Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft
by Lyndall Gordon
HarperCollins. 562 pages, $29.95
FEW PEOPLE change our fundamental view of the world: the Buddha and Jesus, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, Freud, a handful of others. Mary Wollstonecraft belongs to that august company. It’s impossible to imagine our lives without her, for she single-handedly got people thinking about the unthinkable: equality between the sexes. Nothing could be simpler, nothing more natural, and judging from the two centuries since her death, nothing harder to achieve.
Born in 1759 to a violent, alcoholic father, she often saw her mother beaten, and that image of oppression and humiliation determined the course of her life. At an early age, she wrote to her sister Everina, “I am going to be the first of a new genus. The peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.” Her nature was complaining and depressive—she attempted suicide twice—but also deeply compassionate and as persevering as Alexander the Great. And it didn’t hurt that she was attractive, charismatic, and brilliant.
Because her father was a spendthrift, Mary and her siblings were put to work at an early age. She founded a grade school; when that failed she took a job as a paid companion and then became governess for one of the richest families in Ireland. Her dream of independence kept receding, even more so when her mother died and she took on financial responsibility for her entire family, including her wastrel father. And then, a miracle: a benefactor (we don’t know who) gave her enough money to pay her debts, quit her job, and move to London in the hope of making her way as a freelance writer, something no woman had ever done before.
She was fortunate to be taken up by Joseph Johnson, the most progressive publisher of the day and a man who introduced her to a group of her intellectual peers, including Erasmus Darwin and Thomas Paine. Her first year working for Johnson she learned Italian so she could translate from that language; the following year she learned German for the same reason. She had the energy and determination of a platoon of marines. She also shared the phrenologists’ belief in the malleability of human nature and she exemplified their motto: “Self-made, or Never Made!”
Increasingly she turned her attention to the appalling condition of women in her day, which was worse than it had been since the Romans. The Hardwicke Act of 1753 restricted women’s rights to property, to their own earnings, and even to their children, while also depriving them of any grounds for divorce. Upon marrying, women even lost the right to habeas corpus, and since they were treated as mere property in the eyes of the law, they were completely subject to their husbands’ rule, no matter how violent and demeaning. It would be over a century before a new law established a woman’s right to divorce an abusive husband. In other words, Wollstonecraft set herself to overturn the accumulated social custom and legal precedent of a thousand years. If it was hard for a Betty Friedan to launch her revolutionary enterprise in 1963, imagine what it must have been for Wollstonecraft two hundred years earlier. Many thought she was simply out of her mind.
Her great book—A Vindication of the Rights of Women—was published in 1792 when she was 33. Three years later she began her great experiment: a relationship with William Godwin, the political philosopher and novelist whose An Inquiry Concerning Political Justice became a seminal work for the English Romantics. Godwin and Mary were opposed to marriage, but they nevertheless married when Mary became pregnant with her second child. Yet each was so determined to remain independent that after their marriage they worked in separate houses, often dined separately, and even had separate circles of friends. They thus managed to avoid the deadening routines of most married life. They were in fact more intellectual companions than spouses, and their novel union proved a great success.
But it was short-lived, for Wollstonecraft died at 38 giving birth to the future Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. Though Godwin had known her for only two of her nearly 39 years and was on bad terms with her surviving sisters, he rushed into print a partial and inaccurate biography, ostensibly to vindicate Wollstonecraft for posterity and for those who were dismissive of her accomplishments. In Lyndall Gordon’s view, Godwin created a mistaken image of Wollstonecraft—overly emotional, sexually loose, atheistic—which has endured until now, and her goal in this new book is to correct that impression. She has also discovered new letters and court documents, though nothing essential that I can see. Moreover, she has performed a prodigious amount of research, her scholarship is up to date, and all the pertinent facts are there.
But I’ve rarely read a book as badly written as this one. People don’t move to Pisa; they “embrace” Pisa. “The Bishops were well-supplied with money,” since it would be pedestrian to say anything as simple as that “The Bishops were rich.” We are told of “the Wollstonecraft proneness to moaning” and that Mary’s emotions “broke through her clamp on public conduct.” A friend’s mother invites Wollstonecraft into the family, “though her line in chat could not engage Mary’s mind.” The “Smallweeds” keep making mysterious appearances, until we realize that Gordon uses the name as a generic term for “busybody.” We read of “women’s need to unfold their faculties as this knocks against the rock-face of their conflicting need for sexual commitment.” Or again: “Benevolence was the top virtue in eighteenth-century England; in Mary it shed the tone of patron, and took on the warmth of affection.” Mary’s unhappiness in Ireland “can appear self-indulgence [sic], though it’s more like the self-doubt that can kill imagination when it sends out roots in the parching soil of incomprehension.” Coleridge’s Kubla Khan has “a waterfall that seems to fountain from the centre of the earth,” and when Mary argues with her first husband a few pages later, “retorts—great sprays of indignant eloquence—would fountain from her opening throat.” Maybe that’s because “Her proximity to a cliff-edge of contempt made it hard to keep underground.”
Worse, Gordon is often unclear. “The danger of revolution, he [John Adams] explained, is its knock-on effect for disobedient children, Indians and Negroes.” Its knock-on effect? Mary hoped for “an alternative order that can collapse the boundaries between the domestic and the cerebral.” Come again? “Could she sustain herself against others’ plots of dependence?” I have no idea. Gordon also withholds information, another unforgivable sin. At a low point in the Wollstonecraft sisters’ fortunes, they’re invited to live with the family of Mary’s best friend, but “this, of course, they could not accept.” Why not? The Prime Minister offers the post of Private Secretary to one of Mary’s friends. Did he accept or refuse? We’re not told. Halfway through what purports to be a letter to Mary, we discover it’s not addressed to her at all, and we never learn who the recipient is. Travels, her memoir of a summer in Scandinavia, is called Wollstonecraft’s “finest work,” but we’re never told why. More problems abound—inexplicable shifts in tense, annoying bits of fictionalizing, frequent typos—but enough. It’s disheartening to condemn a book that someone has worked so hard on, so let’s hope that Lyndall Gordon is more fortunate next time out and let it go at that.
Two centuries after Wollstonecraft Picasso remarked that “Woman is a machine for suffering.” Wollstonecraft’s great project is far from finished.
Alan Helms is Professor of English Emeritus at U-Mass/Boston and critic-at-large for In Newsweekly.
