The Lady and Her Monsters Read Online Free Page A

from one of its bridges that Mary Wollstonecraft jumped trying to commit suicide.
    During the eighteenth century the river Thames had become a major center of commerce by transporting goods across the British Empire and servicing farmers, fishermen, tradesmen, and other commercial ventures. It had also formed an unspoken boundary between the different classes who lived on either side of its waters. And that river, Mary decided, would finally transport her to her next life. It would become her grave.
    She tried to find a quiet spot for her final moments but could not find one on the Battersea Bridge. The evening of her demise was a viciously cold and rainy one in October, a dreary occasion even by London’s standards. Rather than being deterred, she decided this weather was helpful. Drenched, undoubtedly lonely, and surely frightened, Mary walked up and down the wooden bridge, allowing the rain to soak her clothes.
    On this night, no one was on the bridge, which meant she could carry out her plans in secret. The rain that seeped through her clothes added much-needed weight to her frame. When she thought she was heavy enough, she neared the parapet. She felt the cold dark currents sloshing against the riverbank below were beckoning her, and she jumped. One would imagine her body, now soaked, would have sunk deeply and quickly, but that’s not what happened. Agitated, she struggled against the currents and became tangled in her clothing more and more tightly until she passed out.
    Her body washed ashore and was later found and revived by a passerby. Gilbert Imlay rushed to her, declaring his love, but strangely enough, Mary was not moved by this. Apparently, plunging into the cold water had shaken her out of her melancholy, and she realized the affair needed to come to some sort of resolution.
    Around this time, she reconnected with William Godwin. Having been invited to take tea with Thomas Holcroft, she was surprised to see Godwin there as well. As before, their exchanges didn’t cause either one of them to feel any flurry of love or passion toward the other. By now Godwin had become famous, which seemed to have boosted his demeanor. He was socially awkward but also bent on achieving fame and acceptance from society, so this new lifestyle provided a bonus.
    On the other hand, Mary Wollstonecraft was now a disreputable woman with a sordid love life and an illegitimate child. Not surprisingly, Godwin didn’t think she was as irksome anymore, but rather, somehow, the suffering Godwin saw on her pale features gave her an alluring, vulnerable quality, so much so that he was drawn to a sense of “sympathy in her anguish.” In the following weeks, they saw a great deal of one another and eventually both spoke of “the sentiment, which trembled upon the tongue but from the lips of either.”
    To them, the state of their relationship felt as good as a marriage, without the restrictions of an actual ceremony. They both detested such shows of formality. “Nothing can be so ridiculous upon the face of it, or so contrary to the genuine march of sentiment, as to require the overflowing of the soul to wait upon a ceremony,” Godwin declared. That is, until a child entered the picture.
    When Mary became aware of her second pregnancy, she recalled the scorn she had suffered during her first. Godwin, of course, agreed to marry her, though doing so went against all the principles he had been advocating for years. He was aware that some would see him as a hypocrite for yielding to the institution he so despised: “Some people have formed an inconsistency between my practicing this instance & my doctrine,” he wrote to his friend Thomas Wedgwood. But he also explained why he did not see any inconsistency. He still believed marriage was wrong, and he had only married Mary because he cared for her. Despite having gone through the ceremony, he felt no different than before and said, “I hold myself no