Mary Godwin Shelley

From Philosopedia

Wollstonecraft, Mary (Godwin) (1759–1797)

An English writer who was once called “a hyena in petticoats” by a male who denigrated her feminism, Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), the first great feminist document. She lived in Paris with Gilbert Imlay during much of the French Revolution, but they did not marry and she relished being his wife “in everything save the sanction of the law.” When, however, he tired “of what to him was only a bit of romance,” she twice attempted suicide, once succeeding so far in her design as to throw herself in the Thames, being rescued in a state of insensibility. Imlay pretended to take her and their daughter (Frances) back, but she found after he sent her on a business trip to Scandinavia that he had left for America with some new love. In 1797 after having lived with William Godwin for some time, she married him, fearful of the legal rights of their unborn baby. “Their short marital experience was, apparently, one of unclouded happiness,” Sara A. Underwood wrote.

Soon after the marriage, Mary gave birth to a daughter, Mary, who later became the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The baby was healthy but the placenta was retained in the womb. The doctor's attempt to remove the placenta resulted in blood poisoning, and Mary died on 10 September 1797.

Underwood cites Wollstonecraft as a heroine of freethought. When in 1785 she journeyed to Portugal to be with her dying friend, Frances Blood, she became indignant upon Blood’s death that Portugal would not allow her friend, a Protestant, to be buried in consecrated ground. Successfully arranging to “steal her friend a grave,” she experienced her first defiance of the “powers that be.” She then challenged Edmund Burke for his Reflections on the French Revolution]], saying it contained perfidy to his previously enunciated principles. Whereupon she wrote, A Vindication of the Rights of Man, which introduced her to fame and helped place her among the celebrities of that period. She followed with a companion work on the rights of women, which Underwood describes as

• a passionate defense of the true dignity, and an eloquent plea for the fitter education, of woman; a work coming directly from her heart, and sanctioned by the deliberate reasoning of her brain. . . . [She] is almost masculinely severe and contemptuous in her estimate of her own sex, attacking with sarcasm and pitying scorn its attempts to hold men’s hearts in bondage by sensual attraction, rather than by superior excellence of morals or high intellectual attainments.”

According to Underwood,

• Mary’s religious opinions, like many other things in regard to her, have been misrepresented. She has been called a Materialist, and Atheist; she was neither of these, though a Freethinker. She was a Deist: a devout and reverential believer in the existence of an all-wise and all-loving God.” As proof, she cites Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, in which she
• found it impossible to accept the dogmas of the churches as true, and yet in unison with the idea of an all-pervading, all-wise, and all-creative Power, such as she believed God to be, she could not narrow her God within the church limits, so, rather than loose her hold of her high conception, she let go the churches and their narrow creeds, but held fast, with all the deep ardor and breadth of her nature, to the unknowable, but all-sufficient God.

Elizabeth Larson, in an extensive article in Free Inquiry (Spring 1992) tells of Wollstonecraft’s fight for women’s rights and how, in 1788, she wrote the first lesbian novel, Mary, A Fiction, based upon her real-life passion for Fanny Blood, an emotion which Mary’s husband once described as “so fervent (that it) constituted the ruling passion in her mind.” She died several days after giving birth to a daughter, the future Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft is buried in the Godwin family plot at St. Peter’s Church in Bournemouth, England. The tombstone cites her as author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Adjacent is the tomb of her daughter, Mary (who is buried with Shelley’s liver, or possibly his heart).

Lyndall Gordon's Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (2006) emphasizes that she was sure she would become known as "the first of a new genus," an example of the new woman who would be known not for her gender but for her accomplishments. Gordon describes her as being dignified although voluptuous, warm and gentle not just big-bosomed, and denies she was a "hyena in petticoats." Admirably, Wolstoncraft was sure that "the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on," and she succeeded in making long and difficult trips, both mentally and physically, experiencing the freedoms which were evidencing themselves during the late eighteenth century. Feminists have praised her ever since.

Tomb containing three generations of the Godwin/Wollstonecraft/Shelley family

Underwood has described the scene prior to the entombment:

• The orthodox preacher who officiated in the church to which this graveyard belongs objected seriously to having the bodies of such notorious heretics interred within its sacred precincts, but the present Lady Shelley, wife of Sir Percy, evidently a woman of determination and spirit, as well as an enthusiastic admirer of the noble dead whom she wishes thus to pay honor to, made up her mind that the bodies should be buried there; and, says Mr. Conway, my authorityDeists for this statement, one day actually came from Christchurch in her carriage, following a hearse which bore the bodies. She sat in her carriage before the locked iron gates, and expressed her resolution to sit there until the bodies were admitted for burial. The rector, dreading perhaps the scandal which would be caused, yielded; the gravedigger did his work with haste; and by night, without any ceremonial, the bodies were let down into their graves. When afterward the baronet and his lady wished to place over the graves a marble slab, the rector again protested, on account of the inscription, which said that Mary Wollstonecraft was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Lady Shelley asked him rather pointedly if he had ever read Mary Wollstonecraft’s book; and he having said he had not, she said he had better read it and state his objections afterward. So she sent him the volume, and he read it. He then said he could not find fault with it, and so the inscription went on.

(See the entry for Percy Bysshe Shelley. Also see an article on Wollstonecraft by Esther H. Schor of Princeton University in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory & Criticism (1994). Schor writes, “Wollstonecraft’s admonition to women to ‘effect a revolution in female manners’ and to ‘labour by reforming themselves to reform the world’ remains the manifesto of modern feminism.”)

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