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(1760–1) which she shared with Jane. Such books were above the ephemeral publications usually assigned to women: comedy, conduct books, platitudinous devotional rhymes and sentimental novels. It was through the Ardens that Mary discovered real books as the property of the professional middle class. She was a member of a stratum of the middle class that apprenticed its sons in the lesser professions (surgeon, not physician; attorney, not barrister), for the Wollstonecrafts fell just below the propertied class with access to the higher professions. As a keen-minded girl, alert to the ineffectual landed ambitions of her father, Mary had to find other ways to improve herself. One answer was reading, a conspicuous literacy in her early teens and sustained throughout her life; another answer was friends. Where other girls thought of hunting for husbands, Mary was determined to find a perfect friend.
    Jane Arden could not live up to what Mary had in mind, and Mary often felt rejected. ‘I spent part of the night in tears; (I would not meanly make a merit of it). I cannot bear a slight from those I love,’ she blurted to Jane. ‘There is some part of your letter so cutting, I cannot comment upon it.’ She pressed forward with her feelings: ‘I am a little singular in my thoughts of love and friendship; I must have the first place or none,’ she explained. ‘I own your behaviour is more according to the opinion of the world.’
    Of course, a girl like this, so demanding, so disconcertingly open, had to be kept in her place. Jane indicated that Mary could not be ‘first’ as she had fondly expected.
    It did not occur to her to hide these hurts when she found herself excluded. ‘I should have gone to the play, but none of you seemed to want my company.’ As ranks closed against her, she asked herself where she had erred. ‘I have read some where that vulgar minds will never own they are in the wrong,’ she told Jane, ‘I am determined to be above such a prejudice…and hope my ingenuously owning myself partly in fault to a girl of your good nature will cancel the offence.’ Mary was acting out what she saw herself to be–honest as well as steadfast–and inviting the same in return: ‘I have a heart that scorns disguise, and a countenance which will not dissemble.’
    Mr Arden soothed the situation by sending Mary an essay on friendship, which she copied out at once. The essay pictures the possibilities of two people who would be ‘guardian angels to each other’ and enjoy the benefit of a lifelong attachment that ‘corrects our foibles and errors, refines the pleasures of sense and improves the faculties of mind’. To repeat these words to Jane was to restore hope of an ideal tie, a world apart from her degrading home.
    â€˜The good folks of Beverley (like those of most Country towns) were very ready to find out their Neighbours’ faults,’ Mary reminded Jane a few years later. ‘Many people did not scruple to prognosticate the ruin of the whole family, and the way he [her father] went on, justified them.’ So Mr Wollstonecraft’s faults did not go unnoticed by townsmen and schoolmates, and during her teens Mary experienced the shame of her family’s slide from respectability. Since there was no further point in secrecy, she acknowledged the problem to Jane: ‘It is almost needless to tell you that my father’s violent temper and extravagant turn of mind, was the principal cause of my unhappiness and that of the rest of the family.’
    It’s not clear why he decided to leave Yorkshire. Was this because of local gossip, failure, or the reason given by Godwin: that sheer restlessness in Mr Wollstonecraft tempted him to commercial speculation? In any case, he moved south with his family. We don’t know whether he took or leftbehind a son of fourteen, Henry, apprenticed in January 1775 to