The death of Mary Wollstonecraft--and how it affects her husband, William Godwin.
And then, of course, Mary died shortly after
delivering her daughter, whom Godwin promptly named for his lost wife. Godwin
would reanimate his lost Mary in more than one way in his ensuing years. Yes,
he named his daughter for her (and isn’t this in an eerie way a bit like Frankenstein? A distraught man seeking
the secret of Life—bringing into the world another living being?), but he also
found other ways to immortalize her.
I’ve already written about his memoir about Mary—a
memoir that caused him (and his late wife) considerable social trouble from
which he never truly recovered. But he also wrote about her, indirectly, in his
fiction. The first novel he wrote after her death was St Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century,[i]
begun on December 31, 1797, just four months after that dark date. It first
appeared on December 2, 1799, and he later revised it for another edition in
1831.
Contemporary
reviews were generally unfavourable—so says scholar Pamela Clemit, who
edited the authoritative edition for publisher William Pickering in 1992.[ii]
This is no surprise: Godwin had tumbled from favor with both critics and much
of the conservative and pious reading public. And literary criticism is often
pointedly political.
I read St Leon
in the late summer of 1997, coincidentally just about the time of the
two-hundredth anniversary of Mary Wollstonecraft’s death. And I was moved by
it—especially when I became aware of the personal aspects of the story.
It is a tale about the eponymous St Leon, who
narrates. In his twenties, he meets Marguerite Louise Isabeau de Damville: This was a woman, Godwin writes, destined to crown my happiness, and
consummate my misery. If I had never known her, I should never have tasted true
pleasure; if I had been guided by her counsels, I should not have drained to the
very dregs the cup of anguish.[iii]
Later, from a strange old man whom he has helped, St
Leon learns both the art of multiplying
gold, and the power of living forever.”[iv] Of
course, this means he will outlive his beloved wife, and when she does die
later on, he says I never loved but once;
I never loved but Marguerite. All other affection is stillness and ice compared
with this.[v]
I remember—when I originally read this—what Godwin’s
second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, must have thought when she read it. For there’s not doubt that Godwin was writing about
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (he kept her portrait over his desk for the rest of
his life), and there’s also no doubt that Mary Jane Clairmont Godwin, a bright
woman, knew that her husband was
writing, in a way, about his first wife.
Keeping a loved one alive in words. Godwin was neither
the first nor the last to engage in that hope for immortality. Think of that
final couplet in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?): “So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this and
this gives life to thee.” The this,
of course, is the sonnet itself—the words
in which this anonymous lover lives forever. Just as Mary, in a way, lives on
in the pages of St Leon.
I’ll not say more about the novel—you can easily
acquire it online, on e-readers, and Amazon still has paperback and cloth
copies available. Oh, I just checked ABE and discovered that a first printing
of the novel is going for $3500.[vi] The
ever-impecunious Godwin is no doubt drooling in his grave. And that very
impecuniousness forced him to make a radical decision about his life, and that
decision would forever affect his famous daughter.
[i]
Godwin does not use a period after St—not
in the title, not in the text; this was the general practice in England. In his
1831 revision, however, the period appears in the title though not in the text.
[ii] Collected Novels and Memoirs of William
Godwin, vol. 4, vi.
[iii] Ibid.,
39.
[iv] Ibid.,
135.
[v] Ibid.,
240.
[vi] On
January 12, 2015.
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