The Lady and Her Monsters Read Online Free

to be loved by those we feel ourselves impelled to love,” Godwin wrote. “It is inexplicably gratifying, when we find those qualities that most call forth our affections, to be regarded by that person with some degree of feeling.”
    T hat two such individuals—Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin—became entangled with one another to begin with struck some as an utterly peculiar event. They had initially become acquainted at a dinner party that Godwin attended to meet Thomas Paine, who had just published The Rights of Man. It was not love at first glance for William and Mary. On the contrary, they were “mutually displeased with each other.” Godwin had hoped to spend the evening with Paine, and Mary’s presence there irked him.
    Mary was an attractive woman who was rather tall and had brown hair and eyes. But right away, Godwin was put off by a streak of gloominess that was part of her persona. She would pass this trait on to her daughters. She was left cold by Godwin’s habit of complimenting everyone he met, even when they did not merit it. This was certainly not the most auspicious start of a love match in history.
    They saw very little of each other after the dinner party, as Mary went to France to attend to some business. It was a personal matter about a man with whom she’d become infatuated: Henry Fuseli, a painter eighteen years her senior. She didn’t seem to be bothered by the fact that he was married, and those around her did not understand why she was fascinated with him. This included Godwin, who thought Fuseli was not an intellectual but a snob.
    In the winter of 1792, Mary decided the only way to have a deeper relationship with Fuseli was to include his wife, Sophia. She propositioned them with a sort of ménage-a-trois that would involve all of them living together and her becoming their mutual partner. Not surprisingly, they rejected her.
    Toward the end of 1792, she was living a lonely existence in a tiny Paris apartment, the icy landscape of the city matching her own sadness. The passion she had desired from Fuseli may not have materialized, but she was desperate for the affection of any man. That’s when she fell for the American Gilbert Imlay, who picked up on her vulnerability and need, which let him feed her mind with fantastic (and false) stories of his past and those of a future they might have together. She quickly fell for him and clung tightly to him, especially when she learned she was pregnant.
    The pregnancy brought about a dramatic shift in their relationship, causing Imlay to spend weeks away from Paris, most especially in Le Havre. As the days turned into weeks and weeks extended into months, Mary’s familiar ache and loneliness returned. Only toward the end of her pregnancy did Mary join Imlay in Le Havre, where her daughter Frances—Fanny—was born. In September 1795, soon after the birth, Mary left for London, in what she believed would become a permanent separation.
    Not long after, Mary learned that Imlay had found another woman. She urged him to change his ways and meet their new baby daughter, but this did not happen. Again she was alone, but this time with a baby. Unable to continue on, Mary decided to end her life. “I have been treated with unkindness, and even cruelty by the person . . . [from] whom I had every reason to expect affection,” she wrote to Archibald Hamilton Rowan. “I looked for something like happiness in the discharge of my relative duties, and the heart on which I leaned . . . pierced mine . . . I live but for my child, for I am weary of myself . . . I have been very ill—have taken some desperate steps . . . for now there is nothing good in store,—my heart is broken!”

    Panorama of the river Thames and the buildings of the city. In the eighteenth century, the river provided a great divide between social classes in London. It was also