To Burke's Attack On The French Revolution Mary Wollstonecraft Wrote
An Answer - One Of Many Answers Provoked By It - That Attracted Much
Attention.
This was followed by her "Vindication of the Rights of
Woman while the air was full of declamation on
The "Rights of Man."
The claims made in this little book were in advance of the opinion
of that day, but they are claims that have in our day been conceded.
They are certainly not revolutionary in the opinion of the world
that has become a hundred years older since the book was written.
At this the Mary Wollstonecraft had moved to rooms in Store Street,
Bedford Square. She was fascinated by Fuseli the painter, and he
was a married man. She felt herself to be too strongly drawn
towards him, and she went to Paris at the close of the year 1792, to
break the spell. She felt lonely and sad, and was not the happier
for being in a mansion lent to her, from which the owner was away,
and in which she lived surrounded by his servants. Strong womanly
instincts were astir within her, and they were not all wise folk who
had been drawn around her by her generous enthusiasm for the new
hopes of the world, that made it then, as Wordsworth felt, a very
heaven to the young.
Four months after she had gone to Paris, Mary Wollstonecraft met at
the house of a merchant, with whose wife she had become intimate, an
American named Gilbert Imlay. He won her affections. That was in
April, 1793. He had no means, and she had home embarrassments, for
which she was unwilling that he should become in any way
responsible. A part of the new dream in some minds then was of a
love too pure to need or bear the bondage of authority. The mere
forced union of marriage ties implied, it was said, a distrust of
fidelity. When Gilbert Imlay would have married Mary
Wollstonecraft, she herself refused to bind him; she would keep him
legally exempt from her responsibilities towards the father,
sisters, brothers, whom she was supporting. She took his name and
called herself his wife, when the French Convention, indignant at
the conduct of the British Government, issue a decree from the
effects of which she would escape as the wife of a citizen of the
United States. But she did not marry. She witnessed many of the
horrors that came of the loosened passions of an untaught populace.
A child was born to her - a girl whom she named after the dead friend
of her own girlhood. And then she found that she had leant upon a
reed. She was neglected; and was at last forsaken. Having sent her
to London, Imlay there visited her, to explain himself away. She
resolved on suicide, and in dissuading her from that he gave her
hope again. He needed somebody who had good judgment, and who cared
for his interests, to represent him in some business affairs in
Norway.
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