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MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN is now chiefly remembered as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a work that is, however, remarkable only for the sex of the writer, the period when, and the circumstances in which it was written. The book has often been quoted as the forerunner of the "freedom" of women that took place during the nineteenth century, at least in Great Britain, and Mary Wollstonecraft herself has been acclaimed as a prophetess of the emancipation of her sex, and as one who did much to smooth the way for subsequent female triumphs.

The question is a large one, and cannot be more than briefly touched on here. The very words "rights" and "freedom" do not now bear the plain meanings that they did to Mary Wollstonecraft. We cannot see the vast complex problems of humanity as simply as she saw them; we have much knowledge that was denied to her, and we have witnessed the working out of projects that were to her ardently desired ideals, but are to us merely expedients that are only partly successful.

Were Mary Wollstonecraft to return today, she would find that most of the changes that she had sighed for had taken place, and that her countrywomen had obtained "freedom" in the sense in which she used the word. But she would not find that all the problems that trouble women had been thereby solved, or all their burdens lifted.

It is probable that there were as many contented women in the England of Mary Wollstonecraft's time as in the England of today; each period has its own peculiar vexations and problems, and we can hardly claim that the story of mankind moves in a steady progress towards some ultimate perfection, and that therefore women are "better off" by 150 years of improved conditions than they were in the reign of George III. Many wrongs have been righted since then, many still remain. A woman is now undisputed mistress of her property and her person, but if she possesses no property and finds her person neglected or ignored and herself condemned to live in drab obscurity, she cannot enjoy her freedom, be happy or useful.

Nearly all professions are now open to women; but of what advantage is this to a woman who has not talent, capacity for learning difficult work, courage and robust health? And if she is gifted with all these and achieves success in her chosen line, still she is not a happy woman unless she has contrived a successful emotional life, too, and been loved as well as respected.

Mary Wollstonecraft's famous book was written in the light of ugly personal experiences; she was as indignant as she was sincere, and looked round passionately for remedies for the evils from which she and her friends had so cruelly suffered.

They have not yet been found, at least, in Europe; all that has been done for women in the last century and a half has not saved them from the tragedies that afflicted Mary Wollstonecraft, Eliza Bishop and Fanny Blood—inherited poverty, brutal or indifferent parents, disease following overwork and neglect, reluctant or faithless lovers, incompatible husbands, the struggle to wring a living from an apathetic world; all this is "any summer's story," and has not been ended by female suffrage or any other abstract benefits women have recently received.

Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her book before her own emotional experiences; her elaborate reasoning that ignores feminine instincts and passions was based on her observations of other people's faults and difficulties, failures and wrongs; when she met her own lover she became, as her sister Eliza Bishop bitterly remarked, "but a woman." She had no more to say of the rights of women, for she had learned the sharp lesson that the only thing that matters to a woman—of her type, at least—is luck in love.

Mary Wollstonecraft's fame depended almost entirely on her sex; what she said was platitudinous or crude—but a woman said it; what she did was not so very extraordinary—but a woman did it. Therefore half her world shut its doors in her face and the other half extolled her as a paragon.

Many of the admirers of Mary Wollstonecraft have written of her in a strain of defiant championship that exaggerates her qualities as much as her detractors depreciated them.

It is noticeable how Mrs. Pennell and Mrs. Fawcett, writing respectively in 1885 and 1891 of Mary Wollstonecraft, judge her in terms that now seem as old-fashioned as their heroine's own diatribes. So in another fifty years will anything that may be written now of this woman or of this subject seem out of date.

We can obtain a true view of Mary Wollstonecraft only by seeking in her character for the eternal essentials of human nature and feminine instincts. Mrs. Pennell labours to defend Mary Wollstonecraft's two illicit unions by trying to prove that in each case she acted on principle—wrong, perhaps, but sincere—and that she became, in a short space of time, the mistress of two different men as a gesture of independence and as an affirmation of her belief in sex equality. Mr. Kegan Paul wrote: "She ran counter to the customs of society, yet not wantonly or lightly, but with forethought, in order to carry out a moral theory gravely and religiously adopted."

How cold and priggish does such a theory make this warm-hearted woman out to be! Mary Wollstonecraft did not live her life that it might be an example of independence, a hundred years later, to supporters of women's suffrage or "rights." She lived with Gilbert Imlay, because she fell deeply in love with him, and he was not to be had on any other terms, and because she had the courage and the financial independence to defy convention at the dictates of passion. She lived with William Godwin, because she was mentally exhausted, emotionally broken, lonely and eager for at least some imitation of the conjugal life she had led with Imlay. She married Godwin, because she dreaded social ostracism and the bringing of a second illegitimate child into an orthodox world; she was by then worn out with grief and disillusionment and had given up the hopeless struggle with conventionality.

None of this is at all heroic, and it strips Mary of much of the glory that has been given her by the ardent feminists who have tried to depict her as always acting on rigid principles of right and wrong, and as opposing to a corrupt society the purity of her noble and resolute character, but that it is the truth an unbiased reader of her tragic story can hardly doubt.

Passion, not principle, dictated her letters to Gilbert Imlay; passion, not reason, was behind her two attempts at suicide; lassitude, not a lofty affection, was behind her union with Godwin, and mere expediency was behind her marriage.

She was not a woman of very brilliant gifts; she was self-educated, not well-read, and not imaginative; she was sensitive to a fault, proud, delicate-minded, and like so many women who have endured a wretched childhood, enamoured of an ideal domesticity. She was not witty, and not a stroke of humour—in any sense of the word—enlivens her work or her correspondence. Her miserable circumstances had given all her thoughts a melancholy cast and a bitter opinion of humanity; she was not without that touch of the scold natural to one who continually chides others, not without a suspicion of the old-time schoolmistress's didacticism, nor of a hint of that intellectual arrogance common to the clever woman in a period when clever women were rare. She was considered a wise judge of character, yet in the only case when this gift would have served her, that of Gilbert Imlay, she was grossly deceived. In allowing this man to treat her as his "wife" without any ceremony or legal bond, Mary Wollstonecraft made an immense mistake, but it was one that no warm-hearted woman in her circumstances could have avoided and that few women, even after going through the agony of desertion, would have regretted.

She had accepted, not refused, life, and her memories of that snatched happiness were worth what she paid for them.

This famous woman died in her prime, at the height of her powers, and, as her friends believed, with her best work unaccomplished.

This may be doubted; there is no indication in her posthumous work that she would have ever been more than what her daughter became—an intelligent, industrious writer, compiler and translator, breaking the monotony of hack work with occasional original pieces—all to be forgotten within a decade of her death.

Mary Wollstonecraft was harshly judged by many of her contemporaries and scurrilously abused both during her life and after her death, though it seems incredible now that the flat common sense, truisms and platitudes of her celebrated book could have not only aroused furies of dissent, but have provoked charges of inciting to moral anarchy against the author.

The bold advocate of feminine rights was considered by many to be not only wrong in opinion, but wicked in intention. Her own sex, her own sisters, condemned her pitilessly.

These hostile critics contended that by pointing out the gross defects in women's position, in their training and character, and by claiming for them an equality with men, she was first degrading her sex by stripping it of all its modesty, charm and mystery, and then suggesting an impossible remedy for negligible wrongs by proposing that women should become feminine males and give up all their cherished privileges for unwanted rights.

There was much truth in these arguments. It is certain that the great majority of Mary Wollstonecraft's female contemporaries repudiated her championship and rejected her advice, and that all her male contemporaries—with the exception of a few advanced Radicals or Jacobins—dismissed all she had to say as the dangerously hysterical ravings of an unsexed virago.

Mary Wollstonecraft was herself largely to blame for this. She adopted a violent, railing tone; she bitterly attacked feminine foibles and vices; she sourly inveighed against masculine brutalities and tyrannies, and she left out of account altogether the thousands of happy marriages, families and lives that the system she so sweepingly condemned had produced.

She wrote so completely from personal observation of a few individual cases that she lost all sense of proportion, and was not able to see that the institutions, customs and laws that she attacked were not in themselves bad, and that where they broke down the fallibility of human nature was to blame, and that if they were to be swept away it would be very difficult to replace them. The safety, dignity and repose of women were carefully legislated for centuries before Mary Wollstonecraft was born; a woman was protected in her father's house until she entered that of her husband; her widowhood, her old age, her children were all provided for out of her property; if no husband could be chosen for her, she entered a convent, where she found a shelter respected by the most lawless.

Nor did women lead idle or slavish lives. They were most carefully educated and trained, and the running of the great households—self-supporting and as large as small villages—fell to them. When young, they served as excuses for the masculine ideals of chivalry; when past the charms that then were allowed to fade so quickly they acted as friends, advisers, guides and supporters of the male members of the family. There is nothing in history to make us suppose that feminine influence on human affairs was less before women obtained their "rights" than after they were admitted to political equality, or that they did not then, on the whole, enjoy as much respect, happiness and peace of mind as at any subsequent period.

In Mary Wollstonecraft's day the elaborate social machinery of the Middle Ages had broken down and marriage suffered from the lax morality, the economic disturbances and the loose thinking of the period. The main trouble was financial. The marriage laws were slackly administered and much abused, heiresses were insufficiently protected, fortune hunters were unscrupulous, and a decaying landed gentry bartered its daughters to flourishing tradesmen, and heirs to ruined estates married well-dowered city madams. Marriage laws had broken down at several points, but so had most other laws and institutions. Not only in the treatment of women could the late eighteenth century be termed barbarous—civilisation was then at a low ebb in England.

There is abundant evidence, however, that human kindliness and common sense adjusted all difficulties in the vast majority of instances; men and women lived together on the whole happily. The successful marriages of the ordinary people are unchronicled, but examples of perfect unions among the famous people whose names have endured come at once to mind. Catherine Blake, Lady Romilly, Jane Hogarth, Ann Cobbett were not concerned, in their beautiful obscurity, with the rights of women; their wifely devotion was as lovely and unblemished as that of the women of an earlier generation—Margaret Lucas, Dorothy Temple, Lucy Fanshawe, Rachel Russell, and that Stewart Queen Mary II, who regretted "that she had only three crowns to give her husband."

Mary Wollstonecraft herself, for all her intelligence and vicarious experience, fell a victim to her own passion and another's inconstancy and was reduced to the supreme humiliation of attempted self-destruction; none of the rights she clamoured for would have saved her from that depth of self-confessed failure. Indeed, that a famous, brilliant woman should try to take her own life because of her lover's desertion is a most pitiful thing, for it reveals, with disconcerting clarity, that nothing avails a woman crossed in love and that the ignorant little kitchen maid and the celebrated ornament of her sex alike seek the final oblivion when faced with the emptiness of an existence where passion has been and is no more.

It is not, then, either as a champion of women's rights, or as a literary figure, or as a reformer or a philosopher that Mary Wollstonecraft is interesting, but as a woman "lovely in her person," intelligent, brave and unfortunate, whose story was odd, tragic and touching.

Her valiant struggles for independence, for happiness, for her ideals, her rebellion against her circumstances, her defeat, recovery and resignation will always make her life an absorbing study for other women, none of whom can surely refuse her memory sympathy, understanding and some admiration.

It is the story of her life that is given here, not that of her opinions or her times; the former are only dwelt on as they illustrate her character, the latter as they form her background.

The materials for a life of Mary Wollstonecraft are not very abundant, nor are they so scanty as in the case of many of her contemporaries; her husband's story of her career is more in the nature of a justification of her actions than a detailed narrative of her life, of which perhaps William Godwin was not very well informed. The radical philosopher, with tender care, also collected his wife's papers and letters.

Mary Godwin, afterwards Mary Shelley, seems to have come into possession of much of her mother's early correspondence, which must have been sent to her by her aunts and George Blood; these papers remained in the possession of the Shelley family, and were lent to Mr. Kegan Paul by Sir Percy Shelley in 1879. Unfortunately, in his valuable William Godwin and his Friends, Mr. Kegan Paul gave only a selection from these papers, and both the originals of these and also those not published appear, according to a later biographer, Mr. Ford K. Brown, William Godwin, 1926, to have been unaccountably and most vexatiously lost. We have, then, only those portions of Mary Wollstonecraft's correspondence that her husband found among her papers and published—letters to Imlay, and a few to Mr. Joseph Johnson—and those that Mr. Kegan Paul chose to select for his biography.

The remaining materials consist of scattered allusions in contemporary writings, in William Godwin's stoic diary and in Mary Wollstonecraft's own works, which are, however, poor in autobiographical details. We can only guess at her experiences from her opinions and prejudices, and thus confirm what we know of her circumstances from what we read of her feelings.

The great gap in the materials for a life of Mary Wollstonecraft is caused by the lack of any detailed or sure knowledge of Gilbert Imlay. Her husband and her friends, who must have known much about him, thought him only deserving of oblivion and disdained to record any particulars of his person, his career, his business or prospects.

Mary Wollstonecraft's later biographers likewise have treated the inconstant lover with haughty indifference; Mrs. Pennell briefly dismisses him with "unworthy of Mary's noble affection."

There must be more to the story than that; Mary's love for Imlay was the most important event in her life, and the man himself becomes of supreme interest to anyone who wishes to reconstruct her character.

But, as his letters have gone, and all his contemporaries agreed to keep silence on the subject of Mary's lover, we have to put him together as best we can from what little we know of his behaviour, from the letters addressed to him, and from the brief account of him given by Godwin.

Darnford, in the Wrongs of Woman, is supposed to be a portrait of Imlay; but Mary, unfortunately, was neither a descriptive writer nor a mistress of the vivid phrase, and we are not told even the colour of Darnford's hair or eyes, or indeed given any hint to his appearance, while his character is drawn on general lines—a dissipated youth, a ready way with women, inconstant as seductive, a Robert Lovelace without any of the grace and humour that Richardson cast about his charming villain.

It is much to be regretted that Mary's friends did not pay more attention to the man for whose sake she twice attempted suicide, and that someone did not try to justify her love by extolling the object of it, for, if Imlay was worthless, Mary was a fool, blinded by those mere physical passions she had herself so loudly despised in her Rights of Woman.

In this, as in other unhappy love stories, all the nobility cannot be on the side of the women and all the baseness on the side of the men, unless one allows—what Mary Wollstonecraft never would allow—that the purity of the female character is equalled only by the imbecility of the female mind.

There is indeed every indication, as we shall see when we come to consider the case, that Gilbert Imlay was an attractive person with many admirable qualities, and that his seemingly heartless behaviour towards his mistress was the result of the profound difference between their circumstances and their points of view when their connection began.

Matthew Arnold said, with some self-righteous petulance, that the suicides and attempted suicides in the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle "sickened him of irregular relationships."

But Mary Wollstonecraft can hardly be held responsible for the suicide either of Fanny Imlay or of Harriet Westbrook, or for the vagaries of Jane Clairmont; death had rescued her, nearly twenty years before, from these tragic entanglements that sprang more from poverty and uncontrolled passion than from "irregular relationships." Lawful matrimony has its disasters, too, and perfect respectability its spectacular failures.

There is only one undisputed portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in existence, that by Opie, which used to hang in William Godwin's room at Snow Hill, and preside, like a revered idol, over the tempestuous shifts of the philosopher's raggle-taggle household; it passed into the possession of Sir Percy Shelley, and is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. This picture of a full-faced young woman in a plain gown with loose hair does full justice to Mary's good looks and the expression has nothing of that arrogance which Robert Southey found objectionable in the countenance of the celebrated authoress; it must have been painted shortly before her unexpected death. It was engraved by Heath and published by Joseph Johnson in 1798.

A cast taken after death and a quantity of bright auburn hair, also in the possession of the Shelley family, are said to confirm the truth of the likeness of this portrait.

In 1796 a print appeared inscribed as engraved by Ridley after Opie and entitled Mary Wollstonecraft. This print passed undisputed during Mary's lifetime. In the mid-nineteenth century a picture from which the print appears to have been taken was in the possession of a Mr. William Rennell, sold to him as by Northcote, but declared afterwards to be by Opie. It is now in the National Gallery, London.

This picture shows a young woman with a ribbon binding powdered hair, in a striped dress, holding a book, the expression very grave, almost disagreeable. There seems no reason to doubt that this is a likeness of Mary Wollstonecraft other than that the print by Ridley seems to have been pirated and that the fashionable attire and coiffure are not judged likely details for a portrait of this ardent feminist.

Paris, July, 1936

George R. Preedy