Godwin on Wollstonecraft: The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft by William Godwin. William Godwin

and it is here that he first makes the notorious comparison between Mary and Goethe’s lovelorn young Werther. The friendship took her on her first remarkable voyage, to Portugal in 1785, where Fanny died in childbirth. This passion was never subsequently forgotten. (Chapter 2 and 3)

      The atheist Godwin also sympathetically describes and analyses Mary’s religious beliefs. He treats them in a strikingly modern and psychological way, less as the product of Christian dogma or ‘polemical discussion’, but more as an imaginative expression of her temperament and character. ‘She found inexpressible delight in the beauties of nature, and in the splendid reveries of the imagination…When she walked amidst the wonders of nature, she was accustomed to converse with her God.’ (Chapter 3)

      Next comes her combative experiences as a governess in Ireland, and the discovery of her charismatic talents as a teacher, and gifts as an educational writer (Chapter 4). This is followed from 1788 by the excitement of her early freelance work in London, and her professional friendship with the publisher Joseph Johnson, during which an intense period of self-education takes place. At the same time she takes responsibilty for the careers and financing of most of her family, including her sisters and her father. (Chapter 5).

      Then in 1792, at the age of 35, and at a climactic moment in revolutionary history, she achieves the rapid and triumphant writing of The Rights of Woman, in which she brings both her wide reading and her bitter personal experiences to bear, and makes herself in Godwin’s words ‘the effectual champion’ of her sex. (Chapter 6). Yet at the very moment of success, she is frustrated and humiliated by the ill-judged affair with the married (but bisexual) painter Henry Fuseli, whose exact nature Godwin leaves curiously ill-defined

      It is exactly at this crucial half-way point in his narrative, and significantly just out of chronological sequence, that Godwin ironically places his first and deeply unsatisfactory meeting with Mary, at a dinner party with Johnson and Tom Paine in November 1791. Far from being love at first sight, they quarrel so fiercely that Paine hardly gets a word in edgeways. It is again typical of Godwin that he does not omit this memorable scene.

      From now on the biography seems to accelerate and intensify. Mary sets out on her own to observe events in revolutionary Paris, and as the Terror begins, falls in love with the handsome American adventurer Gilbert Imlay. Godwin’s description of her sexual awakening by Imlay, using the beautiful pre-Freudian imagery of ‘a serpent on a rock’, is one of his triumphs as a biographer, and one wonders how much it must have cost him. Here the comparison with the suicidal young Werther is also repeated. (Chapter 7).

      Mary is registered as Imlay’s wife, and in 1794 bears his illegitimate child – named Fanny (after Fanny Blood) – in Le Havre-Marat. She embarks on a desperate journey to Scandinavia, transforming a secret business venture for Imlay into a wonderful, melancholy book of Romantic travels. Godwin’s tender account of his personal reaction to this book, prepares the ground for the unexpected love-match that will follow.

      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 our full attention.’ (Chapter 8)

      On Mary’s return to London in 1795, she discovers that she is betrayed by Imlay, and twice tries to commit suicide, first with an overdose of opium and then by jumping into the Thames. Godwin’s vivid and moving account of this episode includes another unforgettable image of Mary, pacing Putney Bridge at night in the rain, hoping that by soaking her clothes she would drown more quickly. Paradoxically, it opened Godwin to the charge of trying to make a moral defence of suicide. (Chapter 8).

      The remaining two chapters become increasingly confessional. Yet they are written in the same admirably limpid and economic style, in which understatement is deliberately used to contain overwhelming emotion. Godwin describes how they fell in love in the spring of 1796, and began sleeping together in August, long before their mutual decision to marry. This was only taken after Mary became pregnant. Such a candid admission also opened Godwin to further mockery and abuse, although he never altered it in the second edition. (Chapter 9).

      Finally, at great length and in almost gynecological detail, without the least reference to the traditional comforts of religion, Godwin painfully and minutely describes Mary’s death, eleven days after bearing her second child (Chapter 10). It was the first time a deathbed had been described in this intimate way, including such unsettling details as Mary being given puppies to draw off her breast-milk, and being given too much wine to dull her pain.

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      Some two centuries later its is still possible to find the Memoirs shocking, and to disagree about the picture its draws of Wollstonecraft. Many feminist critics believe that it miscast her as a Romantic heroine, and fatally undervalued her intellectual powers. Most of her modern biographers freely use Godwin as wonderful source material, but condemn him as a hopelessly biased witness.

      Even an outstandingly perceptive and measured writer like Claire Tomalin is uneasy about the effect of his work. ‘In their own way, even the Memoirs had diminished and distorted Mary’s real importance: by minimizing her claim to be taken seriously for her ideas, and presenting her instead as a female Werther, a romantic and tragic heroine, he may have been giving the truth as he wanted to see it, but was very far from serving the cause she had believed in. He made no attempt to discuss her intellectual development, and he was unwilling to consider the validity of her feminist ideas in any detail.’ (Tomalin, 1974)

      This has weight, and is curiously close to the criticism originally made by the Analytical Review in 1798. But it has to be set, for example, against Godwin’s extended analysis and celebration of the significance of The Rights of Woman in Chapter 6. ‘Never did any author enter into a cause, with more ardent desire to be found, not a flourishing and empty declaimer, but an effectual champion…When we consider the importance of its doctrines, and the eminence of genius it displays, it seems not very improbable that [her book] will be read as long as the English language endures…’

      Much criticism has also been directed against Godwin’s attempt at the very end of his biography, to summarize Mary’s ‘intellectual character’, and apparently draw a ‘gendered’ distinction between masculine and feminine intelligence. He contrasts his own cool rational delight in ‘logic and metaphysical distinction’, with her strong, warm emotional instincts and ‘taste for the picturesque’. (Chapter 10). This is easily ridiculed. But it is overlooked that Godwin, the faithful biographer, was actually paraphrasing one of Wollstonecraft’s own letters to him of August 1796. This is what Mary herself wrote on the subject.

      Our imaginations have been rather differently employed – I am more a painter than you – I like to tell the truth, my taste for the picturesque has been more cultivated…My affections have been more exercised than yours, I believe, and my senses are quick, without the aid of fancy – yet tenderness always prevails, which inclines me to be angry with myself when, I do not animate and please those I love.

      But the problem of the intimate biography which seems to violate certain codes of family loyalty and trust is still with us. Thirty years ago, Nigel Nicolson’s Portrait of a Marriage (1973), which revealed his mother Vita Sackville-West’s lesbian relationships, and his father’s homosexual ones, raised such questions. More recently, John Bailey’s account of his wife Iris Murdoch’s relentless destruction by Alzheimer’s disease, in Iris (1999), left many readers and reviewers deeply troubled by such revelations. Yet both these are fine books, and it seems possible that biography as a form is destined to challenge conventions of silence and ignorance.

      One also has to consider the historical effect of such a powerful biography is a more oblique way. The fact, for example, that Mary’s life inspired so many Romantic novels, suggests Godwin had also made her something of a legendary figure. The emotional intensity of Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, the novel which Jane Austen originally drafted at just this time (1797-8), might owe more than we suspect to Mary’s example.

      Her outrageous or comic persona