Her Own Woman: the life of Mary Wollstonecraft
Diane Jacobs Abacus, 333pp, £9.99
ISBN 0349114617
Another life of Wollstonecraft? It is only a year since Janet Todd, Britain's pre-eminent Wollstonecraft scholar, presented us with 450 close-packed pages on the pioneer feminist. Still, that tome was perhaps destined only for the committed, and there is always a place for readable accounts aimed at the non-specialist. Diane Jacobs is American and, the dust-jacket blurb promises, she has unearthed the biographer's holy grail, "new sources", principally on the character and background of Gilbert Imlay, Wollstonecraft's untrustworthy lover.
In fact, these sources don't amount to much, and Jacobs herself makes no great claims for them. Wollstonecraft met Imlay in Paris during the revolution. Part of the anti-establishment flotsam and jetsam that washed up there, Imlay had made his name with A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792), basically a "how to emigrate to Kentucky" guidebook. (Counterfactual speculation has it that Wollstonecraft, had she lived, would have gone to America, to escape the vilification she endured for her ideas in England.) Imlay's idyllic epistolary novel The Emigrants was published a few months after their encounter.
It is certainly intriguing to discover that the frontiersman Daniel Boone lent Imlay $2,000 to buy land in Kentucky in 1783, sending him off on a pattern of borrowing and speculating - and amassing debts. Jacobs has also uncovered a petition composed by Imlay in 1777, when he was 20, on behalf of 11 New Jersey citizens arrested for supporting the rebel cause against the British. "How plucky he seems, how righteous and loyal - there's a hint of bumptiousness," comments Jacobs. He was also very good-looking. Yet Imlay's charm, political fervour and utopianism coexisted with self-centred ruthlessness - the classic revolutionary cocktail. His admirable sentiments on the subjection of women in his novel were not reflected in the conduct of his love affairs. The extent of his swindling is surprising but does not, in the end, change the picture we already have of him. He is irredeemable. The Penguin Classics edition of The Emigrants states baldly: "Gilbert Imlay is the cad who abandoned Mary Wollstonecraft."
Other "new sources" cited include the letters of Joseph Johnson, the most famous radical publisher of the day, who stood staunchly by his principles and his friends. A dry, reserved figure attracted to neither sex, Johnson was fond of Wollstonecraft and attuned to her volatile moods. She was to become the first of a new genus, she said, the woman who supports herself entirely by her pen. When she failed to achieve this, Johnson supplemented her income out of his own pocket. "I never had a father, or a brother," wrote Wollstonecraft (this wasn't true). "You have been both to me, ever since I knew you - yet I have sometimes been very petulant. I have been thinking of those instances of ill-humour and quickness, and they appeared like crimes."
In her acknowledgements, Jacobs thanks her daughter, "whose life is so much freer because Mary Wollstonecraft lived". Her attitude to her subject is much sunnier and less complicated than that of Todd, who seemed irritated at Wollstonecraft's capricious twists and turns. One of the cornerstones of Todd's indictment was the breakdown of the marriage of Wollstonecraft's sister Eliza. Todd's scenario had an interfering Wollstonecraft practically kidnapping Eliza, forcing her into a ruinous separation that would never free her to marry another man. Jacobs, however, is inclined to see Wollstonecraft as a liberator rather than a bossy-boots. And where Todd sees her death in giving birth to the future Mary Shelley as a full stop, Jacobs confidently asserts: "The revolution continued."
Although there is no comparison in terms of scrupulous, diligent scholarship and insight, there is a place for this engaging, fond portrait alongside Todd's biography. Jacobs is less fazed than Todd by Wollstonecraft's tendency to gloom and despondency, and the abjectness of her attachment to the base Imlay. With Jacobs, we are more inclined to remember, as Mary did for years, Imlay's radiant "barrier face": the expression of love he wore when he came to meet her and their illegitimate daughter safe outside the city walls of Paris during the Terror. That child, Fanny, committed suicide in 1816. The child that Mary had with the philosopher William Godwin went on to write Frankenstein, and will live for all time.
Suzi Feay is the literary editor of the Independent on Sunday
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