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Title: Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Author: William Godwin

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Most recently updated: December 11, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEMOIRS OF
THE AUTHOR OF A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN ***

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.

MEMOIRS
of the
AUTHOR
of a
VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS

OF WOMAN.

By WILLIAM GODWIN.

LONDON:
printed for j. johnson, no. 72, st. paul's
church.yard; and g.g. and j. robinson,
paternoster-row.
1798.

CHAP. I
CHAP. II
CHAP. III.
CHAP. IV.
CHAP. V.
CHAP. VI.
CHAP. VII.
CHAP. VIII.
CHAP. IX.
CHAP. X.

MEMOIRS.

CHAP. I.
1759-1775.

It has always appeared to me, that to give to the public some account of the
life of a person of eminent merit deceased, is a duty incumbent on
survivors. It seldom happens that such a person passes through life, without
being the subject of thoughtless calumny, or malignant misrepresentation. It
cannot happen that the public at large should be on a footing with their
intimate acquaintance, and be the observer of those virtues which discover
themselves principally in personal intercourse. Every benefactor of
mankind is more or less influenced by a liberal passion for fame; and
survivors only pay a debt due to these benefactors, when they assert and
establish on their part, the honour they loved. The justice which is thus done
to the illustrious dead, converts into the fairest source of animation and
encouragement to those who would follow them in the same carreer. The
human species at large is interested in this justice, as it teaches them to
place their respect and affection, upon those qualities which best deserve to
be esteemed and loved. I cannot easily prevail on myself to doubt, that the
more fully we are presented with the picture and story of such persons as
the subject of the following narrative, the more generally shall we feel in
ourselves an attachment to their fate, and a sympathy in their excellencies.
There are not many individuals with whose character the public welfare and
improvement are more intimately connected, than the author of A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
The facts detailed in the following pages, are principally taken from the
mouth of the person to whom they relate; and of the veracity and
ingenuousness of her habits, perhaps no one that was ever acquainted with
her, entertains a doubt. The writer of this narrative, when he has met with
persons, that in any degree created to themselves an interest and attachment
in his mind, has always felt a curiosity to be acquainted with the scenes
through which they had passed, and the incidents that had contributed to
form their understandings and character. Impelled by this sentiment, he
repeatedly led the conversation of Mary to topics of this sort; and, once or

twice, he made notes in her presence, of a few dates calculated to arrange
the circumstances in his mind. To the materials thus collected, he has added
an industrious enquiry among the persons most intimately acquainted with
her at the different periods of her life.

Mary Wollstonecraft was born on the 27th of April 1759. Her father's name
was Edward John, and the name of her mother Elizabeth, of the family of
Dixons of Ballyshannon in the kingdom of Ireland: her paternal grandfather
was a respectable manufacturer in Spitalfields, and is supposed to have left
to his son a property of about 10,000l. Three of her brothers and two sisters
are still living; their names, Edward, James, Charles, Eliza, and Everina. Of
these, Edward only was older than herself; he resides in London. James is in
Paris, and Charles in or near Philadelphia in America. Her sisters have for
some years been engaged in the office of governesses in private families,
and are both at present in Ireland.
I am doubtful whether the father of Mary was bred to any profession; but,
about the time of her birth, he resorted, rather perhaps as an amusement
than a business, to the occupation of farming. He was of a very active, and
somewhat versatile disposition, and so frequently changed his abode, as to
throw some ambiguity upon the place of her birth. She told me, that the
doubt in her mind in that respect, lay between London, and a farm upon
Epping Forest, which was the principal scene of the five first years of her
life.
Mary was distinguished in early youth, by some portion of that exquisite
sensibility, soundness of understanding, and decision of character, which
were the leading features of her mind through the whole course of her life.
She experienced in the first period of her existence, but few of those
indulgences and marks of affection, which are principally calculated to
sooth the subjection and sorrows of our early years. She was not the
favourite either of her father or mother. Her father was a man of a quick,
impetuous disposition, subject to alternate fits of kindness and cruelty. In
his family he was a despot, and his wife appears to have been the first, and
most submissive of his subjects. The mother's partiality was fixed upon the

eldest son, and her system of government relative to Mary, was
characterized by considerable rigour. She, at length, became convinced of
her mistake, and adopted a different plan with her younger daughters.
When, in the Wrongs of Woman, Mary speaks of "the petty cares which
obscured the morning of her heroine's life; continual restraint in the most
trivial matters; unconditional submission to orders, which, as a mere child,
she soon discovered to be unreasonable, because inconsistent and
contradictory; and the being often obliged to sit, in the presence of her
parents, for three or four hours together, without daring to utter a word;" she
is, I believe, to be considered as copying the outline of the first period of
her own existence.
But it was in vain, that the blighting winds of unkindness or indifference,
seemed destined to counteract the superiority of Mary's mind. It surmounted
every obstacle; and, by degrees, from a person little considered in the
family, she became in some sort its director and umpire. The despotism of
her education cost her many a heart-ache. She was not formed to be the
contented and unresisting subject of a despot; but I have heard her remark
more than once, that, when she felt she had done wrong, the reproof or
chastisement of her mother, instead of being a terror to her, she found to be
the only thing capable of reconciling her to herself. The blows of her father
on the contrary, which were the mere ebullitions of a passionate temper,
instead of humbling her, roused her indignation. Upon such occasions she
felt her superiority, and was apt to betray marks of contempt. The quickness
of her father's temper, led him sometimes to threaten similar violence
towards his wife. When that was the case, Mary would often throw herself
between the despot and his victim, with the purpose to receive upon her
own person the blows that might be directed against her mother. She has
even laid whole nights upon the landing-place near their chamber-door,
when, mistakenly, or with reason, she apprehended that her father might
break out into paroxysms of violence. The conduct he held towards the
members of his family, was of the same kind as that he observed towards
animals. He was for the most part extravagantly fond of them; but, when he
was displeased, and this frequently happened, and for very trivial reasons,
his anger was alarming. Mary was what Dr. Johnson would have called, "a
very good hater." In some instance of passion exercised by her father to one
of his dogs, she was accustomed to speak of her emotions of abhorrence, as

having risen to agony. In a word, her conduct during her girlish years, was
such, as to extort some portion of affection from her mother, and to hold her
father in considerable awe.
In one respect, the system of education of the mother appears to have had
merit. All her children were vigorous and healthy. This seems very much to
depend upon the management of our infant years. It is affirmed by some
persons of the present day, most profoundly skilled in the sciences of health
and disease, that there is no period of human life so little subject to
mortality, as the period of infancy. Yet, from the mismanagement to which
children are exposed, many of the diseases of childhood are rendered fatal,
and more persons die in that, than in any other period of human life. Mary
had projected a work upon this subject, which she had carefully considered,
and well understood. She has indeed left a specimen of her skill in this
respect in her eldest daughter, three years and a half old, who is a singular
example of vigorous constitution and florid health. Mr. Anthony Carlisle,
surgeon, of Soho-square, whom to name is sufficiently to honour, had
promised to revise her production. This is but one out of numerous projects
of activity and usefulness, which her untimely death has fatally terminated.
The rustic situation in which Mary spent her infancy, no doubt contributed
to confirm the stamina of her constitution. She sported in the open air, and
amidst the picturesque and refreshing scenes of nature, for which she
always retained the most exquisite relish. Dolls and the other amusements
usually appropriated to female children, she held in contempt; and felt a
much greater propensity to join in the active and hardy sports of her
brothers, than to confine herself to those of her own sex.
About the time that Mary completed the fifth year of her age, her father
removed to a small distance from his former habitation, and took a farm
near the Whalebone upon Epping Forest, a little way out of the Chelmsford
road. In Michaelmas 1765, he once more changed his residence, and
occupied a convenient house behind the town of Barking in Essex, eight
miles from London. In this situation some of their nearest neighbours were,
Bamber Gascoyne, esquire, successively member of parliament for several
boroughs, and his brother, Mr. Joseph Gascoyne. Bamber Gascoyne resided
but little on this spot; but his brother was almost a constant inhabitant, and
his family in habits of the most frequent intercourse with the family of

Mary. Here Mr. Wollstonecraft remained for three years. In September
1796, I accompanied my wife in a visit to this spot. No person reviewed
with greater sensibility, the scenes of her childhood. We found the house
uninhabited, and the garden in a wild and ruinous state. She renewed her
acquaintance with the market-place, the streets, and the wharf, the latter of
which we found crowded with barges, and full of activity.
In Michaelmas 1768, Mr. Wollstonecraft again removed to a farm near
Beverley in Yorkshire. Here the family remained for six years, and
consequently, Mary did not quit this residence, till she had attained the age
of fifteen years and five months. The principal part of her school-education
passed during this period; but it was not to any advantage of infant
literature, that she was indebted for her subsequent eminence; her education
in this respect was merely such, as was afforded by the day-schools of the
place, in which she resided. To her recollections Beverley appeared a very
handsome town, surrounded by genteel families, and with a brilliant
assembly. She was surprized, when she visited it in 1795, upon her voyage
to Norway, to find the reality so very much below the picture in her
imagination.
Hitherto Mr. Wollstonecraft had been a farmer; but the restlessness of his
disposition would not suffer him to content himself with the occupation in
which for some years he had been engaged, and the temptation of a
commercial speculation of some sort being held out to him, he removed to a
house in Queen's-Row, in Hoxton near London, for the purpose of its
execution. Here he remained for a year and a half; but, being frustrated in
his expectations of profit, he, after that term, gave up the project in which
he was engaged, and returned to his former pursuits. During this residence
at Hoxton, the writer of these memoirs inhabited, as a student, at the
dissenting college in that place. It is perhaps a question of curious
speculation to enquire, what would have been the amount of the difference
in the pursuits and enjoyments of each party, if they had met, and
considered each other with the same distinguishing regard in 1776, as they
were afterwards impressed with in the year 1796. The writer had then
completed the twentieth, and Mary the seventeenth year of her age. Which
would have been predominant; the disadvantages of obscurity, and the
pressure of a family; or the gratifications and improvement that might have
flowed from their intercourse?

One of the acquaintances Mary formed at this time was with a Mr. Clare,
who inhabited the next house to that which was tenanted by her father, and
to whom she was probably in some degree indebted for the early cultivation
of her mind. Mr. Clare was a clergyman, and appears to have been a
humourist of a very singular cast. In his person he was deformed and
delicate; and his figure, I am told, bore a resemblance to that of the
celebrated Pope. He had a fondness for poetry, and was not destitute of
taste. His manners were expressive of a tenderness and benevolence, the
demonstrations of which appeared to have been somewhat too artificially
cultivated. His habits were those of a perfect recluse. He seldom went out of
his drawing-room, and he showed to a friend of Mary a pair of shoes, which
had served him, he said, for fourteen years. Mary frequently spent days and
weeks together, at the house of Mr. Clare.

CHAP. II
1775-1783.

But a connection more memorable originated about this time, between
Mary and a person of her own sex, for whom she contracted a friendship so
fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind. The
name of this person was Frances Blood; she was two years older than Mary.
Her residence was at that time at Newington Butts, a village near the
southern extremity of the metropolis; and the original instrument for
bringing these two friends acquainted, was Mrs. Clare, wife of the
gentleman already mentioned, who was on a footing of considerable
intimacy with both parties. The acquaintance of Fanny, like that of Mr.
Clare, contributed to ripen the immature talents of Mary.
The situation in which Mary was introduced to her, bore a resemblance to
the first interview of Werter with Charlotte. She was conducted to the door
of a small house, but furnished with peculiar neatness and propriety. The
first object that caught her sight, was a young woman of a slender and
elegant form, and eighteen years of age, busily employed in feeding and
managing some children, born of the same parents, but considerably
inferior to her in age. The impression Mary received from this spectacle
was indelible; and, before the interview was concluded, she had taken, in
her heart, the vows of an eternal friendship.
Fanny was a young woman of extraordinary accomplishments. She sung
and played with taste. She drew with exquisite fidelity and neatness; and,
by the employment of this talent, for some time maintained her father,
mother, and family, but ultimately ruined her health by her extraordinary
exertions. She read and wrote with considerable application; and the same
ideas of minute and delicate propriety followed her in these, as in her other
occupations.
Mary, a wild, but animated and aspiring girl of sixteen, contemplated
Fanny, in the first instance, with sentiments of inferiority and reverence.

Though they were much together, yet, the distance of their habitation being
considerable, they supplied the want of mere frequent interviews by an
assiduous correspondence. Mary found Fanny's letters better spelt and
better indited than her own, and felt herself abashed. She had hitherto paid
but a superficial attention to literature. She had read, to gratify the ardour of
an inextinguishable thirst of knowledge; but she had not thought of writing
as an art. Her ambition to excel was now awakened, and she applied herself
with passion and earnestness. Fanny undertook to be her instructor; and, so
far as related to accuracy and method, her lessons were given with
considerable skill.
It has already been mentioned that, in the spring of the year 1776, Mr.
Wollstonecraft quitted his situation at Hoxton, and returned to his former
agricultural pursuits. The situation upon which he now fixed was in Wales,
a circumstance that was felt as a severe blow to Mary's darling spirit of
friendship. The principal acquaintance of the Wollstonecrafts in this
retirement, was the family of a Mr. Allen, two of whose daughters are since
married to the two elder sons of the celebrated English potter, Josiah
Wedgwood.
Wales however was Mr. Wollstonecraft's residence for little more than a
year. He returned to the neighbourhood of London; and Mary, whose spirit
of independence was unalterable, had influence enough to determine his
choice in favour of the village of Walworth, that she might be near her
chosen friend. It was probably before this, that she has once or twice started
the idea of quitting her parental roof, and providing for herself. But she was
prevailed upon to resign this idea, and conditions were stipulated with her,
relative to her having an apartment in the house that should be exclusively
her own, and her commanding the other requisites of study. She did not
however think herself fairly treated in these instances, and either the
conditions abovementioned, or some others, were not observed in the
sequel, with the fidelity she expected. In one case, she had procured an
eligible situation, and every thing was settled respecting her removal to it,
when the intreaties and tears of her mother led her to surrender her own
inclinations, and abandon the engagement.
These however were only temporary delays. Her propensities continued the
same, and the motives by which she was instigated were unabated. In the

year 1778, she being nineteen years of age, a proposal was made to her of
living as a companion with a Mrs. Dawson of Bath, a widow lady, with one
son already adult. Upon enquiry she found that Mrs. Dawson was a woman
of great peculiarity of temper, that she had had a variety of companions in
succession, and that no one had found it practicable to continue with her.
Mary was not discouraged by this information, and accepted the situation,
with a resolution that she would effect in this respect, what none of her
predecessors had been able to do. In the sequel she had reason to consider
the account she had received as sufficiently accurate, but she did not relax
in her endeavours. By method, constancy and firmness, she found the
means of making her situation tolerable; and Mrs. Dawson would
occasionally confess, that Mary was the only person that had lived with her
in that situation, in her treatment of whom she had felt herself under any
restraint.
With Mrs. Dawson she continued to reside for two years, and only left her,
summoned by the melancholy circumstance of her mother's rapidly
declining health. True to the calls of humanity, Mary felt in this intelligence
an irresistible motive, and eagerly returned to the paternal roof, which she
had before resolutely quitted. The residence of her father at this time, was at
Enfield near London. He had, I believe, given up agriculture from the time
of his quitting Wales, it appearing that he now made it less a source of profit
than loss, and being thought advisable that he should rather live upon the
interest of his property already in possession.
The illness of Mrs. Wollstonecraft was lingering, but hopeless. Mary was
assiduous in her attendance upon her mother. At first, every attention was
received with acknowledgments and gratitude; but, as the attentions grew
habitual, and the health of the mother more and more wretched, they were
rather exacted, than received. Nothing would be taken by the unfortunate
patient, but from the hands of Mary; rest was denied night or day, and by
the time nature was exhausted in the parent, the daughter was qualified to
assume her place, and become in turn herself a patient. The last words her
mother ever uttered were, "A little patience, and all will be over!" and these
words are repeatedly referred to by Mary in the course of her writings.
Upon the death of Mrs. Wollstonecraft, Mary bid a final adieu to the roof of
her father. According to my memorandums, I find her next the inmate of

Fanny at Walham Green, near the village of Fulham. Upon what plan they
now lived together I am unable to ascertain; certainly not that of Mary's
becoming in any degree an additional burthen upon the industry of her
friend. Thus situated, their intimacy ripened; they approached more nearly
to a footing of equality; and their attachment became more rooted and
active.
Mary was ever ready at the call of distress, and, in particular, during her
whole life was eager and active to promote the welfare of every member of
her family. In 1780 she attended the death-bed of her mother; in 1782 she
was summoned by a not less melancholy occasion, to attend her sister Eliza,
married to a Mr. Bishop, who, subsequently to a dangerous lying-in,
remained for some months in a very afflicting situation. Mary continued
with her sister without intermission, to her perfect recovery.

CHAP. III.
1783-1785.

Mary was now arrived at the twenty-fourth year of her age. Her project, five
years before, had been personal independence; it was now usefulness. In the
solitude of attendance on her sister's illness, and during the subsequent
convalescence, she had had leisure to ruminate upon purposes of this sort.
Her expanded mind led her to seek something more arduous than the mere
removal of personal vexations; and the sensibility of her heart would not
suffer her to rest in solitary gratifications. The derangement of her father's
affairs daily became more and more glaring; and a small independent
provision made for herself and her sisters, appears to have been sacrificed
in the wreck. For ten years, from 1782 to 1792, she may be said to have
been, in a great degree, the victim of a desire to promote the benefit of
others. She did not foresee the severe disappointment with which an
exclusive purpose of this sort is pregnant; she was inexperienced enough to
lay a stress upon the consequent gratitude of those she benefited; and she
did not sufficiently consider that, in proportion as we involve ourselves in
the interests and society of others, we acquire a more exquisite sense of
their defects, and are tormented with their untractableness and folly.
The project upon which she now determined, was no other than that of a
day-school, to be superintended by Fanny Blood, herself, and her two
sisters.
They accordingly opened one in the year 1783, at the village of Islington;
but in the course of a few months removed it to Newington Green. Here
Mary formed some acquaintances who influenced the future events of her
life. The first of these in her own estimation, was Dr. Richard Price, well
known for his political and mathematical calculations, and universally
esteemed by those who knew him, for the simplicity of his manners, and the
ardour of his benevolence. The regard conceived by these two persons for
each other, was mutual, and partook of a spirit of the purest attachment.
Mary had been bred in the principles of the church of England, but her

esteem for this venerable preacher led her occasionally to attend upon his
public instructions. Her religion was, in reality, little allied to any system of
forms; and, as she has often told me, was founded rather in taste, than in the
niceties of polemical discussion. Her mind constitutionally attached itself to
the sublime and the amiable. She found an inexpressible delight in the
beauties of nature, and in the splendid reveries of the imagination. But
nature itself, she thought, would be no better than a vast blank, if the mind
of the observer did not supply it with an animating soul. When she walked
amidst the wonders of nature, she was accustomed to converse with her
God. To her mind he was pictured as not less amiable, generous and kind,
than great, wise and exalted. In fact, she had received few lessons of
religion in her youth, and her religion was almost entirely of her own
creation. But she was not on that account the less attached to it, or the less
scrupulous in discharging what she considered as its duties. She could not
recollect the time when she had believed the doctrine of future
punishments. The tenets of her system were the growth of her own moral
taste, and her religion therefore had always been a gratification, never a
terror, to her. She expected a future state; but she would not allow her ideas
of that future state to be modified by the notions of judgment and
retribution. From this sketch, it is sufficiently evident, that the pleasure she
took in an occasional attendance upon the sermons of Dr. Price, was not
accompanied with a superstitious adherence to his doctrines. The fact is,
that, as far down as the year 1787, she regularly frequented public worship,
for the most part according to the forms of the church of England. After that
period her attendance became less constant, and in no long time was wholly
discontinued. I believe it may be admitted as a maxim, that no person of a
well furnished mind, that has shaken off the implicit subsection of youth,
and is not the zealous partizan of a sect, can bring himself to conform to the
public and regular routine of sermons and prayers.
Another of the friends she acquired at this period, was Mrs. Burgh, widow
of the author of the Political Disquisitions, a woman universally well
spoken of for the warmth and purity of her benevolence. Mary, whenever
she had occasion to allude to her, to the last period of her life, paid the
tribute due to her virtues. The only remaining friend necessary to be
enumerated in this place, is the rev. John Hewlet, now master of a boarding-

school at Shacklewel near Hackney, whom I shall have occasion to mention
hereafter.
I have already said that Fanny's health had been materially injured by her
incessant labours for the maintenance of her family. She had also suffered a
disappointment, which preyed upon her mind. To these different sources of
ill health she became gradually a victim; and at length discovered all the
symptoms of a pulmonary consumption. By the medical men that attended
her, she was advised to try the effects of a southern climate; and, about the
beginning of the year 1785, sailed for Lisbon.
The first feeling with which Mary had contemplated her friend, was a
sentiment of inferiority and reverence; but that, from the operation of a ten
years' acquaintance, was considerably changed. Fanny had originally been
far before her in literary attainments; this disparity no longer existed. In
whatever degree Mary might endeavour to free herself from the delusions
of self-esteem, this period of observation upon her own mind and that of her
friend, could not pass, without her perceiving that there were some essential
characteristics of genius, which she possessed, and in which her friend was
deficient. The principal of these was a firmness of mind, an unconquerable
greatness of soul, by which, after a short internal struggle, she was
accustomed to rise above difficulties and suffering. Whatever Mary
undertook, she perhaps in all instances accomplished; and, to her lofty
spirit, scarcely anything she desired, appeared hard to perform. Fanny, on
the contrary, was a woman of a timid and irresolute nature, accustomed to
yield to difficulties, and probably priding herself in this morbid softness of
her temper. One instance that I have heard Mary relate of this sort, was,
that, at a certain time, Fanny, dissatisfied with her domestic situation,
expressed an earnest desire to have a home of her own. Mary, who felt
nothing more pressing than to relieve the inconveniences of her friend,
determined to accomplish this object for her. It cost her infinite exertions;
but at length she was able to announce to Fanny that a house was prepared,
and that she was on the spot to receive her. The answer which Fanny
returned to the letter of her friend, consisted almost wholly of an
enumeration of objections to the quitting her family, which she had not
thought of before, but which now appeared to her of considerable weight.

The judgment which experience had taught Mary to form of the mind of her
friend, determined her in the advice she gave, at the period to which I have
brought down the story. Fanny was recommended to seek a softer climate,
but she had no funds to defray the expence of such an undertaking. At this
time Mr. Hugh Skeys of Dublin, but then resident in the kingdom of
Portugal, paid his addresses to her. The state of her health Mary considered
as such as scarcely to afford the shadow of a hope; it was not therefore a
time at which it was most obvious to think of marriage. She conceived
however that nothing should be omitted, which might alleviate, if it could
not cure; and accordingly urged her speedy acceptance of the proposal.
Fanny accordingly made the voyage to Lisbon; and the marriage took place
on the twenty-fourth of February 1785.
The change of climate and situation was productive of little benefit; and the
life of Fanny was only prolonged by a period of pregnancy, which soon
declared itself. Mary, in the mean time, was impressed with the idea that her
friend would die in this distant country; and, shocked with the recollection
of her separation from the circle of her friends, determined to pass over to
Lisbon to attend her. This resolution was treated by her acquaintance as in
the utmost degree visionary; but she was not to be diverted from her point.
She had not money to defray her expences: she must quit for a long time the
school, the very existence of which probably depended upon her exertions.
No person was ever better formed for the business of education; if it be not
a sort of absurdity to speak of a person as formed for an inferior object, who
is in possession of talents, in the fullest degree adequate to something on a
more important and comprehensive scale. Mary had a quickness of temper,
not apt to take offence with inadvertencies, but which led her to imagine
that she saw the mind of the person with whom she had any transaction, and
to refer the principle of her approbation or displeasure to the cordiality or
injustice of their sentiments. She was occasionally severe and imperious in
her resentments; and, when she strongly disapproved, was apt to express her
censure in terms that gave a very humiliating sensation to the person against
whom it was directed. Her displeasure however never assumed its severest
form, but when it was barbed by disappointment. Where she expected little,
she was not very rigid in her censure of error.

But, to whatever the defects of her temper might amount, they were never
exercised upon her inferiors in station or age. She scorned to make use of an
ungenerous advantage, or to wound the defenceless. To her servants there
never was a mistress more considerate or more kind. With children she was
the mirror of patience. Perhaps, in all her extensive experience upon the
subject of education, she never betrayed one symptom of irascibility. Her
heart was the seat of every benevolent feeling; and accordingly, in all her
intercourse with children, it was kindness and sympathy alone that
prompted her conduct. Sympathy, when it mounts to a certain height,
inevitably begets affection in the person towards whom it is exercised; and I
have heard her say, that she never was concerned in the education of one
child, who was not personally attached to her, and earnestly concerned, not
to incur her displeasure. Another eminent advantage she possessed in the
business of education, was that she was little troubled with scepticism and
uncertainty. She saw, as it were by intuition, the path which her mind
determined to pursue, and had a firm confidence in her own power to effect
what she desired. Yet, with all this, she had scarcely a tincture of obstinacy.
She carefully watched symptoms as they rose, and the success of her
experiments; and governed herself accordingly. While I thus enumerate her
more than maternal qualities, it is impossible not to feel a pang at the
recollection of her orphan children!
Though her friends earnestly dissuaded her from the journey to Lisbon, she
found among them a willingness facilitate the execution of her project,
when it was once fixed. Mrs. Burgh in particular, supplied her with money,
which however she always conceived came from Dr. Price. This loan, I
have reason to believe, was faithfully repaid.
It was during her residence at Newington Green, that she was introduced to
the acquaintance of Dr. Johnson, who was at that time considered as in
some sort the father of English literature. The doctor treated her with
particular kindness and attention, had a long conversation with her, and
desired her to repeat her visit often. This she firmly purposed to do; but the
news of his last illness, and then of his death, intervened to prevent her
making a second visit.
Her residence in Lisbon was not long. She arrived but a short time before
her friend was prematurely delivered, and the event was fatal to both

mother and child. Frances Blood, hitherto the chosen object of Mary's
attachment, died on the twenty-ninth of November 1785.
It is thus that she speaks of her in her Letters from Norway, written ten
years after her decease. "When a warm heart has received strong
impressions, they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and
the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent, by fondly
retracing them. I cannot, without a thrill of delight, recollect views I have
seen, which are not to be forgotten, nor looks I have felt in every nerve,
which I shall never more meet. 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."

CHAP. IV.
1785-1787.

No doubt the voyage to Lisbon tended considerably to enlarge the
understanding of Mary. She was admitted into the best company the English
factory afforded. She made many profound observations on the character of
the natives, and the baleful effects of superstition. The obsequies of Fanny,
which it was necessary to perform by stealth and in darkness, tended to
invigorate these observations in her mind.
She sailed upon her voyage home about the twentieth of December. On this
occasion a circumstance occurred, that deserves to be recorded. While they
were on their passage, they fell in with a French vessel, in great distress,
and in daily expectation of foundering at sea, at the same time that it was
almost destitute of provisions. The Frenchman hailed them, and intreated
the English captain, in consideration of his melancholy situation, to take
him and his crew on board. The Englishman represented in reply, that his
stock of provisions was by no means adequate to such an additional number
of mouths, and absolutely refused compliance. Mary, shocked at his
apparent insensibility, took up the cause of the sufferers, and threatened the
captain to have him called to a severe account, when he arrived in England.
She finally prevailed, and had the satisfaction to reflect, that the persons in
question possibly owed their lives to her interposition.
When she arrived in England, she found that her school had suffered
considerably in her absence. It can be little reproach to any one, to say that
they were found incapable of supplying her place. She not only excelled in
the management of the children, but had also the talent of being attentive
and obliging to the parents, without degrading herself.
The period at which I am now arrived is important, as conducting to the
first step of her literary carreer. Mr. Hewlet had frequently mentioned
literature to Mary as a certain source of pecuniary produce, and had urged
her to make trial of the truth of his judgment. At this time she was desirous

of assisting the father and mother of Fanny in an object they had in view,
the transporting themselves to Ireland; and, as usual, what she desired in a
pecuniary view, she was ready to take on herself to effect. For this purpose
she wrote a duodecimo pamphlet of one hundred and sixty pages, entitled,
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters. Mr. Hewlet obtained from the
bookseller, Mr. Johnson in St. Paul's Church Yard, ten guineas for the copy-
right of this manuscript, which she immediately applied to the object for the
sake of which the pamphlet was written.
Every thing urged Mary to put an end to the affair of the school. She was
dissatisfied with the different appearance it presented upon her return, from
the state in which she left it. Experience impressed upon her a rooted
aversion to that sort of cohabitation with her sisters, which the project of the
school imposed. Cohabitation is a point of delicate experiment, and is, in a
majority of instances, pregnant with ill-humour and unhappiness. The
activity and ardent spirit of adventure which characterized Mary, were not
felt in an equal degree by her sisters, so that a disproportionate share of
every burthen attendant upon the situation, fell to her lot. On the other hand,
they could scarcely perhaps be perfectly easy, in observing the superior
degree of deference and courtship, which her merit extorted from almost
every one that knew her. Her kindness for them was not diminished, but she
resolved that the mode of its exertion in future should be different, tending
to their benefit, without intrenching upon her own liberty.
Thus circumstanced, a proposal was made her, such as, regarding only the
situations through which she had lately passed, is usually termed
advantageous. This was, to accept the office of governess to the daughters
of lord viscount Kingsborough, eldest son to the earl of Kingston of the
kingdom of Ireland. The terms held out to her were such as she determined
to accept, at the same time resolving to retain the situation only for a short
time. Independence was the object after which she thirsted, and she was
fixed to try whether it might not be found in literary occupation. She was
desirous however first to accumulate a small sum of money, which should
enable her to consider at leisure the different literary engagements that
might offer, and provide in some degree for the eventual deficiency of her
earliest attempts.

The situation in the family of lord Kingsborough, was offered to her
through the medium of the rev. Mr. Prior, at that time one of the under
masters of Eton school. She spent some time at the house of this gentleman,
immediately after her giving up the school at Newington Green. Here she
had an opportunity of making an accurate observation upon the manners
and conduct of that celebrated seminary, and the ideas she retained of it
were by no means favourable. By all that she saw, she was confirmed in a
very favourite opinion of her's, in behalf of day-schools, where, as she
expressed it, "children have the opportunity of conversing with children,
without interfering with domestic affections, the foundation of virtue."
Though her residence in the family of lord Kingsborough continued
scarcely more than twelve months, she left behind her, with them and their
connections, a very advantageous impression. The governesses the young
ladies had hitherto had, were only a species of upper servants, controlled in
every thing by the mother; Mary insisted upon the unbounded exercise of
her own discretion. When the young ladies heard of their governess coming
from England, they heard in imagination of a new enemy, and declared their
resolution to guard themselves accordingly. Mary however speedily
succeeded in gaining their confidence, and the friendship that soon grew up
between her and Margaret King, now countess Mount Cashel, the eldest
daughter, was in an uncommon degree cordial and affectionate. Mary
always spoke of this young lady in terms of the truest applause, both in
relation to the eminence of her intellectual powers, and the ingenuous
amiableness of her disposition. Lady Kingsborough, from the best motives,
had imposed upon her daughters a variety of prohibitions, both as to the
books they should read, and in many other respects. These prohibitions had
their usual effects; inordinate desire for the things forbidden, and
clandestine indulgence. Mary immediately restored the children to their
liberty, and undertook to govern them by their affections only. The
consequence was, that their indulgences were moderate, and they were
uneasy under any indulgence that had not the sanction of their governess.
The salutary effects of the new system of education were speedily visible;
and lady Kingsborough soon felt no other uneasiness, than lest the children
should love their governess better than their mother.
Mary made many friends in Ireland, among the persons who visited lord
Kingsborough's house, for she always appeared there with the air of an

equal, and not of a dependent. I have heard her mention the ludicrous
distress of a woman of quality, whose name I have forgotten, that, in a large
company, singled out Mary, and entered into a long conversation with her.
After the conversation was over, she enquired whom she had been talking
with, and found, to her utter mortification and dismay, that it was Miss
King's governess.
One of the persons among her Irish acquaintance, whom Mary was
accustomed to speak of with the highest respect, was Mr. George Ogle,
member of parliament for the county of Wexford. She held his talents in
very high estimation; she was strongly prepossessed in favour of the
goodness of his heart; and she always spoke of him as the most perfect
gentleman she had ever known. She felt the regret of a disappointed friend,
at the part he has lately taken in the politics of Ireland.
Lord Kingsborough's family passed the summer of the year 1787 at Bristol
Hot-Wells, and had formed the project of proceeding from thence to the
continent, a tour in which Mary purposed to accompany them. The plan
however was ultimately given up, and Mary in consequence closed her
connection with them, earlier than she otherwise had purposed to do.
At Bristol Hot-Wells she composed the little book which bears the title of
Mary, a Fiction. A considerable part of this story consists, with certain
modifications, of the incidents of her own friendship with Fanny. All the
events that do not relate to that subject are fictitious.
This little work, if Mary had never produced any thing else, would serve,
with persons of true taste and sensibility, to establish the eminence of her
genius. The story is nothing. He that looks into the book only for incident,
will probably lay it down with disgust. But the feelings are of the truest and
most exquisite class; every circumstance is adorned with that species of
imagination, which enlists itself under the banners of delicacy and
sentiment. A work of sentiment, as it is called, is too often another name for
a work of affectation. He that should imagine that the sentiments of this
book are affected, would indeed be entitled to our profoundest
commiseration.

CHAP. V.
1787-1790.

Being now determined to enter upon her literary plan, Mary came
immediately from Bristol to the metropolis. Her conduct under this
circumstance was such as to do credit both to her own heart, and that of Mr.
Johnson, her publisher, between whom and herself there now commenced
an intimate friendship. She had seen him upon occasion of publishing her
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, and she addressed two or three
letters to him during her residence in Ireland. Upon her arrival in London in
August 1787, she went immediately to his house, and frankly explained to
him her purpose, at the same time requesting his advice and assistance as to
its execution. After a short conversation, Mr. Johnson invited her to make
his house her home, till she should have suited herself with a fixed
residence. She accordingly resided at this time two or three weeks under his
roof. At the same period she paid a visit or two of similar duration to some
friends, at no great distance from the metropolis.
At Michaelmas 1787, she entered upon a house in George street, on the
Surry side of Black Friar's Bridge, which Mr. Johnson had provided for her
during her excursion into the country. The three years immediately ensuing,
may be said, in the ordinary acceptation of the term, to have been the most
active period of her life. She brought with her to this habitation, the novel
of Mary, which had not yet been sent to the press, and the commencement
of a sort of oriental tale, entitled, the Cave of Fancy, which she thought
proper afterwards to lay aside unfinished. I am told that at this period she
appeared under great dejection of spirits, and filled with melancholy regret
for the loss of her youthful friend. A period of two years had elapsed since
the death of that friend; but it was possibly the composition of the fiction of
Mary, that renewed her sorrows in their original force. Soon after entering
upon her new habitation, she produced a little work, entitled, Original
Stories from Real Life, intended for the use of children. At the
commencement of her literary carreer, she is said to have conceived a
vehement aversion to the being regarded, by her ordinary acquaintance, in

the character of an author, and to have employed some precautions to
prevent its occurrence.
The employment which the bookseller suggested to her, as the easiest and
most certain source of pecuniary income, of course, was translation. With
this view she improved herself in her French, with which she had
previously but a slight acquaintance, and acquired the Italian and German
languages. The greater part of her literary engagements at this time, were
such as were presented to her by Mr. Johnson. She new-modelled and
abridged a work, translated from the Dutch, entitled, Young Grandison: she
began a translation from the French, of a book, called, the New Robinson;
but in this undertaking, she was, I believe, anticipated by another translator:
and she compiled a series of extracts in verse and prose, upon the model of
Dr. Enfield's Speaker, which bears the title of the Female Reader; but
which, from a cause not worth mentioning, has hitherto been printed with a
different name in the title-page.
About the middle of the year 1788, Mr. Johnson instituted the Analytical
Review, in which Mary took a considerable share. She also translated
Necker on the Importance of Religious Opinions; made an abridgment of
Lavater's Physiognomy, from the French, which has never been published;
and compressed Salzmann's Elements of Morality, a German production,
into a publication in three volumes duodecimo. The translation of Salzmann
produced a correspondence between Mary and the author; and he
afterwards repaid the obligation to her in kind, by a German translation of
the Rights of Woman. Such were her principal literary occupations, from
the autumn of 1787, to the autumn of 1790.
It perhaps deserves to be remarked that this sort of miscellaneous literary
employment, seems, for the time at least, rather to damp and contract, than
to enlarge and invigorate, the genius. The writer is accustomed to see his
performances answer the mere mercantile purpose of the day, and
confounded with those of persons to whom he is secretly conscious of a
superiority. No neighbour mind serves as a mirror to reflect the generous
confidence he felt within himself; and perhaps the man never yet existed,
who could maintain his enthusiasm to its full vigour, in the midst of this
kind of solitariness. He is touched with the torpedo of mediocrity. I believe
that nothing which Mary produced during this period, is marked with those

daring flights, which exhibit themselves in the little fiction she composed
just before its commencement. Among effusions of a nobler cast, I find
occasionally interspersed some of that homily-language, which, to speak
from my own feelings, is calculated to damp the moral courage, it was
intended to awaken. This is probably to be assigned to the causes above
described.
I have already said that one of the purposes which Mary had conceived, a
few years before, as necessary to give a relish to the otherwise insipid, or
embittered, draught of human life, was usefulness. On this side, the period
of her existence of which I am now treating, is more brilliant, than in a
literary view. She determined to apply as great a part as possible of the
produce of her present employments, to the assistance of her friends and of
the distressed; and, for this purpose, laid down to herself rules of the most
rigid economy. She began with endeavouring to promote the interest of her
sisters. She conceived that there was no situation in which she could place
them, at once so respectable and agreeable, as that of governess in private
families. She determined therefore in the first place, to endeavour to qualify
them for such an undertaking. Her younger sister she sent to Paris, where
she remained near two years. The elder she placed in a school near London,
first as a parlour-boarder, and afterwards as a teacher. Her brother James,
who had already been at sea, she first took into her house, and next sent to
Woolwich for instruction, to qualify him for a respectable situation in the
royal navy, where he was shortly after made a lieutenant. Charles, who was
her favourite brother, had been articled to the eldest, an attorney in the
Minories; but, not being satisfied with his situation, she removed him; and
in some time after, having first placed him with a farmer for instruction, she
fitted him out for America, where his speculations, founded upon the basis
she had provided, are said to have been extremely prosperous. The reason
so much of this parental sort of care fell upon her, was, that her father had
by this time considerably embarrassed his circumstances. His affairs having
grown too complex for himself to disentangle, he had intrusted them to the
management of a near relation; but Mary, not being satisfied with the
conduct of the business, took them into her own hands. The exertions she
made, and the struggle into which she entered however, in this instance,
were ultimately fruitless. To the day of her death her father was almost
wholly supported by funds which she supplied to him. In addition to her

exertions for her own family, she took a young girl of about seven years of
age under her protection and care, the niece of Mrs. John Hunter, and of the
present Mrs. Skeys, for whose mother, then lately dead, she had entertained
a sincere friendship.
The period, from the end of the year 1787 to the end of the year 1790,
though consumed in labours of little eclat, served still further to establish
her in a friendly connection from which she derived many pleasures. Mr.
Johnson, the bookseller, contracted a great personal regard for her, which
resembled in many respects that of a parent. As she frequented his house,
she of course became acquainted with his guests. Among these may be
mentioned as persons possessing her esteem, Mr. Bonnycastle, the
mathematician, the late Mr. George Anderson, accountant to the board of
control, Dr. George Fordyce, and Mr. Fuseli, the celebrated painter.
Between both of the two latter and herself, there existed sentiments of
genuine affection and friendship.

CHAP. VI.
1790-1792.

Hitherto the literary carreer of Mary, had for the most part, been silent; and
had been productive of income to herself, without apparently leading to the
wreath of fame. From this time she was destined to attract the notice of the
public, and perhaps no female writer ever obtained so great a degree of
celebrity throughout Europe.
It cannot be doubted that, while, for three years of literary employment, she
"held the noiseless tenor of her way," her mind was insensibly advancing
towards a vigorous maturity. The uninterrupted habit of composition gave a
freedom and firmness to the expression of her sentiments. The society she
frequented, nourished her understanding, and enlarged her mind. The
French revolution, while it gave a fundamental shock to the human intellect
through every region of the globe, did not fail to produce a conspicuous
effect in the progress of Mary's reflections. The prejudices of her early
years suffered a vehement concussion. Her respect for establishments was
undermined. At this period occurred a misunderstanding upon public
grounds, with one of her early friends, whose attachment to musty creeds
and exploded absurdities, had been increased, by the operation of those very
circumstances, by which her mind had been rapidly advanced in the race of
independence.
The event, immediately introductory to the rank which from this time she
held in the lids of literature, was the publication of Burke's Reflections on
the Revolution in France. This book, after having been long promised to the
world, finally made its appearance on the first of November 1790; and
Mary, full of sentiments of liberty, and impressed with a warm interest in
the struggle that was now going on, seized her pen in the first burst of
indignation, an emotion of which she was strongly susceptible. She was in
the habit of composing with rapidity, and her answer, which was the first of
the numerous ones that appeared, obtained extraordinary notice. Marked as
it is with the vehemence and impetuousness of its eloquence, it is certainly

chargeable with a too contemptuous and intemperate treatment of the great
man against whom its attack is directed. But this circumstance was not
injurious to the success of the publication. Burke had been warmly loved by
the most liberal and enlightened friends of freedom, and they were
proportionably inflamed and disgusted by the fury of his assault, upon what
they deemed to be its sacred cause.
Short as was the time in which Mary composed her Answer to Burke's
Reflections, there was one anecdote she told me concerning it, which seems
worth recording in this place. It was sent to the press, as is the general
practice when the early publication of a piece is deemed a matter of
importance, before the composition was finished. When Mary had arrived at
about the middle of her work, she was seized with a temporary fit of torpor
and indolence, and began to repent of her undertaking. In this state of mind,
she called, one evening, as she was in the practice of doing, upon her
publisher, for the purpose of relieving herself by an hour or two's
conversation. Here, the habitual ingenuousness of her nature, led her to
describe what had just past in her thoughts. Mr. Johnson immediately, in a
kind and friendly way, intreated her not to put any constraint upon her
inclination, and to give herself no uneasiness about the sheets already
printed, which he would cheerfully throw aside, if it would contribute to her
happiness. Mary had wanted stimulus. She had not expected to be
encouraged, in what she well knew to be an unreasonable access of
idleness. Her friend's so readily falling in with her ill-humour, and seeming
to expect that she would lay aside her undertaking, piqued her pride. She
immediately went home; and proceeded to the end of her work, with no
other interruptions but what were absolutely indispensible.
It is probable that the applause which attended her Answer to Burke,
elevated the tone of her mind. She had always felt much confidence in her
own powers; but it cannot be doubted, that the actual perception of a similar
feeling respecting us in a multitude of others, must increase the confidence,
and stimulate the adventure of any human being. Mary accordingly
proceeded, in a short time after, to the composition of her most celebrated
production, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Never did any author enter into a cause, with a more ardent desire to be
found, not a flourishing and empty declaimer, but an effectual champion.

She considered herself as standing forth in defence of one half of the human
species, labouring under a yoke which, through all the records of time, had
degraded them from the station of rational beings, and almost sunk them to
the level of the brutes. She saw indeed, that they were often attempted to be
held in silken fetters, and bribed into the love of slavery; but the disguise
and the treachery served only the more fully to confirm her opposition. She
regarded her sex, in the language of Calista, as

"In every state of life the slaves of men:"

the rich as alternately under the despotism of a father, a brother, and a
husband; and the middling and the poorer classes shut out from the
acquisition of bread with independence, when they are not shut out from the
very means of an industrious subsistence. Such were the views she
entertained of the subject; and such the feelings with which she warmed her
mind.
The work is certainly a very bold and original production. The strength and
firmness with which the author repels the opinions of Rousseau, Dr.
Gregory, and Dr. James Fordyce, respecting the condition of women, cannot
but make a strong impression upon every ingenuous reader. The public at
large formed very different opinions respecting the character of the
performance. Many of the sentiments are undoubtedly of a rather masculine
description. The spirited and decisive way in which the author explodes the
system of gallantry, and the species of homage with which the sex is usually
treated, shocked the majority. Novelty produced a sentiment in their mind,
which they mistook for a sense of injustice. The pretty, soft creatures that
are so often to be found in the female sex, and that class of men who
believe they could not exist without such pretty, soft creatures to resort to,
were in arms against the author of so heretical and blasphemous a doctrine.
There are also, it must be confessed, occasional passages of a stern and
rugged feature, incompatible with the true stamina of the writer's character.
But, if they did not belong to her fixed and permanent character, they
belonged to her character pro tempore; and what she thought, she scorned to
qualify.
Yet, along with this rigid, and somewhat amazonian temper, which
characterised some parts of the book, it is impossible not to remark a

luxuriance of imagination, and a trembling delicacy of sentiment, which
would have done honour to a poet, bursting with all the visions of an
Armida and a Dido.
The contradiction, to the public apprehension, was equally great, as to the
person of the author, as it was when they considered the temper of the book.
In the champion of her sex, who was described as endeavouring to invest
them with all the rights of man, those whom curiosity prompted to seek the
occasion of beholding her, expected to find a sturdy, muscular, raw-boned
virago; and they were not a little surprised, when, instead of all this, they
found a woman, lovely in her person, and, in the best and most engaging
sense, feminine in her manners.
The Vindication of the Rights of Woman is undoubtedly a very unequal
performance, and eminently deficient in method and arrangement. When
tried by the hoary and long-established laws of literary composition, it can
scarcely maintain its claim to be placed in the first class of human
productions. But when we consider the importance of its doctrines, and the
eminence of genius it displays, it seems not very improbable that it will be
read as long as the English language endures. The publication of this book
forms an epocha in the subject to which it belongs; and Mary
Wollstonecraft will perhaps hereafter be found to have performed more
substantial service for the cause of her sex, than all the other writers, male
or female, that ever felt themselves animated in the behalf of oppressed and
injured beauty.
The censure of the liberal critic as to the defects of this performance, will be
changed into astonishment, when I tell him, that a work of this inestimable
moment, was begun, carried on, and finished in the state in which it now
appears, in a period of no more than six weeks.
It is necessary here that I should resume the subject of the friendship that
subsisted between Mary and Mr. Fuseli, which proved the source of the
most memorable events in her subsequent history. He is a native of the
republic of Switzerland, but has spent the principal part of his life in the
island of Great-Britain. The eminence of his genius can scarcely be
disputed; it has indeed received the testimony which is the least to be
suspected, that of some of the most considerable of his contemporary

artists. He has one of the most striking characteristics of genius, a daring, as
well as persevering, spirit of adventure. The work in which he is at present
engaged, a series of pictures for the illustration of Milton, upon a very large
scale, and produced solely upon the incitement of his own mind, is a proof
of this, if indeed his whole life had not sufficiently proved it.
Mr. Fuseli is one of Mr. Johnson's oldest friends, and was at this time in the
habit of visiting him two or three times a week. Mary, one of whose
strongest characteristics was the exquisite sensations of pleasure she felt
from the associations of visible objects, had hitherto never been acquainted,
or never intimately acquainted, with an eminent painter. The being thus
introduced therefore to the society of Mr. Fuseli, was a high gratification to
her; while he found in Mary, a person perhaps more susceptible of the
emotions painting is calculated to excite, than any other with whom he ever
conversed. Painting, and subjects closely connected with painting, were
their almost constant topics of conversation; and they found them
inexhaustible. It cannot be doubted, but that this was a species of exercise
very conducive to the improvement of Mary's mind.
Nothing human however is unmixed. If Mary derived improvement from
Mr. Fuseli, she may also be suspected of having caught the infection of
some of his faults. In early life Mr. Fuseli was ardently attached to
literature; but the demands of his profession have prevented him from
keeping up that extensive and indiscriminate acquaintance with it, that
belles-lettres scholars frequently possess. Of consequence, the favourites of
his boyish years remain his only favourites. Homer is with Mr. Fuseli the
abstract and deposit of every human perfection. Milton, Shakespear, and
Richardson, have also engaged much of his attention. The nearest rival of
Homer, I believe, if Homer can have a rival, is Jean Jacques Rousseau. A
young man embraces entire the opinions of a favourite writer, and Mr.
Fuseli has not had leisure to bring the opinions of his youth to a revision.
Smitten with Rousseau's conception of the perfectness of the savage state,
and the essential abortiveness of all civilization, Mr. Fuseli looks at all our
little attempts at improvement, with a spirit that borders perhaps too much
upon contempt and indifference. One of his favourite positions is the
divinity of genius. This is a power that comes complete at once from the
hands of the Creator of all things, and the first essays of a man of real
genius are such, in all their grand and most important features, as no

subsequent assiduity can amend. Add to this, that Mr. Fuseli is somewhat of
a caustic turn of mind, with much wit, and a disposition to search, in every
thing new or modern, for occasions of censure. I believe Mary came
something more a cynic out of the school of Mr. Fuseli, than she went into
it.
But the principal circumstance that relates to the intercourse of Mary, and
this celebrated artist, remains to be told. She saw Mr. Fuseli frequently; he
amused, delighted and instructed her. As a painter, it was impossible she
should not wish to see his works, and consequently to frequent his house.
She visited him; her visits were returned. Notwithstanding the inequality of
their years, Mary was not of a temper to live upon terms of so much
intimacy with a man of merit and genius, without loving him. The delight
she enjoyed in his society, she transferred by association to his person.
What she experienced in this respect, was no doubt heightened, by the state
of celibacy and restraint in which she had hitherto lived, and to which the
rules of polished society condemn an unmarried woman. She conceived a
personal and ardent affection for him. Mr. Fuseli was a married man, and
his wife the acquaintance of Mary. She readily perceived the restrictions
which this circumstance seemed to impose upon her; but she made light of
any difficulty that might arise out of them. Not that she was insensible to
the value of domestic endearments between persons of an opposite sex, but
that she scorned to suppose, that she could feel a struggle, in conforming to
the laws she should lay down to her conduct.
There cannot perhaps be a properer place than the present, to state her
principles upon this subject, such at least as they were when I knew her
best. She set a great value on a mutual affection between persons of an
opposite sex. She regarded it as the principal solace of human life. It was
her maxim, "that the imagination should awaken the senses, and not the
senses the imagination." In other words, that whatever related to the
gratification of the senses, ought to arise, in a human being of a pure mind,
only as the consequence of an individual affection. She regarded the
manners and habits of the majority of our sex in that respect, with strong
disapprobation. She conceived that true virtue would prescribe the most
entire celibacy, exclusively of affection, and the most perfect fidelity to that
affection when it existed.—There is no reason to doubt that, if Mr. Fuseli
had been disengaged at the period of their acquaintance, he would have

been the man of her choice. As it was, she conceived it both practicable and
eligible, to cultivate a distinguishing affection for him, and to foster it by
the endearments of personal intercourse and a reciprocation of kindness,
without departing in the smallest degree from the rules she prescribed to
herself.
In September 1791, she removed from the house she occupied in George-
street, to a large and commodious apartment in Store street, Bedford-square.
She began to think that she had been too rigid, in the laws of frugality and
self-denial with which she set out in her literary career; and now added to
the neatness and cleanliness which she had always scrupulously observed a
certain degree of elegance, and those temperate indulgences in furniture and
accommodation, from which a sound and uncorrupted taste never fails to
derive pleasure.
It was in the month of November in the same year (1791), that the writer of
this narrative was first in company with the person to whom it relates. He
dined with her at a friend's, together with Mr. Thomas Paine and one or two
other persons. The invitation was of his own seeking, his object being to see
the author of the Rights of Man, with whom he had never before conversed.
The interview was not fortunate. Mary and myself parted, mutually
displeased with each other. I had not read her Rights of Woman. I had
barely looked into her Answer to Burke, and been displeased, as literary
men are apt to be, with a few offences, against grammar and other minute
points of composition. I had therefore little curiosity to see Mrs.
Wollstonecraft, and a very great curiosity to see Thomas Paine. Paine, in his
general habits, is no great talker; and, though he threw in occasionally some
shrewd and striking remarks; the conversation lay principally between me
and Mary. I, of consequence, heard her, very frequently when I wished to
hear Paine.
We touched on a considerable variety of topics, and particularly on the
characters and habits of certain eminent men. Mary, as has already been
observed, had acquired, in a very blameable degree, the practice of seeing
every thing on the gloomy side, and bestowing censure with a plentiful
hand, where circumstances were in any respect doubtful. I, on the contrary,
had a strong propensity, to favourable construction, and particularly, where

I found unequivocal marks of genius, strongly to incline to the supposition
of generous and manly virtue. We ventilated in this way the characters of
Voltaire and others, who have obtained from some individuals an ardent
admiration, while the greater number have treated them with extreme moral
severity. Mary was at last provoked to tell me, that praise, lavished in the
way that I lavished it, could do no credit either to the commended or the
commender. We discussed some questions on the subject of religion, in
which her opinions approached much nearer to the received ones, than
mine. As the conversation proceeded, I became dissatisfied with the tone of
my own share in it. We touched upon all topics, without treating forcibly
and connectedly upon any. Meanwhile, I did her the justice, in giving an
account of the conversation to a party in which I supped, though I was not
sparing of my blame, to yield her the praise of a person of active and
independent thinking. On her side, she did me no part of what perhaps I
considered as justice.
We met two or three times in the course of the following year, but made a
very small degree of progress towards a cordial acquaintance.
In the close of the year 1792, Mary went over to France, where she
continued to reside for upwards of two years. One of her principal
inducements to this step, related, I believe, to Mr. Fuseli. She had, at first,
considered it as reasonable and judicious, to cultivate what I may be
permitted to call, a Platonic affection for him; but she did not, in the sequel,
find all the satisfaction in this plan, which she had originally expected from
it. It was in vain that she enjoyed much pleasure in his society, and that she
enjoyed it frequently. Her ardent imagination was continually conjuring up
pictures of the happiness she should have found, if fortune had favoured
their more intimate union. She felt herself formed for domestic affection,
and all those tender charities, which men of sensibility have constantly
treated as the dearest band of human society. General conversation and
society could not satisfy her. She felt herself alone, as it were, in the great
mass of her species; and she repined when she reflected, that the best years
of her life were spent in this comfortless solitude. These ideas made the
cordial intercourse of Mr. Fuseli, which had at first been one of her greatest
pleasures, a source of perpetual torment to her. She conceived it necessary
to snap the chain of this association in her mind; and, for that purpose,
determined to seek a new climate, and mingle in different scenes.

It is singular, that during her residence in Store street, which lasted more
than twelve months, she produced nothing, except a few articles in the
Analytical Review. Her literary meditations were chiefly employed upon
the Sequel to the Rights of Woman; but she has scarcely left behind her a
single paper, that can, with any certainty, be assigned to have had this
destination.

CHAP. VII.
1792-1795.

The original plan of Mary, respecting her residence in France, had no
precise limits in the article of duration; the single purpose she had in view
being that of an endeavour to heal her distempered mind. She did not
proceed so far as even to discharge her lodging in London; and, to some
friends who saw her immediately before her departure, she spoke merely of
an absence of six weeks.
It is not to be wondered at, that her excursion did not originally seem to
produce the effects she had expected from it. She was in a land of strangers;
she had no acquaintance; she had even to acquire the power of receiving
and communicating ideas with facility in the language of the country. Her
first residence was in a spacious mansion to which she had been invited, but
the master of which (monsieur Fillietaz) was absent at the time of her
arrival. At first therefore she found herself surrounded only with servants.
The gloominess of her mind communicated its own colour to the objects
she saw; and in this temper she began a series of Letters on the Present
Character of the French Nation, one of which she forwarded to her
publisher, and which appears in the collection of her posthumous works.
This performance she soon after discontinued; and it is, as she justly
remarks, tinged with the saturnine temper which at that time pervaded her
mind.
Mary carried with her introductions to several agreeable families in Paris.
She renewed her acquaintance with Paine. There also subsisted a very
sincere friendship between her and Helen Maria Williams, author of a
collection of poems of uncommon merit, who at that time resided in Paris.
Another person, whom Mary always spoke of in terms of ardent
commendation, both for the excellence of his disposition, and the force of
his genius, was a count Slabrendorf, by birth, I believe, a Swede. It is
almost unnecessary to mention, that she was personally acquainted with the
majority of the leaders in the French revolution.

But the house that, I believe, she principally frequented at this time, was
that of Mr. Thomas Christie, a person whose pursuits were mercantile, and
who had written a volume on the French revolution. With Mrs. Christie her
acquaintance was more intimate than with the husband.
It was about four months after her arrival at Paris in December 1792, that
she entered into that species of connection, for which her heart secretly
panted, and which had the effect of diffusing an immediate tranquillity and
cheerfulness over her manners. The person with whom it was formed (for it
would be an idle piece of delicacy, to attempt to suppress a name, which is
known to every one whom the reputation of Mary has reached), was Mr.
Gilbert Imlay, native of the United States of North America.
The place at which she first saw Mr. Imlay was at the house of Mr. Christie;
and it perhaps deserves to be noticed, that the emotions he then excited in
her mind, were, I am told, those of dislike, and that, for some time, she
shunned all occasions of meeting him. This sentiment however speedily
gave place to one of greater kindness.
Previously to the partiality she conceived for him, she had determined upon
a journey to Switzerland, induced chiefly by motives of economy. But she
had some difficulty in procuring a passport; and it was probably the
intercourse that now originated between her and Mr. Imlay, that changed
her purpose, and led her to prefer a lodging at Neuilly, a village three miles
from Paris. Her habitation here was a solitary house in the midst of a
garden, with no other inhabitants than herself and the gardener, an old man,
who performed for her many of the offices of a domestic, and would
sometimes contend for the honour of making her bed. The gardener had a
great veneration for his guest, and would set before her, when alone, some
grapes of a particularly fine sort, which she could not without the greatest
difficulty obtain, when she had any person with her as a visitor. Here it was
that she conceived, and for the most part executed, her Historical and Moral
View of the French Revolution[A], into which, as she observes, are
incorporated most of the observations she had collected for her Letters, and
which was written with more sobriety and cheerfulness than the tone in
which they had been commenced. In the evening she was accustomed to
refresh herself by a walk in a neighbouring wood, from which her old host

in vain endeavoured to dissuade her, by recounting divers horrible robberies
and murders that had been committed there.
[A] No part of the proposed continuation of this work, has been found among the
papers of the author.

The commencement of the attachment Mary now formed, had neither
confident nor adviser. She always conceived it to be a gross breach of
delicacy to have any confidant in a matter of this sacred nature, an affair of
the heart. The origin of the connection was about the middle of April 1793,
and it was carried on in a private manner for four months. At the expiration
of that period a circumstance occurred that induced her to declare it. The
French convention, exasperated at the conduct of the British government,
particularly in the affair of Toulon, formed a decree against the citizens of
this country, by one article of which the English, resident in France, were
ordered into prison till the period of a general peace. Mary had objected to a
marriage with Mr. Imlay, who, at the time their connection was formed, had
no property whatever; because she would not involve him in certain family
embarrassments to which she conceived herself exposed, or make him
answerable for the pecuniary demands that existed against her. She however
considered their engagement as of the most sacred nature; and they had
mutually formed the plan of emigrating to America, as soon as they should
have realized a sum, enabling them to do it in the mode they desired. The
decree however that I have just mentioned, made it necessary, not that a
marriage should actually take place, but that Mary should take the name of
Imlay, which, from the nature of their connexion, she conceived herself
entitled to do, and obtain a certificate from the American ambassador, as the
wife of a native of that country.
Their engagement being thus avowed, they thought proper to reside under
the same roof, and for that purpose removed to Paris.
Mary was now arrived at the situation, which, for two or three preceding
years, her reason had pointed out to her as affording the most substantial
prospect of happiness. She had been tossed and agitated by the waves of
misfortune. Her childhood, as she often said, had known few of the
endearments, which constitute the principal happiness of childhood. The
temper of her father had early given to her mind a severe cast of thought,
and substituted the inflexibility of resistance for the confidence of affection.

The cheerfulness of her entrance upon womanhood, had been darkened, by
an attendance upon the death-bed of her mother, and the still more afflicting
calamity of her eldest sister. Her exertions to create a joint independence for
her sisters and herself, had been attended, neither with the success, nor the
pleasure, she had hoped from them. Her first youthful passion, her
friendship for Fanny, had encountered many disappointments, and, in fine, a
melancholy and premature catastrophe. Soon after these accumulated
mortifications, she was engaged in a contest with a near relation, whom she
regarded as unprincipled, respecting the wreck of her father's fortune. In
this affair she suffered the double pain, which arises from moral
indignation, and disappointed benevolence. Her exertions to assist almost
every member of her family, were great and unremitted. Finally, when she
indulged a romantic affection for Mr. Fuseli, and fondly imagined that she
should find in it the solace of her cares, she perceived too late, that, by
continually impressing on her mind fruitless images of unreserved affection
and domestic felicity, it only served to give new pungency to the sensibility
that was destroying her.
Some persons may be inclined to observe, that the evils here enumerated,
are not among the heaviest in the catalogue of human calamities. But evils
take their rank, more from the temper of the mind that suffers them, than
from their abstract nature. Upon a man of a hard and insensible disposition,
the shafts of misfortune often fall pointless and impotent. There are persons,
by no means hard and insensible, who, from an elastic and sanguine turn of
mind, are continually prompted to look on the fair side of things, and,
having suffered one fall, immediately rise again, to pursue their course, with
the same eagerness, the same hope, and the same gaiety, as before. On the
other hand, we not unfrequently meet with persons, endowed with the most
exquisite and delicious sensibility, whose minds seem almost of too fine a
texture to encounter the vicissitudes of human affairs, to whom pleasure is
transport, and disappointment is agony indescribable. This character is
finely pourtrayed by the author of the Sorrows of Werter. Mary was in this
respect a female Werter.
She brought then, in the present instance, a wounded and sick heart, to take
refuge in the bosom of a chosen friend. Let it not however be imagined, that
she brought a heart, querulous, and ruined in its taste for pleasure. No; her
whole character seemed to change with a change of fortune. Her sorrows,

the depression of her spirits, were forgotten, and she assumed all the
simplicity and the vivacity of a youthful mind. She was like a serpent upon
a rock, that casts its slough, and appears again with the brilliancy, the
sleekness, and the elastic activity of its happiest age. She was playful, full
of confidence, kindness and sympathy. Her eyes assumed new lustre, and
her cheeks new colour and smoothness. Her voice became chearful; her
temper overflowing with universal kindness; and that smile of bewitching
tenderness from day to day illuminated her countenance, which all who
knew her will so well recollect, and which won, both heart and soul, the
affection of almost every one that beheld it.
Mary now reposed herself upon a person, of whose honour and principles
she had the most exalted idea. She nourished an individual affection, which
she saw no necessity of subjecting to restraint; and a heart like her's was not
formed to nourish affection by halves. Her conception of Mr. Imlay's
"tenderness and worth, had twisted him closely round her heart;" and she
"indulged the thought, that she had thrown out some tendrils, to cling to the
elm by which she wished to be supported." This was "talking a new
language to her;" but, "conscious that she was not a parasite-plant," she was
willing to encourage and foster the luxuriancies of affection. Her
confidence was entire; her love was unbounded. Now, for the first time in
her life she gave a loose to all the sensibilities of her nature.
Soon after the time I am now speaking of, her attachment to Mr. Imlay
gained a new link, by finding reason to suppose herself with child.
Their establishment at Paris, was however broken up almost as soon as
formed, by the circumstance of Mr. Imlay's entering into business, urged, as
he said, by the prospect of a family, and this being a favourable crisis in
French affairs for commercial speculations. The pursuits in which he was
engaged, led him in the month of September to Havre de Grace, then called
Havre Marat, probably to superintend the shipping of goods, in which he
was jointly engaged with some other person or persons. Mary remained in
the capital.
The solitude in which she was now left, proved an unexpected trial.
Domestic affections constituted the object upon which her heart was fixed;
and she early felt, with an inward grief, that Mr. Imlay "did not attach those

tender emotions round the idea of home," which, every time they recurred,
dimmed her eyes with moisture. She had expected his return from week to
week, and from month to month, but a succession of business still
continued to detain him at Havre. At the same time the sanguinary character
which the government of France began every day more decisively to
assume, contributed to banish tranquillity from the first months of her
pregnancy. Before she left Neuilly, she happened one day to enter Paris on
foot (I believe, by the Place de Louis Quinze), when an execution, attended
with some peculiar aggravations, had just taken place, and the blood of the
guillotine appeared fresh upon the pavement. The emotions of her soul burst
forth in indignant exclamations, while a prudent bystander warned her of
her danger, and intreated her to hasten and hide her discontents. She
described to me, more than once, the anguish she felt at hearing of the death
of Brissot, Vergniaud, and the twenty deputies, as one of the most
intolerable sensations she had ever experienced.
Finding the return of Mr. Imlay continually postponed, she determined, in
January 1794, to join him at Havre. One motive that influenced her, though,
I believe, by no means the principal, was the growing cruelties of
Robespierre, and the desire she felt to be in any other place, rather than the
devoted city, in the midst of which they were perpetrated.
From January to September, Mr. Imlay and Mary lived together, with great
harmony, at Havre, where the child, with which she was pregnant, was
born, on the fourteenth of May, and named Frances, in remembrance of the
dear friend of her youth, whose image could never be erased from her
memory.
In September, Mr. Imlay took his departure from Havre for the port of
London. As this step was said to be necessary in the way of business, he
endeavoured to prevail upon Mary to quit Havre, and once more take up her
abode at Paris. Robespierre was now no more, and, of consequence, the
only objection she had to residing in the capital, was removed. Mr. Imlay
was already in London, before she undertook her journey, and it proved the
most fatiguing journey she ever made; the carriage, in which she travelled,
being overturned no less than four times between Havre and Paris.

This absence, like that of the preceding year in which Mr. Imlay had
removed to Havre, was represented as an absence that was to have a short
duration. In two months he was once again to join her at Paris. It proved
however the prelude to an eternal separation. The agonies of such a
separation, or rather desertion, great as Mary would have found them upon
every supposition, were vastly increased, by the lingering method in which
it was effected, and the ambiguity that, for a long time, hung upon it. This
circumstance produced the effect, of holding her mind, by force, as it were,
to the most painful of all subjects, and not suffering her to derive the just
advantage from the energy and elasticity of her character.
The procrastination of which I am speaking was however productive of one
advantage. It put off the evil day. She did not suspect the calamities that
awaited her, till the close of the year. She gained an additional three months
of comparative happiness. But she purchased it at a very dear rate. Perhaps
no human creature ever suffered greater misery, than dyed the whole year
1795, in the life of this incomparable woman. It was wasted in that sort of
despair, to the sense of which the mind is continually awakened, by a
glimmering of fondly cherished, expiring hope.
Why did she thus obstinately cling to an ill-starred, unhappy passion?
Because it is of the very essence of affection, to seek to perpetuate itself. He
does not love, who can resign this cherished sentiment, without suffering
some of the sharpest struggles that our nature is capable of enduring. Add to
this, Mary had fixed her heart upon this chosen friend; and one of the last
impressions a worthy mind can submit to receive, is that of the
worthlessness of the person upon whom it has fixed all its esteem. Mary
had struggled to entertain a favourable opinion of human nature; she had
unweariedly fought for a kindred mind, in whose integrity and fidelity to
take up her rest. Mr. Imlay undertook to prove, in his letters written
immediately after their complete separation, that his conduct towards her
was reconcilable to the strictest rectitude; but undoubtedly Mary was of a
different opinion. Whatever the reader may decide in this respect, there is
one sentiment that, I believe, he will unhesitatingly admit: that of pity for
the mistake of the man, who, being in possession of such a friendship and
attachment as those of Mary, could hold them at a trivial price, and, "like
the base Indian, throw a pearl away, richer than all his tribe.[A]"

[A] A person, from whose society at this time Mary derived particular
gratification, was Archibald Hamilton Rowan, who had lately become a fugitive
from Ireland, in consequence of a political prosecution, and in whom she found
those qualities which were always eminently engaging to her, great integrity of
disposition, and great kindness of heart.

CHAP. VIII.
1795, 1796.

In April 1795, Mary returned once more to London, being requested to do
so by Mr. Imlay, who even sent a servant to Paris to wait upon her in the
journey, before she could complete the necessary arrangements for her
departure. But, notwithstanding these favourable appearances, she came to
England with a heavy heart, not daring, after all the uncertainties and
anguish she had endured, to trust to the suggestions of hope.
The gloomy forebodings of her mind, were but too faithfully verified. Mr.
Imlay had already formed another connexion; as it is said, with a young
actress from a strolling company of players. His attentions therefore to
Mary were formal and constrained, and she probably had but little of his
society. This alteration could not escape her penetrating glance. He ascribed
it to pressure of business, and some pecuniary embarrassments which, at
that time, occurred to him; it was of little consequence to Mary what was
the cause. She saw, but too well, though she strove not to see, that his
affections were lost to her for ever.
It is impossible to imagine a period of greater pain and mortification than
Mary passed, for about seven weeks, from the sixteenth of April to the sixth
of June, in a furnished house that Mr. Imlay had provided for her. She had
come over to England, a country for which she, at this time, expressed "a
repugnance, that almost amounted to horror," in search of happiness. She
feared that that happiness had altogether escaped her; but she was
encouraged by the eagerness and impatience which Mr. Imlay at length
seemed to manifest for her arrival. When she saw him, all her fears were
confirmed. What a picture was she capable of forming to herself, of the
overflowing kindness of a meeting, after an interval of so much anguish and
apprehension! A thousand images of this sort were present to her burning
imagination. It is in vain, on such occasions, for reserve and reproach to
endeavour to curb in the emotions of an affectionate heart. But the hopes
she nourished were speedily blasted. Her reception by Mr. Imlay, was cold

and embarrassed. Discussions ("explanations" they were called) followed;
cruel explanations, that only added to the anguish of a heart already
overwhelmed in grief! They had small pretensions indeed to explicitness;
but they sufficiently told, that the case admitted not of remedy.
Mary was incapable of sustaining her equanimity in this pressing
emergency. "Love, dear, delusive love!" as she expressed herself to a friend
some time afterwards, "rigorous reason had forced her to resign; and now
her rational prospects were blasted, just as she had learned to be contented
with rational enjoyments". Thus situated, life became an intolerable
burthen. While she was absent from Mr. Imlay, she could talk of purposes
of reparation and independence. But, now that they were in the same house,
she could not withhold herself from endeavours to revive their mutual
cordiality; and unsuccessful endeavours continually added fuel to the fire
that destroyed her. She formed a desperate purpose to die.
This part of the story of Mary is involved in considerable obscurity. I only
know, that Mr. Imlay became acquainted with her purpose, at a moment
when he was uncertain whether or no it were already executed, and that his
feelings were roused by the intelligence. It was perhaps owing to his
activity and representations, that her life was, at this time, saved. She
determined to continue to exist. Actuated by this purpose, she took a
resolution, worthy both of the strength and affectionateness of her mind.
Mr. Imlay was involved in a question of considerable difficulty, respecting a
mercantile adventure in Norway. It seemed to require the presence of some
very judicious agent, to conduct the business to its desired termination.
Mary determined to make the voyage, and take the business into her own
hands. Such a voyage seemed the most desireable thing to recruit her
health, and, if possible, her spirits, in the present crisis. It was also
gratifying to her feelings, to be employed in promoting the interest of a
man, from whom she had experienced such severe unkindness, but to whom
she ardently desired to be reconciled. The moment of desperation I have
mentioned, occurred in the close of May, and, in about a week after, she set
out upon this new expedition.
The narrative of this voyage is before the world, and perhaps a book of
travels that so irresistibly seizes on the heart, never, in any other instance,
found its way from the press. The occasional harshness and ruggedness of

character, that diversify her Vindication of the Rights of Woman, here
totally disappear. If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love
with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her
sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in
tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all
our admiration. Affliction had tempered her heart to a softness almost more
than human; and the gentleness of her spirit seems precisely to accord with
all the romance of unbounded attachment.
Thus softened and improved, thus fraught with imagination and sensibility,
with all, and more than all, "that youthful poets fancy, when they love," she
returned to England, and, if he had so pleased, to the arms of her former
lover. Her return was hastened by the ambiguity, to her apprehension, of
Mr. Imlay's conduct. He had promised to meet her upon her return from
Norway, probably at Hamburgh; and they were then to pass some time in
Switzerland. The style however of his letters to her during her tour, was not
such as to inspire confidence; and she wrote to him very urgently, to explain
himself, relative to the footing upon which they were hereafter to stand to
each other. In his answer, which reached her at Hamburgh, he treated her
questions as "extraordinary and unnecessary," and desired her to be at the
pains to decide for herself. Feeling herself unable to accept this as an
explanation, she instantly determined to sail for London by the very first
opportunity, that she might thus bring to a termination the suspence that
preyed upon her soul.
It was not long after her arrival in London in the commencement of
October, that she attained the certainty she sought. Mr. Imlay procured her a
lodging. But the neglect she experienced from him after she entered it,
flashed conviction upon her, in spite of his asseverations. She made further
enquiries, and at length was informed by a servant, of the real state of the
case. Under the immediate shock which the painful certainty gave her, her
first impulse was to repair to him at the ready-furnished house he had
provided for his new mistress. What was the particular nature of their
conference I am unable to relate. It is sufficient to say that the wretchedness
of the night which succeeded this fatal discovery, impressed her with the
feeling, that she would sooner suffer a thousand deaths, than pass another of
equal misery.

The agony of her mind determined her; and that determination gave her a
sort of desperate serenity. She resolved to plunge herself in the Thames;
and, not being satisfied with any spot nearer to London, she took a boat, and
rowed to Putney. Her first thought had led her to Battersea-bridge, but she
found it too public. It was night when she arrived at Putney, and by that
time had begun to rain with great violence. The rain suggested to her the
idea of walking up and down the bridge, till her clothes were thoroughly
drenched and heavy with the wet, which she did for half an hour without
meeting a human being. She then leaped from the top of the bridge, but still
seemed to find a difficulty in sinking, which she endeavoured to counteract
by pressing her clothes closely round her. After some time she became
insensible; but she always spoke of the pain she underwent as such, that,
though she could afterwards have determined upon almost any other species
of voluntary death, it would have been impossible for her to resolve upon
encountering the same sensations again. I am doubtful, whether this is to be
ascribed to the mere nature of suffocation, or was not rather owing to the
preternatural action of a desperate spirit.
After having been for a considerable time insensible, she was recovered by
the exertions of those by whom the body was found. She had sought, with
cool and deliberate firmness, to put a period to her existence, and yet she
lived to have every prospect of a long possession of enjoyment and
happiness. It is perhaps not an unfrequent case with suicides, that we find
reason to suppose, if they had survived their gloomy purpose, that they
would, at a subsequent period, have been considerably happy. It arises
indeed, in some measure, out of the very nature of a spirit of self-
destruction; which implies a degree of anguish, that the constitution of the
human mind will not suffer to remain long undiminished. This is a serious
reflection, Probably no man would destroy himself from an impatience of
present pain, if he felt a moral certainty that there were years of enjoyment
still in reserve for him. It is perhaps a futile attempt, to think of reasoning
with a man in that state of mind which precedes suicide. Moral reasoning is
nothing but the awakening of certain feelings: and the feeling by which he
is actuated, is too strong to leave us much chance of impressing him with
other feelings, that should have force enough to counterbalance it. But, if
the prospect of future tranquillity and pleasure cannot be expected to have
much weight with a man under an immediate purpose of suicide, it is so

much the more to be wished, that men would impress their minds, in their
sober moments, with a conception, which, being rendered habitual, seems
to promise to act as a successful antidote in a paroxysm of desperation.
The present situation of Mary, of necessity produced some further
intercourse between her and Mr. Imlay. He sent a physician to her; and Mrs.
Christie, at his desire, prevailed on her to remove to her house in Finsbury-
square. In the mean time Mr. Imlay assured her that his present was merely
a casual, sensual connection; and, of course, fostered in her mind the idea
that it would be once more in her choice to live with him. With whatever
intention the idea was suggested, it was certainly calculated to increase the
agitation of her mind. In one respect however it produced an effect unlike
that which might most obviously have been looked for. It roused within her
the characteristic energy of mind, which she seemed partially to have
forgotten. She saw the necessity of bringing the affair to a point, and not
suffering months and years to roll on in uncertainty and suspence. This idea
inspired her with an extraordinary resolution. The language she employed,
was, in effect, as follows: "If we are ever to live together again, it must be
now. We meet now, or we part for ever. You say, You cannot abruptly break
off the connection you have formed. It is unworthy of my courage and
character, to wait the uncertain issue of that connexion. I am determined to
come to a decision. I consent then, for the present, to live with you, and the
woman to whom you have associated yourself. I think it important that you
should learn habitually to feel for your child the affection of a father. But, if
you reject this proposal, here we end. You are now free. We will correspond
no more. We will have no intercourse of any kind. I will be to you as a
person that is dead."
The proposal she made, extraordinary and injudicious as it was, was at first
accepted; and Mr. Imlay took her accordingly, to look at a house he was
upon the point of hiring, that she might judge whether it was calculated to
please her. Upon second thoughts however he retracted his concession.
In the following month, Mr. Imlay, and the woman with whom he was at
present connected, went to Paris, where they remained three months. Mary
had, previously to this, fixed herself in a lodging in Finsbury-place, where,
for some time, she saw scarcely any one but Mrs. Christie, for the sake of
whose neighbourhood she had chosen this situation; "existing," as she

expressed it, "in a living tomb, and her life but an exercise of fortitude,
continually on the stretch."
Thus circumstanced, it was unavoidable for her thoughts to brood upon a
passion, which all that she had suffered had not yet been able to extinguish.
Accordingly, as soon as Mr. Imlay returned to England, she could not
restrain herself from making another effort, and desiring to see him once
more. "During his absence, affection had led her to make numberless
excuses for his conduct," and she probably wished to believe that his
present connection was, as he represented it, purely of a casual nature. To
this application, she observes, that "he returned no other answer, except
declaring, with unjustifiable passion, that he would not see her."
This answer, though, at the moment, highly irritating to Mary, was not the
ultimate close of the affair. Mr. Christie was connected in business with Mr.
Imlay, at the same time that the house of Mr. Christie was the only one at
which Mary habitually visited. The consequence of this was, that, when Mr.
Imlay had been already more than a fortnight in town, Mary called at Mr.
Christie's one evening, at a time when Mr. Imlay was in the parlour. The
room was full of company. Mrs. Christie heard Mary's voice in the passage,
and hastened to her, to intreat her not to make her appearance. Mary
however was not to be controlled. She thought, as she afterwards told me,
that it was not consistent with conscious rectitude, that she should shrink, as
if abashed, from the presence of one by whom she deemed herself injured.
Her child was with her. She entered; and, in a firm manner, immediately led
up the child, now near two years of age, to the knees of its father. He retired
with Mary into another apartment, and promised to dine with her at her
lodging, I believe, the next day.
In the interview which took place in consequence of this appointment, he
expressed himself to her in friendly terms, and in a manner calculated to
sooth her despair. Though he could conduct himself, when absent from her,
in a way which she censured as unfeeling; this species of sternness
constantly expired when he came into her presence. Mary was prepared at
this moment to catch at every phantom of happiness; and the gentleness of
his carriage, was to her as a sun-beam, awakening the hope of returning day.
For an instant she gave herself up to delusive visions; and, even after the

period of delirium expired, she still dwelt, with an aching eye, upon the air-
built and unsubstantial prospect of a reconciliation.
At his particular request, she retained the name of Imlay, which, a short
time before, he had seemed to dispute with her. "It was not," as she
expresses herself in a letter to a friend, "for the world that she did so—not
in the least—but she was unwilling to cut the Gordian knot, or tear herself
away in appearance, when she could not in reality".
The day after this interview, she set out upon a visit to the country, where
she spent nearly the whole of the month of March. It was, I believe, while
she was upon this visit, that some epistolary communication with Mr.
Imlay, induced her resolutely to expel from her mind, all remaining doubt
as to the issue of the affair.
Mary was now aware that every demand of forbearance towards him, of
duty to her child, and even of indulgence to her own deep-rooted
predilection, was discharged. She determined to rouse herself, and cast off
for ever an attachment, which to her had been a spring of inexhaustible
bitterness. Her present residence among the scenes of nature, was
favourable to this purpose. She was at the house of an old and intimate
friend, a lady of the name of Cotton, whose partiality for her was strong and
sincere. Mrs. Cotton's nearest neighbour was Sir William East, baronet; and,
from the joint effect of the kindness of her friend, and the hospitable and
distinguishing attentions of this respectable family, she derived considerable
benefit. She had been amused and interested in her journey to Norway; but
with this difference, that, at that time, her mind perpetually returned with
trembling anxiety to conjectures respecting Mr. Imlay's future conduct,
whereas now, with a lofty and undaunted spirit, she threw aside every
thought that recurred to him, while she felt herself called upon to make one
more effort for life and happiness.
Once after this, to my knowledge, she saw Mr. Imlay; probably, not long
after her return to town. They met by accident upon the New Road; he
alighted from his horse, and walked with her for some time; and the
rencounter passed, as she assured me, without producing in her any
oppressive emotion.

Be it observed, by the way, and I may be supposed best to have known the
real state of the case, she never spoke of Mr. Imlay with acrimony, and was
displeased when any person, in her hearing, expressed contempt of him.
She was characterised by a strong sense of indignation; but her emotions of
this sort were short-lived, and in no long time subsided into a dignified
sereneness and equanimity.
The question of her connection with Mr. Imlay, as we have seen, was not
completely dismissed, till March 1796. But it is worthy to be observed, that
she did not, like ordinary persons under extreme anguish of mind, suffer her
understanding, in the mean time, to sink into listlessness and debility. The
most inapprehensive reader may conceive what was the mental torture she
endured, when he considers, that she was twice, with an interval of four
months, from the end of May to the beginning of October, prompted by it to
purposes of suicide. Yet in this period she wrote her Letters from Norway.
Shortly after its expiration she prepared them for the press, and they were
published in the close of that year. In January 1796, she finished the sketch
of a comedy, which turns, in the serious scenes, upon the incidents of her
own story. It was offered to both the winter-managers, and remained among
her papers at the period of her decease; but it appeared to me to be in so
crude and imperfect a state, that I judged it most respectful to her memory
to commit it to the flames. To understand this extraordinary degree of
activity, we must recollect however the entire solitude, in which most of her
hours were at that time consumed.

CHAP. IX.
1796, 1797.

I am now led, by the progress of the story, to the last branch of her history,
the connection between Mary and myself. And this I shall relate with the
same simplicity that has pervaded every other part of my narrative. If there
ever were any motives of prudence or delicacy, that could impose a
qualification upon the story, they are now over. They could have no relation
but to factitious rules of decorum. There are no circumstances of her life,
that, in the judgment of honour and reason, could brand her with disgrace.
Never did there exist a human being, that needed, with less fear, expose all
their actions, and call upon the universe to judge them. An event of the most
deplorable sort, has awfully imposed silence upon the gabble of frivolity.
We renewed our acquaintance in January 1796, but with no particular effect,
except so far as sympathy in her anguish, added in my mind to the respect I
had always entertained for her talents. It was in the close of that month that
I read her Letters from Norway; and the impression that book produced
upon me has been already related.
It was on the fourteenth of April that I first saw her after her excursion into
Berkshire. On that day she called upon me in Somers Town, she having,
since her return, taken a lodging in Cumming-street, Pentonville, at no great
distance from the place of my habitation. From that time our intimacy
increased, by regular, but almost imperceptible degrees.
The partiality we conceived for each other, was in that mode, which I have
always regarded as the purest and most refined style of love. It grew with
equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been impossible for the
most minute observer to have said who was before, and who was after. One
sex did not take the priority which long-established custom has awarded it,
nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not
conscious that either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient,
the toil-spreader or the prey, in the affair. When, in the course of things, the

disclosure came, there was nothing, in a manner, for either party to disclose
to the other.
In July 1796 I made an excursion into the county of Norfolk, which
occupied nearly the whole of that month. During this period Mary removed,
from Cumming-street, Pentonville, to Judd place West, which may be
considered as the extremity of Somers Town. In the former situation, she
had occupied a furnished lodging. She had meditated a tour to Italy or
Switzerland, and knew not how soon she should set out with that view. Now
however she felt herself reconciled to a longer abode in England, probably
without exactly knowing why this change had taken place in her mind. She
had a quantity of furniture locked up at a broker's ever since her residence
in Store-street, and she now found it adviseable to bring it into use. This
circumstance occasioned her present removal.
The temporary separation attendant on my little journey, had its effect on
the mind of both parties. It gave a space for the maturing of inclination. I
believe that, during this interval, each furnished to the other the principal
topic of solitary and daily contemplation. Absence bestows a refined and
aërial delicacy upon affection, which it with difficulty acquires in any other
way. It seems to resemble the communication of spirits, without the
medium, or the impediment, of this earthly frame.
When we met again, we met with new pleasure, and, I may add, with a
more decisive preference for each other. It was however three weeks longer,
before the sentiment which trembled upon the tongue, burst from the lips of
either. There was, as I have already said, no period of throes and resolute
explanation attendant on the tale. It was friendship melting into love.
Previously to our mutual declaration, each felt half-assured, yet each felt a
certain trembling anxiety to have assurance complete.
Mary rested her head upon the shoulder of her lover, hoping to find a heart
with which she might safely treasure her world of affection; fearing to
commit a mistake, yet, in spite of her melancholy experience, fraught with
that generous confidence, which, in a great soul, is never extinguished. I
had never loved till now; or, at least, had never nourished a passion to the
same growth, or met with an object so consummately worthy.

We did not marry. It is difficult to recommend any thing to indiscriminate
adoption, contrary to the established rules and prejudices of mankind; but
certainly nothing can be so ridiculous upon the face of it, or so contrary to
the genuine march of sentiment, as to require the overflowing of the soul to
wait upon a ceremony, and that which, wherever delicacy and imagination
exist, is of all things most sacredly private, to blow a trumpet before it, and
to record the moment when it has arrived at its climax.
There were however other reasons why we did not immediately marry.
Mary felt an entire conviction of the propriety of her conduct. It would be
absurd to suppose that, with a heart withered by desertion, she was not right
to give way to the emotions of kindness which our intimacy produced, and
to seek for that support in friendship and affection, which could alone give
pleasure to her heart, and peace to her meditations. It was only about six
months since she had resolutely banished every thought of Mr. Imlay; but it
was at least eighteen that he ought to have been banished, and would have
been banished, had it not been for her scrupulous pertinacity in determining
to leave no measure untried to regain him. Add to this, that the laws of
etiquette ordinarily laid down in these cases, are essentially absurd, and that
the sentiments of the heart cannot submit to be directed by the rule and the
square. But Mary had an extreme aversion to be made the topic of vulgar
discussion; and, if there be any weakness in this, the dreadful trials through
which she had recently passed, may well plead in its excuse. She felt that
she had been too much, and too rudely spoken of, in the former instance;
and she could not resolve to do any thing that should immediately revive
that painful topic.
For myself, it is certain that I had for many years regarded marriage with so
well-grounded an apprehension, that, notwithstanding the partiality for
Mary that had taken possession of my soul, I should have felt it very
difficult, at least in the present stage of our intercourse, to have resolved on
such a measure. Thus, partly from similar, and partly from different
motives, we felt alike in this, as we did perhaps in every other circumstance
that related to our intercourse.
I have nothing further that I find it necessary to record, till the
commencement of April 1797. We then judged it proper to declare our
marriage, which had taken place a little before. The principal motive for

complying with this ceremony, was the circumstance of Mary's being in a
state of pregnancy. She was unwilling, and perhaps with reason, to incur
that exclusion from the society of many valuable and excellent individuals,
which custom awards in cases of this sort. I should have felt an extreme
repugnance to the having caused her such an inconvenience. And, after the
experiment of seven months of as intimate an intercourse as our respective
modes of living would admit, there was certainly less hazard to either, in the
subjecting ourselves to those consequences which the laws of England
annex to the relations of husband and wife. On the sixth of April we entered
into possession of a house, which had been taken by us in concert.
In this place I have a very curious circumstance to notice, which I am happy
to have occasion to mention, as it tends to expose certain regulations of
polished society, of which the absurdity vies with the odiousness. Mary had
long possessed the advantage of an acquaintance with many persons of
genius, and with others whom the effects of an intercourse with elegant
society, combined with a certain portion of information and good sense,
sufficed to render amusing companions. She had lately extended the circle
of her acquaintance in this respect; and her mind, trembling between the
opposite impressions of past anguish and renovating tranquillity, found ease
in this species of recreation. Wherever Mary appeared, admiration attended
upon her. She had always displayed talents for conversation; but maturity of
understanding, her travels, her long residence in France, the discipline of
affliction, and the smiling, new-born peace which awaked a corresponding
smile in her animated countenance, inexpressibly increased them. The way
in which the story of Mr. Imlay was treated in these polite circles, was
probably the result of the partiality she excited. These elegant personages
were divided between their cautious adherence to forms, and the desire to
seek their own gratification. Mary made no secret of the nature of her
connection with Mr. Imlay; and in one instance, I well know, she put herself
to the trouble of explaining it to a person totally indifferent to her, because
he never failed to publish every thing he knew, and, she was sure, would
repeat her explanation to his numerous acquaintance. She was of too proud
and generous a spirit to stoop to hypocrisy. These persons however, in spite
of all that could be said, persisted in shutting their eyes, and pretending they
took her for a married woman.

Observe the consequence of this! While she was, and constantly professed
to be, an unmarried mother; she was fit society for the squeamish and the
formal. The moment she acknowledged herself a wife, and that by a
marriage perhaps unexceptionable, the case was altered. Mary and myself,
ignorant as we were of these elevated refinements, supposed that our
marriage would place her upon a surer footing in the calendar of polished
society, than ever. But it forced these people to see the truth, and to confess
their belief of what they had carefully been told; and this they could not
forgive. Be it remarked, that the date of our marriage had nothing to do with
this, that question being never once mentioned during this period. Mary
indeed had, till now, retained the name of Imlay which had first been
assumed from necessity in France; but its being retained thus long, was
purely from the aukwardness that attends the introduction of a change, and
not from an apprehension of consequences of this sort. Her scrupulous
explicitness as to the nature of her situation, surely sufficed to make the
name she bore perfectly immaterial.
It is impossible to relate the particulars of such a story, but in the language
of contempt and ridicule. A serious reflection however upon the whole,
ought to awaken emotions of a different sort. Mary retained the most
numerous portion of her acquaintance, and the majority of those whom she
principally valued. It was only the supporters and the subjects of the
unprincipled manners of a court, that she lost. This however is immaterial.
The tendency of the proceeding, strictly considered, and uniformly acted
upon, would have been to proscribe her from all valuable society. And who
was the person proscribed? The firmest champion, and, as I strongly
suspect, the greatest ornament her sex ever had to boast! A woman, with
sentiments as pure, as refined, and as delicate, as ever inhabited a human
heart! It is fit that such persons should stand by, that we may have room
enough for the dull and insolent dictators, the gamblers and demireps of
polished society!
Two of the persons, the loss of whose acquaintance Mary principally
regretted upon this occasion, were Mrs. Inchbald and Mrs. Siddons. Their
acquaintance, it is perhaps fair to observe, is to be ranked among her recent
acquisitions. Mrs. Siddons, I am sure, regretted the necessity, which she
conceived to be imposed on her by the peculiarity of her situation, to
conform to the rules I have described. She is endowed with that rich and

generous sensibility, which should best enable its possessor completely to
feel the merits of her deceased friend. She very truly observes, in a letter
now before me, that the Travels in Norway were read by no one, who was
in possession of "more reciprocity of feeling, or more deeply impressed
with admiration of the writer's extraordinary powers."
Mary felt a transitory pang, when the conviction reached her of so
unexpected a circumstance, that was rather exquisite. But she disdained to
sink under the injustice (as this ultimately was) of the supercilious and the
foolish, and presently shook off the impression of the first surprize. That
once subsided, I well know that the event was thought of, with no emotions,
but those of superiority to the injustice she sustained; and was not of force
enough, to diminish a happiness, which seemed hourly to become more
vigorous and firm.
I think I may venture to say, that no two persons ever found in each other's
society, a satisfaction more pure and refined. What it was in itself, can now
only be known, in its full extent, to the survivor. But, I believe, the serenity
of her countenance, the increasing sweetness of her manners, and that
consciousness of enjoyment that seemed ambitious that every one she saw
should be happy as well as herself, were matters of general observation to
all her acquaintance. She had always possessed, in an unparalleled degree,
the art of communicating happiness, and she was now in the constant and
unlimited exercise of it. She seemed to have attained that situation, which
her disposition and character imperiously demanded, but which she had
never before attained; and her understanding and her heart felt the benefit of
it.
While we lived as near neighbours only, and before our last removal, her
mind had attained considerable tranquillity, and was visited but seldom with
those emotions of anguish, which had been but too familiar to her. But the
improvement in this respect, which accrued upon our removal and
establishment, was extremely obvious. She was a worshipper of domestic
life. She loved to observe the growth of affection between me and her
daughter, then three years of age, as well as my anxiety respecting the child
not yet born. Pregnancy itself, unequal as the decree of nature seems to be
in this respect, is the source of a thousand endearments. No one knew better
than Mary how to extract sentiments of exquisite delight, from trifles,

which a suspicious and formal wisdom would scarcely deign to remark. A
little ride into the country with myself and the child, has sometimes
produced a sort of opening of the heart, a general expression of confidence
and affectionate soul, a sort of infantine, yet dignified endearment, which
those who have felt may understand, but which I should in vain attempt to
pourtray.
In addition to our domestic pleasures, I was fortunate enough to introduce
her to some of my acquaintance of both sexes, to whom she attached herself
with all the ardour of approbation and friendship.
Ours was not an idle happiness, a paradise of selfish and transitory
pleasures. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to mention, that, influenced by
the ideas I had long entertained upon the subject of cohabitation, I engaged
an apartment, about twenty doors from our house in the Polygon, Somers
Town, which I designed for the purpose of my study and literary
occupations. Trifles however will be interesting to some readers, when they
relate to the last period of the life of such a person as Mary. I will add
therefore, that we were both of us of opinion, that it was possible for two
persons to be too uniformly in each other's society. Influenced by that
opinion, it was my practice to repair to the apartment I have mentioned as
soon as I rose, and frequently not to make my appearance in the Polygon,
till the hour of dinner. We agreed in condemning the notion, prevalent in
many situations in life, that a man and his wife cannot visit in mixed
society, but in company with each other; and we rather sought occasions of
deviating from, than of complying with, this rule. By these means, though,
for the most part, we spent the latter half of each day in one another's
society, yet we were in no danger of satiety. We seemed to combine, in a
considerable degree, the novelty and lively sensation of visit, with the more
delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life.
Whatever may be thought, in other respects, of the plan we laid down to
ourselves, we probably derived a real advantage from it, as to the constancy
and uninterruptedness of our literary pursuits. Mary had a variety of
projects of this sort, for the exercise of her talents, and the benefit of
society; and, if she had lived, I believe the world would have had very little
reason to complain of any remission of her industry. One of her projects,
which has been already mentioned, was of a series of Letters on the

Management of Infants. Though she had been for some time digesting her
ideas on this subject with a view to the press, I have found comparatively
nothing that she had committed to paper respecting it. Another project, of
longer standing, was of a series of books for the instruction of children. A
fragment she left in execution of this project, is inserted in her Posthumous
Works.
But the principal work, in which she was engaged for more than twelve
months before her decease, was a novel, entitled, The Wrongs of Woman. I
shall not stop here to explain the nature of the work, as so much of it as was
already written, is now given to the public. I shall only observe that,
impressed, as she could not fail to be, with the consciousness of her talents,
she was desirous, in this instance, that they should effect what they were
capable of effecting. She was sensible how arduous a task it is to produce a
truly excellent novel; and she roused her faculties to grapple with it. All her
other works were produced with a rapidity, that did not give her powers
time fully to expand. But this was written slowly and with mature
consideration. She began it in several forms, which she successively
rejected, after they were considerably advanced. She wrote many parts of
the work again and again, and, when she had finished what she intended for
the first part, she felt herself more urgently stimulated to revise and improve
what she had written, than to proceed, with constancy of application, in the
parts that were to follow.

CHAP. X.
I am now led, by the course of my narrative, to the last fatal scene of her
life. She was taken in labour on Wednesday, the thirtieth of August. She had
been somewhat indisposed on the preceding Friday, the consequence, I
believe, of a sudden alarm. But from that time she was in perfect health.
She was so far from being under any apprehension as to the difficulties of
child-birth, as frequently to ridicule the fashion of ladies in England, who
keep their chamber for one full month after delivery. For herself, she
proposed coming down to dinner on the day immediately following. She
had already had some experience on the subject in the case of Fanny; and I
cheerfully submitted in every point to her judgment and her wisdom. She
hired no nurse. Influenced by ideas of decorum, which certainly ought to
have no place, at least in cases of danger, she determined to have a woman
to attend her in the capacity of midwife. She was sensible that the proper
business of a midwife, in the instance of a natural labour, is to sit by and
wait for the operations of nature, which seldom, in these affairs, demand the
interposition of art.
At five o'clock in the morning of the day of delivery, she felt what she
conceived to be some notices of the approaching labour. Mrs. Blenkinsop,
matron and midwife to the Westminster Lying in Hospital, who had seen
Mary several times previous to her delivery, was soon after sent for, and
arrived about nine. During the whole day Mary was perfectly cheerful. Her
pains came on slowly; and, in the morning, she wrote several notes, three
addressed to me, who had gone, as usual, to my apartments, for the purpose
of study. About two o'clock in the afternoon, she went up to her chamber,—
never more to descend.
The child was born at twenty minutes after eleven at night. Mary had
requested that I would not come into the chamber till all was over, and
signified her intention of then performing the interesting office of
presenting the new-born child to its father. I was sitting in a parlour; and it
was not till after two o'clock on Thursday morning, that I received the
alarming intelligence, that the placenta was not yet removed, and that the

midwife dared not proceed any further, and gave her opinion for calling in a
male practitioner. I accordingly went for Dr. Poignand, physician and man-
midwife to the same hospital, who arrived between three and four hours
after the birth of the child. He immediately proceeded to the extraction of
the placenta, which he brought away in pieces, till he was satisfied that the
whole was removed. In that point however it afterwards appeared that he
was mistaken.
The period from the birth of the child till about eight o'clock the next
morning, was a period full of peril and alarm. The loss of blood was
considerable, and produced an almost uninterrupted series of fainting fits. I
went to the chamber soon after four in the morning, and found her in this
state. She told me some time on Thursday, "that she should have died the
preceding night, but that she was determined not to leave me." She added,
with one of those smiles which so eminently illuminated her countenance,
"that I should not be like Porson," alluding to the circumstance of that great
man having lost his wife, after being only a few months married. Speaking
of what she had already passed through, she declared, "that she had never
known what bodily pain was before."
On Thursday morning Dr. Poignand repeated his visit. Mary had just before
expressed some inclination to see Dr. George Fordyce, a man probably of
more science than any other medical professor in England, and between
whom and herself there had long subsisted a mutual friendship. I mentioned
this to Dr. Poignand, but he rather discountenanced the idea, observing that
he saw no necessity for it, and that he supposed Dr. Fordyce was not
particularly conversant with obstetrical cases; but that I would do as I
pleased. After Dr. Poignand was gone, I determined to send for Dr. Fordyce.
He accordingly saw the patient about three o'clock on Thursday afternoon.
He however perceived no particular cause of alarm; and, on that or the next
day, quoted, as I am told, Mary's case, in a mixed company, as a
corroboration of a favourite idea of his, of the propriety of employing
females in the capacity of midwives. Mary "had had a woman, and was
doing extremely well."
What had passed however in the night between Wednesday and Thursday,
had so far alarmed me, that I did not quit the house, and scarcely the
chamber, during the following day. But my alarms wore off, as time

advanced. Appearances were more favourable, than the exhausted state of
the patient would almost have permitted me to expect. Friday morning
therefore I devoted to a business of some urgency, which called me to
different parts of the town, and which, before dinner, I happily completed.
On my return, and during the evening, I received the most pleasurable
sensations from the promising state of the patient. I was now perfectly
satisfied that every thing was safe, and that, if she did not take cold, or
suffer from any external accident, her speedy recovery was certain.
Saturday was a day less auspicious than Friday, but not absolutely alarming.
Sunday, the third of September, I now regard as the day, that finally decided
on the fate of the object dearest to my heart that the universe contained.
Encouraged by what I considered as the progress of her recovery, I
accompanied a friend in the morning in several calls, one of them as far as
Kensington, and did not return till dinner-time. On my return I found a
degree of anxiety in every face, and was told that she had had a sort of
shivering fit, and had expressed some anxiety at the length of my absence.
My sister and a friend of hers, had been engaged to dine below stairs, but a
message was sent to put them off, and Mary ordered that the cloth should
not be laid, as usual, in the room immediately under her on the first floor,
but in the ground-floor parlour. I felt a pang at having been so long and so
unseasonably absent, and determined that I would not repeat the fault.
In the evening she had a second shivering fit, the symptoms of which were
in the highest degree alarming. Every muscle of the body trembled, the
teeth chattered, and the bed shook under her. This continued probably for
five minutes. She told me, after it was over, that it had been a struggle
between life and death, and that she had been more than once, in the course
of it, at the point of expiring. I now apprehend these to have been the
symptoms of a decided mortification, occasioned by the part of the placenta
that remained in the womb. At the time however I was far from considering
it in that light. When I went for Dr. Poignand, between two and three
o'clock on the morning of Thursday, despair was in my heart. The fact of
the adhesion of the placenta was stated to me; and, ignorant as I was of
obstetrical science, I felt as if the death of Mary was in a manner decided.
But hope had re-visited my bosom; and her chearings were so delightful,
that I hugged her obstinately to my heart. I was only mortified at what

appeared to me a new delay in the recovery I so earnestly longed for. I
immediately sent for Dr. Fordyce, who had been with her in the morning, as
well as on the three preceding days. Dr. Poignand had also called this
morning but declined paying any further visits, as we had thought proper to
call in Dr. Fordyce.
The progress of the disease was now uninterrupted. On Tuesday I found it
necessary again to call in Dr. Fordyce in the afternoon, who brought with
him Dr. Clarke of New Burlington-street, under the idea that some
operation might be necessary. I have already said, that I pertinaciously
persisted in viewing the fair side of things; and therefore the interval
between Sunday and Tuesday evening, did not pass without some mixture
of cheerfulness. On Monday, Dr. Fordyce forbad the child's having the
breast, and we therefore procured puppies to draw off the milk. This
occasioned some pleasantry of Mary with me and the other attendants.
Nothing could exceed the equanimity, the patience and affectionateness of
the poor sufferer. I intreated her to recover; I dwelt with trembling fondness
on every favourable circumstance; and, as far it was possible in so dreadful
a situation, she, by her smiles and kind speeches, rewarded my affection.
Wednesday was to me the day of greatest torture in the melancholy series. It
was now decided that the only chance of supporting her through what she
had to suffer, was by supplying her rather freely with wine. This task was
devolved upon me. I began about four o'clock in the afternoon. But for me,
totally ignorant of the nature of diseases and of the human frame, thus to
play with a life that now seemed all that was dear to me in the universe, was
too dreadful a task. I knew neither what was too much, nor what was too
little. Having begun, I felt compelled, under every disadvantage, to go on.
This lasted for three hours. Towards the end of that time, I happened
foolishly to ask the servant who came out of the room, "What she thought
of her mistress?" she replied, "that, in her judgment, she was going as fast
as possible." There are moments, when any creature that lives, has power to
drive one into madness. I seemed to know the absurdity of this reply; but
that was of no consequence. It added to the measure of my distraction. A
little after seven I intreated a friend to go for Mr. Carlisle, and bring him
instantly wherever he was to be found. He had voluntarily called on the
patient on the preceding Saturday, and two or three times since. He had seen
her that morning, and had been earnest in recommending the wine-diet.

That day he dined four miles out of town, on the side of the metropolis,
which was furthest from us. Notwithstanding this, my friend returned with
him after three-quarters of an hour's absence. No one who knows my friend,
will wonder either at his eagerness or success, when I name Mr. Basil
Montagu. The sight of Mr. Carlisle thus unexpectedly, gave me a stronger
alleviating sensation, than I thought it possible to experience.
Mr. Carlisle left us no more from Wednesday evening, to the hour of her
death. It was impossible to exceed his kindness and affectionate attention. It
excited in every spectator a sentiment like adoration. His conduct was
uniformly tender and anxious, ever upon the watch, observing every
symptom, and eager to improve every favourable appearance. If skill or
attention could have saved her, Mary would still live. In addition to Mr.
Carlisle's constant presence, she had Dr. Fordyce and Dr. Clarke every day.
She had for nurses, or rather for friends, watching every occasion to serve
her, Mrs. Fenwick, author of an excellent novel, entitled Secrecy, another
very kind and judicious lady, and a favourite female servant. I was scarcely
ever out of the room. Four friends, Mr. Fenwick, Mr. Basil Montagu, Mr.
Marshal, and Mr. Dyson, sat up nearly the whole of the last week of her
existence in the house, to be dispatched, on any errand, to any part of the
metropolis, at a moment's warning.
Mr. Carlisle being in the chamber, I retired to bed for a few hours on
Wednesday night. Towards morning he came into my room with an account
that the patient was surprisingly better. I went instantly into the chamber.
But I now sought to suppress every idea of hope. The greatest anguish I
have any conception of, consists in that crushing of a new-born hope which
I had already two or three times experienced. If Mary recovered, it was
well, and I should see it time enough. But it was too mighty a thought to
bear being trifled with, and turned out and admitted in this abrupt way.
I had reason to rejoice in the firmness of my gloomy thoughts, when, about
ten o'clock on Thursday evening, Mr. Carlisle told us to prepare ourselves,
for we had reason to expect the fatal event every moment. To my thinking,
she did not appear to be in that state of total exhaustion, which I supposed
to precede death; but it is probable that death does not always take place by
that gradual process I had pictured to myself; a sudden pang may accelerate
his arrival. She did not die on Thursday night.

Till now it does not appear that she had any serious thoughts of dying; but
on Friday and Saturday, the two last days of her life, she occasionally spoke
as if she expected it. This was however only at intervals; the thought did not
seem to dwell upon her mind. Mr. Carlisle rejoiced in this. He observed,
and there is great force in the suggestion, that there is no more pitiable
object, than a sick man, that knows he is dying. The thought must be
expected to destroy his courage, to co-operate with the disease, and to
counteract every favourable effort of nature.
On these two days her faculties were in too decayed a state, to be able to
follow any train of ideas with force or any accuracy of connection. Her
religion, as I have already shown, was not calculated to be the torment of a
sick bed; and, in fact, during her whole illness, not one word of a religious
cast fell from her lips.
She was affectionate and compliant to the last. I observed on Friday and
Saturday nights, that, whenever her attendants recommended to her to sleep,
she discovered her willingness to yield, by breathing, perhaps for the space
of a minute, in the manner of a person that sleeps, though the effort, from
the state of her disorder, usually proved ineffectual.
She was not tormented by useless contradiction. One night the servant, from
an error in judgment, teazed her with idle expostulations, but she
complained of it grievously, and it was corrected. "Pray, pray, do not let her
reason with me," was her expression. Death itself is scarcely so dreadful to
the enfeebled frame, as the monotonous importunity of nurses ever-lastingly
repeated.
Seeing that every hope was extinct, I was very desirous of obtaining from
her any directions, that she might wish to have followed after her decease.
Accordingly, on Saturday morning, I talked to her for a good while of the
two children. In conformity to Mr. Carlisle's maxim of not impressing the
idea of death, I was obliged to manage my expressions. I therefore affected
to proceed wholly upon the ground of her having been very ill, and that it
would be some time before she could expect to be well; wishing her to tell
me any thing that she would choose to have done respecting the children, as
they would now be principally under my care. After having repeated this
idea to her in a great variety of forms, she at length said, with a significant

tone of voice, "I know what you are thinking of," but added, that she had
nothing to communicate to me upon the subject.
The shivering fits had ceased entirely for the two last days. Mr. Carlisle
observed that her continuance was almost miraculous, and he was on the
watch for favourable appearances, believing it highly improper to give up
all hope, and remarking, that perhaps one in a million, of persons in her
state might possibly recover. I conceive that not one in a million, unites so
good a constitution of body and of mind.
These were the amusements of persons in the very gulph of despair. At six
o'clock on Sunday morning, September the tenth, Mr. Carlisle called me
from my bed to which I had retired at one, in conformity to my request, that
I might not be left to receive all at once the intelligence that she was no
more. She expired at twenty minutes before eight.

Her remains were deposited, on the fifteenth of September, at ten o'clock in
the morning, in the church-yard of the parish church of St. Pancras,
Middlesex. A few of the persons she most esteemed, attended the ceremony;
and a plain monument is now erecting on the spot, by some of her friends,
with the following inscription:
mary wollstonecraft godwin,
author of
a vindication
of the rights of woman.
born, XXVII april MDCCLIX.
died, X september MDCCXCVII.

The loss of the world in this admirable woman, I leave to other men to
collect; my own I well know, nor can it be improper to describe it. I do not
here allude to the personal pleasures I enjoyed in her conversation: these
increased every day, in proportion as we knew each other better, and as our

mutual confidence increased. They can be measured only by the treasures of
her mind, and the virtues of her heart. But this is a subject for meditation,
not for words. What I purposed alluding to, was the improvement that I
have for ever lost.
We had cultivated our powers (if I may venture to use this sort of language)
in different directions; I chiefly an attempt at logical and metaphysical
distinction, she a taste for the picturesque. One of the leading passions of
my mind has been an anxious desire not to be deceived. This has led me to
view the topics of my reflection on all sides; and to examine and re-
examine without end, the questions that interest me.
But it was not merely (to judge at least from all the reports of my memory
in this respect) the difference of propensities, that made the difference in
our intellectual habits. I have been stimulated, as long as I can remember,
by an ambition for intellectual distinction; but, as long as I can remember, I
have been discouraged, when I have endeavoured to cast the sum of my
intellectual value, by finding that I did not possess, in the degree of some
other men, an intuitive perception of intellectual beauty. I have perhaps a
strong and lively sense of the pleasures of the imagination; but I have
seldom been right in aligning to them their proportionate value, but by dint
of persevering examination, and the change and correction of my first
opinions.
What I wanted in this respect, Mary possessed, in a degree superior to any
other person I ever knew. The strength of her mind lay in intuition. She was
often right, by this means only, in matters of mere speculation. Her religion,
her philosophy, (in both of which the errors were comparatively few, and
the strain dignified and generous) were, as I have already said, the pure
result of feeling and taste. She adopted one opinion, and rejected another,
spontaneously, by a sort of tact, and the force of a cultivated imagination;
and yet, though perhaps, in the strict sense of the term, she reasoned little, it
is surprising what a degree of soundness is to be found in her
determinations. But, if this quality was of use to her in topics that seem the
proper province of reasoning, it was much more so in matters directly
appealing to the intellectual taste. In a robust and unwavering judgment of
this sort, there is a kind of witchcraft; when it decides justly, it produces a
responsive vibration in every ingenuous mind. In this sense, my oscillation

and scepticism were fixed by her boldness. When a true opinion emanated
in this way from another mind, the conviction produced in my own assumed
a similar character, instantaneous and firm. This species of intellect
probably differs from the other, chiefly in the relation of earlier and later.
What the one perceives instantaneously (circumstances having produced in
it, either a premature attention to objects of this sort, or a greater boldness
of decision) the other receives only by degrees. What it wants, seems to be
nothing more than a minute attention to first impressions, and a just
appreciation of them; habits that are never so effectually generated, as by
the daily recurrence of a striking example.
This light was lent to me for a very short period, and is now extinguished
for ever!
While I have described the improvement I was in the act of receiving, I
believe I have put down the leading traits of her intellectual character.

the end.

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