May I come to your house to philosophise?
John Barrell
- The Letters of William Godwin Vol. I: 1778-97 by Pamela Clemit
Oxford, 306 pp, £100.00, February 2011, ISBN 978 0 19 956261 9
Over the last few months two publications have made it possible, as never before, to attempt to understand the enigmatic William Godwin, the author of one of the great novels of the 18th century and of the founding text in the philosophy of anarchism, the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, the father of Mary Shelley, and the friend or acquaintance of almost everyone on the liberal left over 50 of the most intellectually exciting years in British history. In November last year his voluminous diary, immaculately edited by a team led by Mark Philp, went live on the internet (godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), and this year saw the publication of the first of six volumes of his letters, also immaculately edited by Pamela Clemit. The volume starts in 1778, when Godwin took up his first post as a dissenting minister, through the publication of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice in 1793 and The Adventures of Caleb Williams the following year, and ends shortly after the death in September 1797 of Mary Wollstonecraft, six months after their marriage, during the darkest period of his mourning.
Letters
Vol. 33 No. 20 · 20 October 2011
From Gina Luria Walker
John Barrell captures the equivocal nature of William Godwin’s insistence on ‘the collision of mind with mind’ (LRB, 8 September). Mary Hays came from the same tradition of intellectual and political activism as Godwin. She introduced herself to him in a letter asking to borrow a copy of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice because it was too expensive for her to buy. The correspondence (the letters were mainly from Hays) and the face to face encounters (mostly Godwin’s visits to her) produced a unique ‘proto-psychoanalysis’ (Mary Jacobus’s term) in which Godwin tried, as Barrell suggests, to make Hays more rational – ‘like a man’ – and she struggled to make him accept her as the flawed woman they agreed she was. Neither succeeded.
Still, the interactions were productive for both. Hays was Mary Wollstonecraft’s sole champion among the small cluster of female radicals after the blasting of Wollstonecraft’s hopes for a life with Gilbert Imlay, father of her daughter Fanny Imlay. On 8 January 1796 Hays tried her hand at matchmaking when she reintroduced Godwin and her beloved friend at tea in her lodgings. Hays reported to Godwin afterwards that Wollstonecraft applauded Godwin’s sensitivity to Hays’s unhappiness over William Frend, which raised him in Wollstonecraft’s estimation.
Godwin remained Hays’s standard of male intellection. Resisting what she saw as his hyper-rationality proved to be the catalyst for her own development. When Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’, Hays produced a feminist corrective, her little remembered ‘Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft’ in Richard Phillips’s short-lived Annual Necrology, where Wollstonecraft’s necrology was placed beside Edmund Burke’s.
The ‘Memoirs of Wollstonecraft’ was probably intended as a first attempt at ‘female biography’, Hays’s response to the biographies of Great Men, like the biography Godwin wrote of Chaucer for Phillips. Her major work, Female Biography; or, Memoirs of Illustrious and Celebrated Women, of All Ages and Countries, published in six volumes by Phillips in 1803, assembled 300 bustling, active, mostly rebellious women – including Manon Roland, Girondist martyr, and Catharine Macaulay, Whig historian, whose reputation was tarnished after her marriage to a younger man.
Gina Luria Walker
New York
