The Lady and Her Monsters Read Online Free Page B

otherwise bound than I was before the ceremony took place.”
    On March 31, 1797, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft married in the small church at St. Pancras, and on April 6, 1797, they moved into a house together located at 29 Polygon Road, in London’s Somers Town district. Godwin immediately began to receive congratulatory notes that said such a union was powerful and intellectually a fabulous match. One note came from Thomas Holcroft, in whose house they had reacquainted themselves. As others before him had, Holcroft extended a happy note to Godwin for having landed “Mrs. W.” But whether or not his wishes were heartfelt remain unclear, because earlier in the months preceding the marriage, Holcroft seemed to have a great and passionate crush on Mary Wollstonecraft.
    â€œI think I discover[ed] the very being for whom my soul has for years been languishing,” he wrote to her. “The woman of reason all day . . . in the evenings becomes the playful and passionate child of love . . . one in whose arms I should encounter . . . soft eyes and ecstatic exulting and yielding known only to beings that seem purely ethereal: beings that breathe and imbue but souls: You are this being.”
    E ven though William Godwin had at first been reluctant to marry her, the void he felt upon Mary’s death was deep and long lasting. And he dealt with it in the only way he knew how. Stunned into disbelief, the day after her death William Godwin entered his study, sat down at his writing desk, set quill to paper, and began working on what eventually became Memoirs of the Author of “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” He felt obliged “to give the public some account of the life of a person of eminent merit deceased” during that particular time, for “it is a duty incumbent on the survivors.”
    His intentions were to tell Mary’s story, to highlight her heartbreaks and successes, her triumphs and apologies, so that readers could glimpse the most transfixing woman he had ever known. He was well intended, though when the memoirs were published in January 1798, the criticism and backlash he received came as a stab in the heart. On those pages he had poured out his heart as well as Mary’s secrets, going to great lengths to highlight not only her life but also her private affairs and indiscretions, including her infatuation with Henry Fuseli, her affair with Gilbert Imlay, and the birth of Fanny.
    Most of the information had been taken from private letters, journals, and confidences shared during their conjugal life. He also included detailed accounts of her two suicide attempts and her bouts with depression, clearly something her readers, those who had read A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, had either not known about or wished not to know about. In Godwin’s hands, Mary Wollstonecraft came across as a bit of a hypocrite: in her work, she had fought for the equal rights of women, for owning one’s own life and doing with it what one may, for refuting marriage, for being on par with men, for having other choices; most of all, she had attacked the educational system of the time for training young women solely to be “the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears, dismissing reason, whenever he chooses to be amused.” And yet in Godwin’s book, she was attempting to drown herself over the inconsequential Gilbert Imlay? And what was to become of the child she had given birth to?
    Written and published reviews were even harsher than the ones he received in person. One particularly nasty one printed in the Monthly Review declared that “blushes would suffuse the cheeks of most husbands, if they were forced to relate these anecdotes of their wives which Mr. Godwin voluntarily proclaims to the world. The extreme eccentricity of Mr. G.’s sentiments will account for his conduct. Virtue and vice are weighed by him in a balance