The Monsters Read online

  Additional complaints show up in a novel she wrote in 1787, titled Mary. (The title character was, not by coincidence, “the daughter of Edward, who married Eliza,” the same names as the real-life Mary’s parents.) The book describes not only the way men repress women’s individuality but also shows that women often accept this domination. It was clear that the author was recalling her own family when she wrote: “Her father always exclaimed against female acquirements, and was glad that his wife’s indolence and ill health made her not trouble herself about them. . . . [He] was very tyrannical and passionate; indeed so very easily irritated when inebriated, that Mary was continually in dread lest he should frighten her mother to death.” For those who knew that the real-life Mary often slept on the landing near her mother’s bedroom to protect her when her father was in one of his drunken rages, the portrait was hardly veiled.

  Mary had only a few years of formal schooling, but her parents’ fecklessness also gave her the freedom to run and play outside rather than being confined indoors, the fate of most girls at the time. To compensate for the chill she encountered at home, she formed intense friendships. Her best friend when she was fourteen was a schoolgirl named Jane Arden. The two girls exchanged letters in which they gossiped about “macaronis,” the young fashionable men in the town. Then some incident led Mary to accuse Jane of favoring another girl. Mary wrote to her, “I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none.” In another letter to Jane, she wrote, “I cannot bear a slight from those I love.”

  As Mary grew into adolescence, she was required to change from the loose shifts and comfortable petticoats of childhood to corsets with stiff stays of whalebone that constrained her body from chest to thigh. Compounding her sense of restriction, she lacked a room of her own where she could be alone. Displaying the signs of a growing rebellious streak, Mary announced that she would never marry for money, for she was seeking a nobler life for herself. She also became more socially concerned, especially about the living conditions of servants and the poor.

  When Mary was fifteen, her family moved to Hoxton, outside London. Here she met Fanny Blood, with whom Mary immediately made “in her heart, the vows of an eternal friendship.” Fanny too suffered from having a drunken father, and Mary soon confided to Jane that now she loved her new friend “better than all the world beside.” Fanny, Mary wrote, “has a masculine understanding, and sound judgment, yet she has every feminine virtue.” Their relationship would endure through additional relocations, and become one of the most important in Mary’s life.

  Marriage, whether for love or money, remained unattractive to Mary in view of the example given by her parents. As a result, she knew that she had to be self-supporting. (“I must be independent and earn my own subsistence or be very uncomfortable,” she declared.) At the time, single women had limited options for work—teacher, governess, or companion. In 1778, Mary found employment as a companion to a wealthy widow. The job, despite its amiable name, could be quite unpleasant, for it required the hired person to cater to the whims of her employer: the author Fanny Burney called the occupation “toad-eating.” But Mary made a success of it, staying for two years until she had to come home to nurse her mother through her final illness.

  Mary faithfully attended her mother for the next two years. During that time, her brother Ned, now married, rarely came to visit. Though Mary hoped for some sign of deathbed favoritism and affection, she was disappointed. Her mother’s last words were, “. . . a little patience and all will be over.” Mary, however, would improve on these—and gain the affection she yearned for—when she wrote her autobiographical novel Mary. There, the dying mother’s last words to her daughter are: “My child, I have not always treated you with kindness. God forgive me! Do you?” One day, Mary’s own daughter would follow her mother’s example of using her pen to “improve” her real-life experiences.

  Six months after her mother’s death, Mary’s younger sister Eliza married Meredith Bishop, a boat builder some ten years older than she. In less than a year Eliza gave birth to a daughter and suffered from what we now know as postpartum depression. A concerned Bishop asked Mary to come and stay with her sister. Instead, Mary “rescued” her: with Fanny Blood’s help, she spirited Eliza away from home when Bishop was absent, leaving the infant behind. They went into hiding north of London, living under false names. Eliza might well have returned to her husband if left to her own devices, but Mary stiffened her resolve.

  Now Mary set out to achieve her dream of self-sufficiency and establishing a life with Fanny Blood. In 1783, joined by another of Mary’s sisters, Everina, the four young women opened a school at Newington Green, on the outskirts of London. There, Mary met Dr. Richard Price, who took her under his wing and became a bit of a father figure. Dr. Price was a devoted lover of liberty; he had fervently supported both the American Revolution and the cause of reform within England. He corresponded with intellectuals and scientists in the United States and France—Franklin, Jefferson, and Condorcet, to name just a few. Price helped Mary to understand the intellectual underpinnings of what she felt instinctively about liberty and human rights.

  The all-female family life that Mary hoped for was, however, doomed. In August 1784, word came that Eliza’s baby daughter, still with its father, had died. Eliza suffered another nervous breakdown, and later would come to view Mary as the person who had destroyed her marriage and caused the loss of her child. (The resentment had repercussions even years after Mary’s death when her two sisters, Eliza and Everina, rejected Mary’s own daughter, who wanted to find a refuge with them.) At this time, Fanny Blood was also suffering from ill health: tuberculosis. When her longtime beau Hugh Skeys, who had become a wine merchant in Lisbon, sent a proposal of marriage, Mary encouraged Fanny to accept, arguing that the climate of Portugal would be good for Fanny’s health. But after her friend’s departure, she wrote, “without someone to love this world is a desert.”

  When Fanny became pregnant, Mary made the sea voyage to Lisbon to be with her, arriving only a few hours before the delivery. But she was only to be a witness to tragedy. Fanny’s illness affected the birth, and both mother and child died. Fanny’s death haunted Mary for the rest of her life. She would write, “the grave has closed over my dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath.”

  She closed the school in Newington Green when she returned to England and found work as a governess for an aristocratic family in Ireland. This lasted only a year, for the lady of the family thought that the children were more devoted to Mary than to herself. While in Ireland Mary read and became deeply influenced by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was the most important thinker of the second half of the eighteenth century. Mary found his work particularly appealing because of its emphasis on the personal, particularly in his Confessions. Rousseau was also, like her, a person of internal contradictions. In a letter to her sister Everina on March 24, 1787, she wrote: “I am now reading Rousseau’s Émile, and love his paradoxes. . . . He was a strange inconsistent unhappy clever creature—yet he possessed an uncommon portion of sensibility and penetration.” She might have been describing herself.

  While at Newington Green, Mary had written a book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, which a friendly clergyman, John Hewlett, had sent to the London publisher Joseph Johnson. Johnson had accepted it and paid Mary twenty guineas, a sum that she immediately turned over to two of Fanny Blood’s needy brothers, ignoring her own debts and obligations. Now, in 1787, she wrote to Johnson about her newest plan for self-sufficiency: to become a full-time writer. “I am determined! Your sex generally laugh at female determinations; but let me tell you, I never yet resolved to do anything of consequence, that I did not adhere resolutely to do it, till I accomplished my purpose, improbable as it might have appeared to a more timid mind.” She relocated to London, where Johnson helped her find lodgings. A liber
al in politics, he had published the works of William Blake and Benjamin Franklin as well as Thomas Paine, scientist Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), poet William Cowper, and chemist Joseph Priestley.

  Acclaimed as “the father of the book trade,” for he was the first to commission books, rather than serve as a printer for those who wished to publish, Johnson became both a mentor and a friend. Mary bragged to Everina in a letter: “I am . . . going to be the first of a new genus,” adding, “You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track—the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.”

  Publishers were aware that women made up a large part of the reading public, and women like Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, and Hannah More were well known for their novels that dealt with women’s interests. The bestsellers of the day included two genres of particular appeal to women—the novel of sentiment and the Gothic novel. In some ways, these reflected opposite sides of female personality. Novels of sentiment celebrated delicacy of feelings, and even fostered the practice of weeping in public. Such works praised women for their purity of refinement and moral superiority, exalting the traditional roles of mother, wife, and loyal sister. Gothic novels, on the other hand, looked into darker corners. Often set in exotic locales, the Gothics dealt with fear and the irrationality that lies beneath the surface of so-called normal life. Women writing in the Gothic genre discovered they could explore emotions and daring actions outside the norms regarded as “proper” for women. (Men were often fans of the Gothic genre too; the young Lord Byron read Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Mysteries of Udolpho, and modeled part of his own soon-to-be-famous persona after one of its characters.)

  Johnson suggested that Mary try her hand at writing books in the new field of children’s fiction. His neighbor John Newbery had made a good living at it. (Today a children’s book award is named for him.) In 1788, Mary’s Original Stories appeared, depicting women in many different roles—single, married, widowed, working, and at home. It showed Mary’s concern for the condition of the poor by portraying the suffering of unmothered children, victims of bad housing and corrupt landlords. For the second edition of the book, Johnson hired William Blake to illustrate it. The eccentric Blake was then an unknown artist and Mary found in him a friend as well as a collaborator who shared her social concerns. Soon Blake would be illustrating his own poems rather than acting as a collaborator for others’ work.

  Mary found a new intellectual circle opening to her. She wrote to Fanny Blood’s brother George, “Whenever I am tired of solitude I go to Mr. Johnson’s and there I meet the kind of company I find most pleasure in.” Johnson hosted afternoon dinners where he entertained many of the leading writers, philosophers, and artists of the day. With time, Mary became one of the regulars, whom she called “standing dishes”—the only woman so honored other than the writer Anna Barbauld. Besides Blake, the guests included the painters John Opie and Henry Fuseli; the political philosophers Thomas Paine and William Godwin; the American poet Joel Barlow; radical reformer Horne Tooke, who had actually raised money in Britain to support the American colonies’ struggle for independence; and Thomas Holcroft, who went from peddler’s son and stable boy to become one of England’s leading dramatists, just to name a few. Many of those in Johnson’s circle were free thinkers, English versions of the French philosophes who were then challenging people to use rationality rather than religious faith to guide their lives. Mary found herself in the midst of daring discussions that challenged and encouraged her.

  All of these people appealed to Mary’s mind, but the artist Henry Fuseli stoked the fire in her heart. Mary was approaching thirty, and she longed for a great passion. In Fuseli she thought that she had found the “soul mate” she had dreamed of. Born Johann Heinrich Füssli in Zurich in 1741, he had come to England in the 1760s, where he adopted his new name. He was the oldest son of a painter who insisted that he become a minister, so as a child he had painted only in secret. He became ordained when he was twenty, along with his best friend Johann Lavater, who would later become famous as the founder of physiognomy, a method of determining character through the examination of facial features. The two men had an intense relationship that may well have been sexual. Fuseli wrote in a letter to Lavater, “I grow too excited, I must stop here—O you who sleep alone now—dream of me—that my soul might meet with yours.” When Lavater married, Fuseli wrote that a disembodied spirit would be around the lips of him and his bride.

  Fuseli was a brilliant scholar who knew eight languages and wrote essays about painting, sculpture, art history, and Rousseau. When he came to England, a meeting with the painter Joshua Reynolds set him on the road to his true calling and he spent some seven years in Italy studying art. In 1782, he completed his most famous painting, The Nightmare, which caused a sensation. Bizarre, erotic, and emotional, it was reproduced many times in prints, and became an icon of Romantic art. The work portrays a sleeping woman lying across a bed, arms open as if filled with erotic desire. Looking through the window at her is a ghostly horse—a symbol of sexuality—with bulging, pale eyes. Seated on the sleeping woman’s chest, staring out at the viewer of the work, is a grinning incubus, a male demon who had sexual intercourse with women as they slept. For a while the painting hung in Joseph Johnson’s home as a token of the two men’s close friendship. As guests engaged in the intellectual conversation of Johnson’s dinner parties, they could enjoy a little erotica at the same time. (A century later, Sigmund Freud also displayed a print of this painting on the wall of his office.) And the image of the woman in the painting would much later become an inspiration for Wollstonecraft’s daughter, when she wrote her famous novel.

  When Mary met Fuseli she was twenty-nine and relatively inexperienced; he was a worldly-wise forty-seven. The short, lecherous, vain bisexual was a walk on the wild side for Mary, but unfortunately he was not a person capable of the kind of attachment she wished for. She was fascinated by his paintings and drawings, and loved listening to him discourse authoritatively on many subjects. His descriptions of the seamier side of life engrossed her too. He spoke openly of frequenting prostitutes; some of the drawings that he showed her were pornographic. All this—novel, daring, on the edge—was stimulating to Mary, in a way that the high-toned conversation of the crowd at Johnson’s was not. She plunged into a love affair, meeting Fuseli at her own flat as well as his studio. At his urging, she changed her appearance. Before meeting him, she had dressed in a plain, almost careless, manner in coarse clothes, black worsted stockings, and beaver hat with her hair hanging loose about her shoulders. The fastidious Fuseli showed her how to dress more fashionably, and she now pinned up her hair.

  As Mary’s ardor increased, however, Fuseli’s interest in her cooled; his friendship for her, he claimed, had been strictly intellectual. As Mary tried more desperately to call attention to herself, writing feverishly and often, Fuseli withdrew from her. He would pointedly allow her letters to remain unopened for many days. For a sexual partner, Fuseli preferred another: he married Sophia Rawlins, one of the models he used for his paintings. Ironically, she would burn her husband’s more explicit drawings after his death.

  It took a revolution to distract Mary from her unrequited passion for Fuseli. The French Revolution, which began in 1789 when a mob stormed and captured the Paris prison known as the Bastille, was the central event of the time. Its rallying cry of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which proclaimed all citizens were equal under the law, not only electrified the French but inspired many Britons as well. Mary and her friends who gathered at Joseph Johnson’s house cheered what was happening in France, for they felt it heralded a new day for all mankind. The young poet William Wordsworth summed up the feelings of many with the couplet: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” In October, Joseph Priestley predicted that revolution would spread to other countries—something that did not thrill Britain’s upper classes. Indeed, after
Mary’s old mentor, Reverend William Price, gave a public sermon praising the revolution, saying, “I see the ardour for liberty catching and spreading,” a prominent member of Parliament, Edmund Burke, felt compelled to reply. Though Burke had earlier supported the American Revolution, his Reflections on the Revolution in France condemned the destruction of French aristocratic society and government. Burke used the language of a Gothic novel in his metaphor for the revolutionary forces: “Out of the tomb of the murdered monarchy in France has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination.”

  Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the first answer to Burke in her vigorous defense of the French Revolution, Vindication of the Rights of Man, which was published anonymously in December 1790; the first printing sold out in a month, and the next printing had her name attached to it. Overnight, Mary became a heroine to English supporters of the Revolution. William Roscoe, a friend of Fuseli’s, wrote a ballad satirizing Burke in which this stanza appeared:

  And lo! an Amazon stept out,

  One WOLLSTONECRAFT her name,

  Resolv’d to stop his mad career,

  Whatever chance became.

  The Revolution radicalized a number of women writers, who began to critique the role of women in society and the family. The revolutionary emphasis on the rights of man gave Mary the opening to write about the other half of the human race. She may have been inspired by a dinner at Johnson’s house in September 1791, where Thomas Paine, the firebrand whose pamphlet Common Sense had helped spark the American Revolution, was a guest. Among those present was William Godwin, who had been looking forward to meeting Paine and was annoyed when, he felt, Mary monopolized the conversation.