Wollstonecraft gave birth to her first child, Fanny, at Le Havre in northern France. There, she wrote An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, which was published in London in December 1794. Imlay eventually left, promising to return but never did. Her letters to him reflect the depression of a mother left alone with an infant amid a revolution.
In her desperation, Wollstonecraft sought Imlay, in April 1795, but he rejected her. She made her first of two attempts at suicide in May of the same year, probably with laudanum, but Imlay saved her. She embarked upon a hazardous business trip on his behalf in Scandinavia, with her young daughter and a maid. She wrote a personal travel narrative, along with letters to Imlay, which became her most popular book, Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in 1796. It received positive review by critics, and would, later on, influence Romantic poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. When she returned to England, she realized her relationship with Imlay was over, and she attempted suicide again. A stranger saw her jump into the River Thames and rescued her. Wollstonecraft never considered her suicide attempts irrational. However, she recovered and returned to her literary life, becoming involved with Joseph Johnson's circle again.
In that same year, she rekindled with an old acquaintance, William Godwin. Godwin had read her Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and later wrote that, "If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” They became lovers, but remained separated as they were both opposed to the institution of marriage, reminding themselves that the law gave rights to a husband and took them away from a wife.
When Wollstonecraft became pregnant, the couple eventually wed so that their child would be legitimate, though they continued to live separately in two adjoining houses. Their marriage revealed the truth that Wollstonecraft had never married Imlay, and as a result she and Godwin lost many friends, on top of being criticized for advocating marriage abolition. Their union would be short-lived, though happy and stable. Mary died on August 30th, 1797, ten days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary, of puerperal (childbed) fever, a common and often fatal occurrence in the eighteenth century. Septicaemia took her and
left Godwin devastated, with a new baby girl, who, in turn would become one of the most famous writers of all time, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.
Interestingly, Mary Shelley’s novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826), and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837), among other studies of lesser-known works, support the idea that Mary Shelley was a political radical throughout her life, too. “Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practiced by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley (her
William Godwin (c. 1802), by James Northcote. Oil on canvas. The National Portrait Gallery. PD.
33 | Ceres Magazine | Spring 2016