Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollsteoncraft was born on 27 April 1759 in London.
Her father Edward drifted in and out of jobs and locations, never succeeding in
establishing himself or his family on a stable basis. A failure on a
professional level, he was also abusive as a person, particularly to his wife
Elizabeth. Mary's youthful experiences of trying to shield and console her
mother strongly colored her later writings against what she thought of as the
bondage of marriage.
As an
adolescent Mary Wollstonecraft befriended Fanny Blood with whom she formed an
enduring bond. After the death of her mother in 1780, Mary
abandoned her own home and went to live with the Blood family, a female enclave
that subsisted on the small earnings to be made by needlework and painting. Her
sister Eliza escaped the home by marriage, but, when after the birth of a child
she appeared to her husband to have suffered a nervous collapse, he summoned
Mary to help in her recovery. The sister, instead, became convinced that the
problem lay in her marriage, and she essentially kidnapped Eliza, afterward
arranging for a legal separation of husband and wife.
At this point (1784), facing
the universal lack of professional opportunity for women, Wollstonecraft decided
to set up a school with Eliza and Fanny Blood, in Islington. They determined, however, that their prospects would be improved if they
transferred it outside the city and thus moved to the northern suburb of
Newington Green, where they were joined by the third of the Wollstonecraft
sisters Everina. In this idyllic location Mary made
the acquaintance of Samuel Johnson, also of
the radical Dissenting minister Dr. Richard Price.
In 1785 Fanny Blood
left the school to accept an offer of marriage in Lisbon, Portugal. She was
soon pregnant, and, in her isolation, she wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, pleading
with her to join her and see her through the birth of her child. Although it
meant jeopardizing the success of the school, Mary left for Lisbon, where she
encountered her friend already in premature labor. Fanny died in Mary's arms,
and the baby survived for only a short time after her. The despondency into
which this episode drove Mary is rehearsed in the central chaopters
of her first novel, Mary, A Fiction, published
in 1788.
Returning to
England, Mary Wollstonecraft found her school in untenable financial condition
and was forced to close it. She attempted to realize some income by writing a
conduct book based on her experiences as a teacher, Thoughts on the
Education of Daughters, which would be brought to the press in 1787 by the
foremost liberal publisher of the time, Joseph Johnson. Robbed of her
independent livelihood, however, she had no resources to support herself, and
in 1786 she entered
the household of Viscount Kingsborough of Mitchelstown,
Country Cork, Ireland, where she served as governess to the two daughters. This
position lasted a year and drove her to a detestation of the demeaning position
of governess that can be seen in many of her later writings. It also led to her
second educational publication, a work that, with surprisingly dark colors,
drew on her Irish experiences, following the reclamation of two spoiled sisters
by a determinedly sober governess named Mrs. Mason, which was published by
Johnson in 1788 as Original
Stories from Real Life: with Conversations Calculated to Regulate the
Affections and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness. William Blake furnished
illustrations for its second edition. Many years later, after she moved to
Italy, Mary Shelley found
herself befriended by one of those once wayward sisters, who, having escaped an
arranged marriage to an Irish peer, in veneration of her former governess had
adopted the name of Mrs. Mason and thrived amid the intellectual life of the
university town of Pisa.
With her
career as an educator frustrated, Mary Wollstonecraft determined to earn her
living by her pen, translating from the French and reviewing for Johnson's
periodical, the Analytical Review. At Joseph Johnson's weekly Tuesday
dinners Mary Wollstonecraft met a number of radical thinkers: Thomas Paine, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and most
importantly, though at the time he found her somewhat irritating, William Godwin, whom she
first met in 1791. With
Johnson's liberal circle of intellectuals Mary at last found her rightful
place, and soon she found the opportunity to enlist her pen in controversy far
beyond the range usually assumed by a female author. Her target was Edmund Burke's
conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France, written ostensibly
as an admonishing letter to Richard Price. Although there were some thirty
responses to Burke's rambling diatribe against French democracy, including
Thomas Paine's best-selling polemic, Rights of Man, Mary
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790) had the
honor of being the first off the press. It is clear, however, that as
Wollstonecraft honed her attack on Burke's defence of
landed property over human rights she saw a larger issue on which Burke's
entire argument depended: patriarchy. Two years later saw the publication of
the work that made her famous and that survives the centuries for the depth and
cogency of its analysis, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published
by Johnson in 1792.
Late that
year, in typically daring fashion, Mary Wollstonecraft traveled to France to
witness the French Revolution firsthand and to collect material for her Historical
and Moral View of the French Revolution, which Johnson published in 1794. While in
Paris she met an American ship captain and businessman, Gilbert Imlay, and soon
became his lover. Indeed, they lived a romantic existence, for all English,
however sympathetic to the regime, were under threat by the Terror, and Imlay
first hid Mary in the American embassy during its height, then moved to the
port of Le Havre where she managed to pass safely as his wife. In 1794 she had a
daughter by Imlay, Fanny Imlay, to whom
she was deeply attached. Never one to stick at proper female conventions, Mary
with her infant daughter undertook an expedition to further Imlay's business
interests, the account of which she published as one of her enduring
contributions to English literature, Letters Written during a Short
Residence in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark (1796). These
letters end with a sense of impending disaster, which was, indeed, the case.
Upon her return to London, Wollstonecraft discovered that, while she was
working on his behalf, Imlay had deserted her. Distraught, she attempted
suicide by jumping from Putney Bridge into the Thames.
Recovering
from this near disaster, Mary Wollstonecraft renewed her acquaintance with
William Godwin, and, though they kept their separate apartments and circle of
friends, they soon became romantically involved. Although both had written
against the prevailing notions of matrimony, when it became clear that Mary was
pregnant they determined to marry: the wedding was performed in St. Pancras Church on 29 March 1797. On 31
August Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter, who was given both their
names as an intellectual inheritance, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The child was robust, but there were complications with the afterbirth,
and Mary Wollstonecraft quickly sickened from placental infection and died just
eleven days after her daughter's birth, on 10 September.
Deeply
attached as the lovers had been, this event left Godwin distraught. His means
of recovery was to write a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, Memoirs of the
Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, to which he added an
edition of the remarkable fragments of her last novel, Maria, or the Wrongs
of Woman. Their publication in 1798 had the
ironic effect of furnishing critics of Mary Wollstonecraft's lifestyle with the
means by which to attack not just her but all attempts to liberate women from a
conventional patriarchal control. In the end justice prevails. In a later time
her attackers have receded to historical footnotes, and Mary Wollstonecraft
stands in honor for her significant contributions to English letters and human
progress.
URL
http://www.english.upenn.edu/Projects/knarf/Wollston/bio.html
OTHER
INTERESTING BIOGRAPHIES:
←PREVIOUS [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] NEXT→