Oddly, Godwin’s memoir of his wife did much to destroy
her reputation—and his—in a public becoming much more, well, Victorian—although
Victoria would not take the throne until 1837, a year after Godwin died and
some thirty years after he published this little book (the text is only about
seventy pages in the Penguin Classics edition).
Why did it have such a deleterious effect?
Well, he wrote frankly (as frankly as was possible at
the time) about Mary’s affair with the American Gilbert Imlay (see chapter
above: “What’s Eating Gilbert Imlay?”). Godwin writes about how the two met,
how they fell in love (a heart like hers
was not formed to nourish affection by halves,[1] he
says), how Mary took the name “Mrs. Imlay” even though they were not married,
how they lived together near Paris (while she was researching her book Historical and Moral View of the French
Revolution), and—most damning of all: She found reason to suppose herself with child.[2]
Oops. Godwin had just written (in his usual frank and
unapologetic way) about an illicit affair, about a child born out of wedlock.
Godwin was not naïve, I will quickly say. He was just true to his principles,
principles he’d written about repeatedly in his essays and monographs—the obligation
of human beings to be frank and honest with one another. He would quickly learn
that most people in London and throughout the country did not agree.
Godwin went on to write candidly about how Imlay
abandoned Mary, who now had a child (Fanny Imlay). Perhaps no human creature, he wrote, ever suffered greater misery [… than did] this incomparable woman.[3]
Godwin went on to describe her suicide attempt—leaping
at night into the Thames from Putney Bridge in 1795—another tale not destined
to earn Mary or Godwin any admiration from the reading public.
The final two chapters of his ten-chapter text deal
with his own relationship with Mary Wollstonecraft, chapters that reveal their
own sexual activity—but also featuring declarations like this one: I think I may venture to say, that no two
persons ever found in each other’s society, a satisfaction more pure and
refined—a sentence that surely elicited salacious snickers from readers.[4]
He also talks about his great fondness for Mary’s
daughter, Fanny, and how—although he and Mary shared living quarters—they maintained
separate accommodations during the day, places near each other, places where
they could do their own work and writing. During the day they wrote letters
back and forth to each other (late 17th-century texting, in a way),
and the surviving notes have been published in a lovely little book called Godwin and Mary: Letters of William Godwin
and Mary Wollstonecraft.[5]
Some are barely a sentence long; others, more lengthy. But all reveal—in a way
that no biographer really could—the profound intimacy of these two—the lovely
collapse of two human hearts into one.
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