marriage, nor assail orthodox religion; her book was really a plea for equality of education, passing into one for state education and for the joint education of the sexes. It was a protest against the assumption that woman was only the plaything of man, and she asserted that intellectual companionship was the chief, as it is the lasting, happiness of marriage. She thus directly opposed the teaching of Rousseau, of whom she was in other respects an ardent disciple.
Mrs Wollstonecraft, as she now styled herself, desired to watch the progress of the Revolution in France, and went to Paris in 1792. Godwin, in his memoir of his wife, considers that the change of residence may have been prompted by the discovery that she was becoming attached to Henry Fuseli, but there is little to confirm this surmise; indeed, it was first proposed that she should go to Paris in company with him and his wife, nor was there any subsequent breach in their friendship. She remained in Paris during the Reign of Terror, when communication with England was difficult or almost impossible. Some time in the spring or summer of 1793 Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American, became acquainted with Mary—an acquaintance which ended in a more intimate connexion. There was no legal ceremony of marriage, and it is doubtful whether such a marriage would have been valid at the time; but she passed as Imlay’s wife, and Imlay himself terms her in a legal document, “Mary Imlay, my best friend and wife.” In August 1793 Imlay was called to Havre on business, and was absent for some months, during which time most of the letters published after her death by Godwin were written. Towards the end of the year she joined Imlay at Havre, and there in the spring of 1794 she gave birth to a girl, who received the name of Fanny, in memory of the dear friend of her youth. In this year she published the first volume of a never completed Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. Imlay became involved in a multitude of speculations, and his affection for Mary and their child was already waning. He left Mary for some months at Havre. In June 1795, after joining him in England, Mary left for Norway on business for Imlay. Her letters from Norway, divested of all personal details, were afterwards published. She returned to England late in 1795, and found letters awaiting her from Imlay, intimating his intention to separate from her, and offering to settle an annuity on her and her child. For herself she rejected this offer with scorn: “From you,” she wrote, “I will not receive anything more. I am not sufficiently humbled to depend on your beneficence.” They met again, and for a short time lived together, until the discovery that he was carrying on an intrigue under her own roof drove her to despair, and she attempted to drown herself by leaping from Putney bridge, but was rescued by watermen. Imlay now completely deserted her, although she continued to bear his name.
In 1796, when Mary Wollstonecraft was living in London, supporting herself and her child by working, as before, for Mr Johnson, she met William Godwin. A friendship sprang up between them,—a friendship, as he himself says, which “melted into love.” Godwin states that “ideas which he is now willing to denominate prejudices made him by no means willing to conform to the ceremony of marriage”; but these prejudices were overcome, and they were married at St Pancras church on the 29th of March 1797. And now Mary had a season of real calm in her stormy existence. Godwin, for once only in his life, was stirred by passion, and his admiration for his wife equalled his affection. But their happiness was of short duration. The birth of her daughter Mary, afterwards the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the 30th of August 1797, proved fatal, and Mrs Godwin died on the 10th of September following. She was buried in the churchyard of Old St Pancras, but her remains were afterwards removed by Sir Percy Shelley to the churchyard of St Peter’s, Bournemouth.
Her principal published works are as follows:—Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, . . . (1787); The Female Reader (selections) (1789); Original Stories from Real Life (1791); An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, and the effects it has produced in Europe, vol. i. (no more published) (1790); Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792); Vindication of the Rights of Man (1793); Mary, a Fiction (1788); Letters written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark (1796); Posthumous Works (4 vols., 1798). It is impossible to trace the many articles contributed by her to periodical literature.
A memoir of her life was published by Godwin in 1798. A large portion of C. Kegan Paul’s work, William Godwin, his Friends and Contemporaries, was devoted to her, and an edition of the Letters to Imlay (1879), of which the first edition was published by Godwin, is prefaced by a somewhat fuller memoir. See also E. Dowden, The French Revolution and English Literature (1897) pp. 82 et seq.; E. R. Pennell, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (1885), in the Eminent Women Series; E. R. Clough, A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman (1898); an edition of her Original Stories (1906), with William Blake’s illustrations and an introduction by E. V. Lucas; and the Love Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Gilbert Imlay (1908), with an introduction by Roger Ingpen.