Henry Fuseli briefly and non-committaly discussed Mary with Godwin, but having given him a tantalizing glimpse of a whole drawer full of her letters, refused to let him see a single one. If he knew of Godwin’s intentions with regards to Mary’s letters to Imlay, this is hardly surprising. But it left the exact nature of their relationship still enigmatic. Years later the Fuseli letters were seen by Godwin’s own biographer, Kegan Paul (see Further Reading), who claimed that they showed intellectual admiration, but not sexual passion. Yet when these letters were eventually sold to the Shelley family (for £50), Sir Percy Shelley carefully destroyed them unpublished, towards the end of the 19th century.
Joseph Johnson was torn between a natural desire to accede to Godwin’s wishes as the grieving widow, and his long-standing professional role of defending Mary’s literary reputation. He may also have entertained the very understandable hope of achieving a publishing coup. He at least warned Godwin of several undiplomatic references to living persons in the biography, especially the aristocratic Kingsborough children to whom Mary had been a governess in Ireland, and the powerful and well-disposed Wedgwood family. He also questioned the wisdom of describing Mary’s many male friendships, in London, Dublin and Paris, so unguardedly. He felt the ambiguous account of Fuseli was particularly ill-judged, and challenged Godwin’s characterization of the painter’s ‘cynical’ attitude towards Mary.
But Godwin would not give way on any of these issues. On 11th January 1798, shortly before publication, he wrote unrepentantly to Johnson, refusing to make any last minute changes. ‘With respect to Mr Fuseli, I am sincerely sorry not to have pleased you…As to his cynical cast, his impatience of contradiction, and his propensity to satire, I have carefully observed them…’ He added that, in his view, Mary had actually ‘copied’ these traits while under Fuseli’s influence in 1792, and this was a significant part of her emotional development. He was committed to describing this, ‘in the sincerity of my judgement’, even though sometimes unfavourable to her.
This idea that Mary Wollstonecraft’s intellectual power grew out of a combination of emotional strengths and weaknesses, was central to Godwin’s notion of modern biography. ‘Her errors were connected and interwoven with the qualities most characteristic of her genius.’ He was not writing a pious family memorial, or a work of feminist hagiography, or a disembodied ideological tract. He felt he could sometimes be critical of Mary’s behaviour, while always remaining passionately committed to her genius. Godwin stuck unswervingly to his belief in the exemplary value of full exposure. The truth about a human being would bring understanding, and then sympathy. ‘I cannot easily prevail on myself to doubt, that the more fully we are presented with the picture and story as such persons as the subject of the following narrative, the more generally shall we feel ourselves attached to their fate, and a sympathy in their excellencies.’ (Preface)
3
It appeared that Godwin could not have been more mistaken. Most readers were appalled by the Memoirs when they were first published at the end of January, 1798. There was no precedence for biography of this kind, and Godwin’s ‘naïve’ candour and plain-speaking about his own wife filled them with horrid fascination.
Mary’s old friend, the radical lawyer and publisher from Liverpool, William Roscoe, privately jotted these sad verses in the margin of his copy.
Hard was thy fate in all the scenes of life As daughter, sister, mother, friend and wife; But harder still, thy fate in death we own, Thus mourn’d by Godwin with a heart of stone.
The Historical Magazine called the Memoirs ‘the most hurtful book’ of 1798. Robert Southey accused Godwin of ‘a want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked’. The European Magazine described the work as ‘the history of a philosophical wanton’, and was sure it would be read ‘with detestation by everyone attached to the interests of religion and morality; and with indignation by any one who might feel any regard for the unhappy woman, whose frailties should have been buried in oblivion.’
The Monthly Magazine, a largely conservative woman’s journal, saw Mary as a kind of female Icarus figure, who had burnt out her talents with pride and ambition. ‘She was a woman of high genius; and, as she felt the whole strength of her powers, she thought herself lifted, in a degree, above the ordinary travels of civil communities…’
The most even-handed was Johnson’s own Analytical Review, which observed that the biography, though remarkable, lacked intellectual depth. It contained ‘no correct history of the formation of Mrs G’s mind. We are neither informed of her favourite books, her hours of study, nor her attainments in languages and philosophy.’ Even more pointedly, it noted that anyone who also read the Letters would ‘stand astonished at the fervour, strength and duration of her affection for Imlay’.
These initial criticisms, some written more in sorrow than in anger, and not necessarily bad publicity (at least for Johnson) were soon followed by more formidable attacks. The Monthly Review, previously a supporter of Wollstonecraft’s work, now in May 1798 wrote with extreme disapproval of Godwin’s revelations: ‘blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands if they were forced to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world. The extreme eccentricity of Mr Godwin’s sentiments will account for this conduct. Virtue and vice are weighed by him in a balance of his own. He neither looks to marriage with respect, nor to suicide with horror.’
The Anti-Jacobin Review delivered a general onslaught on the immorality that everything that Wollstonecraft was supposed to stand for: outrageous sexual behaviour, inappropriate education for young women, disrespect for parental authority, nonpayment of creditors, suicidal emotionalism, repulsive rationalism, consorting with the enemy in time of war, and disbelief in God. It implied that the case was even worse than Godwin made out – ‘the biographer does not mention her many amours’ – and provided a helpful Index to the more offensive subjectmatter of the Memoirs.
Godwin edits the Posthumous Works of his wife – inculcates the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes – reprobates marriage – considers Mary Godwin a model for female imitation – certifies his wife’s constitution to have been amorous – Memoirs of her – account of his wife’s adventures as a kept mistress – celebrates her happiness while the concubine of Imlay – informs the public that she was concubine to himself before she was his wife – her passions inflamed by celibacy – falls in love with a married man [Fuseli] – on the breaking out of the war betakes herself to our enemies – intimate with the French leaders under Robespierre – with Thomas Paine…
James Gillray, quick to sense a public mood, produced one of his most savage cartoons in The Anti-Jacobin for August 1798. Mockingly entitled ‘The New Morality’, it showed a giant Cornucopia of Ignorance vomiting a stream of books into the gutter, which include Paine’s Rights of Man, Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Women, and Godwin’s Memoirs. Godwin looks on in the guise of jackass, standing on his hind-legs and braying from a copy of Political Justice.
The gothic novelist Horace Walpole described Wollstonecraft as ‘a Hyena in petticoats’. The polemicist and antiquarian Richard Polwhele leapt into print with an entire poem against her, entitled ‘The Unsexed Females’, 1798.
See Wollstonecraft, whom no decorum checks,
Arise, the intrepid champion of her sex;
O’er humbled man assert the sovereign claim,
And slight the timid blush of virgin fame…
The Reverend Polwhele goes on piously to enumerate her