william godwin's memoirs of the author of a vindication of the rights of woman and the gender of romantic biography

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Notes

notes

1. Desmond notes that immundi is the same word used to describe menstruating women excluded from the temple in the pollution laws of Leviticus 15.20 (60).

2. Myers describes the Memoirs as “the substratum on which even the newest lives [of Wollstonecraft] erect their varying portrayals” (“Godwin's Memoirs” 299).

3. Critics since the eighteenth century have tended to accept the representation of Mary Hays (author of the autobiographical novel Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796)) put forward in the anti-Jacobin press which characterised her as a balding disciple of Godwin, spouting forth large sections of Political Justice, with little understanding and even less decorum. While it is true that Hays engaged with Godwin in a correspondence that was marked by a certain servility in her tone, this servility appears to have functioned primarily to soften her growing critique of his philosophy. For Hays, Godwin seemed to ignore the fact that “sexual distinction” is the first circumstance that mankind meets and that this circumstance had frequently been cajoled into a prejudice. As Marilyn Brooks has recently observed, throughout her correspondence with Godwin, Hays continually foregrounded the injustices of these sexual distinctions, especially for women, which she believed distorted their adoption of many of the cornerstones of Godwinian discourse, truth, virtue and sincerity. See Brooks 370. After several years of discussion and correspondence with Godwin, Hays confessed that she felt that philosophy had done her no personal good and wrote in 1796: “I have acquired the power of reasoning on this subject at a dear rate – at the expense of inconceivable suffering.” Such an observation complicates our understanding of Hays’ turn away from self-revelatory novels to collective female biography in the early nineteenth century, suggesting not a conservative shift as earlier commentators have suggested. Rather, this turn marks an explicit rejection of both Jacobin sexual politics and Rousseauvian autobiography as a mode through which to understand the self and to plead for the rights of woman. It is interesting to note in this context that throughout her life Hays drew on the relationship between Heloise and Abelard as a paradigm through which to interrogate women's relationship to knowledge. See Walker 20. While for Le Dœuff the doomed relationship between Heloise and Abelard represents women's ability to access philosophy only through the mediation of a lover, for Hays (and Wollstonecraft) the couple evoked an erotics of pedagogy they sought to emulate.

4. Gilbert Imlay (1754–1828) was a land speculator, author, veteran of the American War of Independence and father of Mary Wollstonecraft's first child Fanny. Godwin, in his Memoirs, revealed that Imlay and Wollstonecraft were not married, although his own marriage to Wollstonecraft had emphatically demonstrated this fact.

5. See <books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084, 725591,00.html>.

6. Wollstonecraft appears to have understood that it was the Romantic Mary with whom Godwin had fallen in love. In a letter dated 26 October 1796 she suggests he read her Vindication of the Rights of Man as an “amende honorable” or punishment.

7. In a recent biography of Wollstonecraft, Gordon implies that the Memoirs were in fact written to vindicate Wollstonecraft in the eyes of people like Mrs Inchbald.

8. It is important to note here that these “private” letters to Imlay were different from the public correspondence Wollstonecraft produced in her Letters from Sweden. This suggests that Wollstonecraft cultivated a distinctive “persona” in the writings she intended to make public. Godwin published edited versions of her private letters to Imlay and then destroyed the originals.

9. Recent work on The Wrongs of Woman by Jordan suggests that contrary to earlier claims, Wollstonecraft was “pretty exact” in her understanding of the law and how matters of criminal conversation would play out in court: “we should,” she writes, “take Maria seriously as an account of England's ‘partial’ laws” (225).

10. According to Richards, George Dyson was the only other person to be shown this manuscript (Wollstonecraft, Wrongs of Woman 38).

11. Johnson has suggested that the song sung by Sterne's bird “taught its song by a servant of the ancien regime, becomes all of England's women who regardless of class sing the same song: ‘I can’t get out – I can’t get out’” (163).