Chapter C: KEGAN PAUL: Prefatory Memoir to ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters to

Imlay.’

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[Sidenote: Her farewell to Imlay.]

I never wanted but your heart--that gone, you have nothing more to give. Had I only poverty to fear, I should not shrink from life. Forgive me then, if I say, that I shall consider any direct or indirect attempt to supply my necessities, as an insult which I have not merited, and as rather done out of tenderness for your own reputation, than for me.

My child may have to blush for her mother’s want of prudence, and may lament that the rectitude of my heart made me above vulgar precautions; but she shall not despise me for meanness. You are now perfectly free. God bless you!

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: ‘Letters to Imlay.’ (London: November, 1795.)

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[Sidenote: She meets Godwin.]

Godwin met her at the moment when she was deeply depressed by the ingratitude of one utterly incapable of appreciating her excellence; who had stolen her heart, and availed himself of her excessive and thoughtless generosity and lofty independence of character, to plunge her in difficulties and then desert her. Difficulties, worldly difficulties, indeed, she set at nought, compared with her despair of good, her confidence betrayed, and when once she could conquer the misery that clung to her heart, she struggled cheerfully to meet the poverty that was her inheritance, and to do her duty by her darling child.

MARY SHELLEY: quoted in ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries.’

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The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined style of love. It grew with equal advances in the mind of each. It would have been impossible for the most minute observer to have said who was before and who after. One sex did not take the priority which long-established custom has awarded it, nor the other overstep that delicacy which is so severely imposed. I am not conscious that either party can assume to have been the agent or the patient, the toil-spreader or the prey in the affair. When, in the course of things the disclosure came, there was nothing in a manner for either party to disclose to the other. It was friendship melting into love.

WILLIAM GODWIN: ‘Memoir of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman,’ quoted in ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries,’ by C. Kegan Paul.

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[Sidenote: Mary’s appearance.]

Like her mind, her beauty would appear to have ripened late. In July, 1792, Mrs. Bishop says in a letter to Everina that Charles [their brother] informs her “that Mrs. Wollstonecraft had grown quite handsome.” [Mary “took the brevet rank of _Mrs._” after the issue of ‘The Rights of Woman,’ “which had made her in some degree a public character.”] The grudging admission is more than confirmed by her portrait by Opie, now in the possession of Sir Percy Shelley, which was painted for Godwin during the brief period of her marriage; long, therefore, after she had reached mature age, and when all the waves and storms of her sorrows had gone over her. More than one print was engraved of that portrait, in which is well preserved its tender, wistful, childlike, pathetic beauty, with a look of pleading against the hardness of the world, which I know in one only other face, that of Beatrice Cenci. But those prints can give no notion of the complexion, rich, full, healthy, vivid, of the clear brown eyes and masses of brownish auburn hair. The fault of the face was that one eyelid slightly drooped.