How William Godwin dynamited his wife's reputation

And created a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft that's lasted for two hundred years

Note, I wrote this post about twelve months ago, but there was never a great time to post it. So now it’s in my Substack’s perpetual reserve, for when I run dry on ideas, which has come approximately…now.

Recently I got into 18th century novels again, through my e-readers “Show me a random book” function, I ended up reading Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story, which is about a flightly English Protestant girl who is the ward of a Catholic priest, and she falls hopelessly in love with him. The book was written in 1779, but published in 1790, and it was a huge contemporary success. The author, Inchbald, made a living writing for the stage, which was fairly rare in those times, and was a contemporary of the Enlightenment set: William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Emma Hays, etc.

I love early novels because you don’t know what’s going to happen. In a Victorian novel, you know the couple is going to fall in love and live happily ever after (unless it’s a Gothic or sensation novel, but you normally know pretty early if you’re reading one of those). In the 18th century you just have no idea. Like in Pamela, the maid lives happily ever after, married to the man who, err, has been harassing her, whereas in Clarissa, which was written by the same man, Richardson, Clarissa Harlowe dies tragically. You just have no clue which conventions will predominate in a given book, and sometimes the book itself seems a bit uncertain!

It’s actually quite hard to get good editions of 18th century novels, and especially of novels by women. The Inchbald book that I read was in an Oxford Classics Edition, but they don’t have that many of the minor 18th century novels. But then I remembered Broadview Editions, and I started browsing their catalogue. Many of their books aren’t available in digital edition through Amazon, for some reason, but you can order the digital edition via Google Play. That led me to read Portrait of Emma Courtney, which didn’t have quite the same broad appeal that I think A Simple Story does. But one character in the book is a thinly veiled portrait of the philosopher William Godwin, father of Mary Shelley (author of Frankenstein). And that reminded me I’d never read anything by his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft (mother of Mary Shelley). And I’d purchased, ages ago, a Penguin Classics book that combined a rather bizarre, unclassifiable work by Wollstonecraft, Letters Written From Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, with the book Godwin wrote about her after her death, Memoir of the Author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

I really liked both books! I’d read Godwin’s most-read novel, Caleb Williams before, during my last 18th century novel phase (I think I even wrote a blog post about it), but hadn’t read anything by Wollstonecraft. Her book, Letters is a series of twenty-five letters she wrote to her lover Gilbert Imlay (this was before she left Imlay and met Godwin) detailing her thoughts and feelings about her travels through Sweden and Norway. It’s full of beautiful descriptions of scenery and ruminations on manners and morals and, most importantly, on the importance of sentiment and the cultivation of one’s aesthetic capacities.

This is very early Romantic writing (i.e. it came before the writing of anyone we would properly call a Romantic), but it comes at a time when at least some intellectuals believed that the way to human happiness and self-improvement was through the cultivation of peoples’ capacity to feel. This leads to a very early kind of psychologism and self-evaluation (an English professor would probably call this the early stages of the bourgeois invention of the self). Wollstonecraft pays lots of attention to her own feelings and to the impact of the people and the landscape on her feelings.

Here is her description of, I believe, the people of Sweden, who she thinks are very uncultivated (although also very friendly):

Do not term me severe, if I add, that after youth is flown, the husband becomes a sot; and the wife amuses herself by scolding her servants. In fact, what is to be expected in any country where taste and cultivation of mind do not supply the place of youthful beauty and animal spirits? Affection requires a firmer foundation than sympathy; and few people have a principle of action sufficiently stable to produce rectitude of feeling; for, in spite of all the arguments I have heard to justify deviations from duty, I am persuaded that even the most spontaneous sensations are more under the direction of principle than weak people are willing to allow.

At some point she also becomes very depressed, because she realizes Imlay is trying to break things off with her (she’s on this journey in order to recover a treasure ship that Imlay lost, although this fact was only revealed through archival research in the 1980s!) And between completing this journey and publishing these letters she will attempt to commit suicide TWICE.

---

The other book in the volume, Godwin’s Memoirs, is of equal or perhaps greater interest. It’s a remarkably honest biography of Wollstonecraft, which Godwin writes as if he was a disinterested observer, almost in the style of a Plutarch or Suetonius. He describes her life and the development of her manner and characters, her early attachment to a childhood friend, Fanny Blood, who dies in childbirth in Lisbon, and how Wollstonecraft’s impulsive behavior leads to the collapse of a school she was running. He doesn’t shirk from any of her intellectual or moral faults. But the man was also clearly deeply in love with her and, moreover, intensely respected her.

Wollstonecraft is most famous as the author of the book Vindication of the Rights of Women (next on my reading list!) I have no idea what’s in it, but I gather that it’s an early feminist polemic: the Second Sex of its time. The tract made her extremely famous and recognizable. Around the time she wrote it, she went to Revolutionary France, where she met Gilbert Imlay and began her dalliance with him, which resulted both in an illegitimate daughter and in the melancholia that drove her to attempt suicide. Godwin doesn’t shirk from any of this! Rather, he seeks to justify it (Godwin himself didn’t believe strongly in marriage).

For a sample of the writing here’s his description of her early writing days, when she took up translation and other writing for hire:

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.

The book is a remarkable and loving portrait. In the end, when Mary is sick and hemmorhaging for days as an aftermath of childbirth (giving birth to Mary Shelley), you can tell that Godwin is utterly beside himself. It made me really sad. Moreover, it’s a pretty unique scene in literature. Think of the birth scene in War and Peace which gets so much acclaim: this is a scene utterly grounded in reality, which intimately involved the lives of three of the greatest writers of the age (if we count Mary Shelley, as we certainly should).

The publication of this book caused an immense scandal. It completely torpedoed the reputation of Wollstonecraft. She’d already suffered from marrying William Godwin. As he mentioned in the book, until they got married, people allowed themselves to believe that Wollstonecraft’s daughter with Imlay had been legitimate (i.e. she and Imlay had married). But after she married Godwin, there was no denying the reality that she’d had a premarital relationship. So that already affected her relationship.

But when the details were aired by Godwin, everyone was like, wow this lady had such loose morals! That’s exactly what comes of these Jacobin, revolutionary sympathies! So her life became part of the story about these shiftless free-thinking atheistic immoral intellectuals, and for almost a hundred years, people ignored her. In fact, the memoir was out of print for more than a hundred years!

Here’s the author of the introduction to the Penguin Classics book, describing the Memoir’s reception:

The Monthly Review, previously her supporter, now wrote with hypocritical disapproval in May 1798: ‘blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands if they were forced to relate those anecdotes of their wives which Mr Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world. The extreme eccentricity of Mr Godwin’s sentiments will account for this conduct. Virtue and vice are weighed by him in a balance of his own. He neither looks to marriage with respect, nor to suicide with horror

Godwin himself was struck by the reaction, and for the rest of his life he wrote much less and much less freely. He opened a bookstore and made his living from publishing children’s books. He stood by the memoir, but recognized that the public didn’t want that sort of honestly. Indeed, what’ll characterize the next hundred years is a profound turning-away from honesty in sexual and romantic matters.

But luckily the tide turned and now we have this profound and loving document to remember Wollstonecraft by.