The Little Payment For Her Pamphlet On The "Education Of Daughters"
Caused Mary Wollstonecraft To Think More Seriously Of Earning By Her
Pen.
The pamphlet seems also to have advanced her credit as a
teacher.
After giving up her day school, she spent some weeks at
Eton with the Rev. Mr. Prior, one of the masters there, who
recommended her as governess to the daughters of Lord Kingsborough,
an Irish viscount, eldest son of the Earl of Kingston. Her way of
teaching was by winning love, and she obtained the warm affection of
the eldest of her pupils, who became afterwards Countess Mount-
Cashel. In the summer of 1787, Lord Kingsborough's family,
including Mary Wollstonecraft, was at Bristol Hot-wells, before
going to the Continent. While there, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her
little tale published as "Mary, a Fiction," wherein there was much
based on the memory of her own friendship for Fanny Blood.
The publisher of Mary Wollstonecraft's "Thoughts on the Education of
Daughters" was the same Joseph Johnson who in 1785 was the publisher
of Cowper's "Task." With her little story written and a little
money saved, the resolve to live by her pen could now be carried
out. Mary Wollstonecraft, therefore, parted from her friends at
Bristol, went to London, saw her publisher, and frankly told him her
determination. He met her with fatherly kindness, and received her
as a guest in his house while she was making her arrangements. At
Michaelmas, 1787, she settled in a house in George Street, on the
Surrey side of Blackfriars Bridge. There she produced a little book
for children, of "Original Stories from Real Life," and earned by
drudgery for Joseph Johnson. She translated, she abridged, she made
a volume of Selections, and she wrote for an "Analytical Review,"
which Mr. Johnson founded in the middle of the year 1788. Among the
books translated by her was Necker "On the Importance of Religious
Opinions." Among the books abridged by her was Salzmann's "Elements
of Morality." With all this hard work she lived as sparely as she
could, that she might help her family. She supported her father.
That she might enable her sisters to earn their living as teachers,
she sent one of them to Paris, and maintained her there for two
years; the other she placed in a school near London as parlour-
boarder until she was admitted into it as a paid teacher. She
placed one brother at Woolwich to qualify for the Navy, and he
obtained a lieutenant's commission. For another brother, articled
to an attorney whom he did not like, she obtained a transfer of
indentures; and when it became clear that his quarrel was more with
law than with the lawyers, she placed him with a farmer before
fitting him out for emigration to America. She then sent him, so
well prepared for his work there that he prospered well. She tried
even to disentangle her father's affairs; but the confusion in them
was beyond her powers of arrangement. Added to all this faithful
work, she took upon herself the charge of an orphan child, seven
years old, whose mother had been in the number of her friends. That
was the life of Mary Wollstonecraft, thirty years old, in 1789, the
year of the Fall of the Bastille; the noble life now to be touched
in its enthusiasms by the spirit of the Revolution, to be caught in
the great storm, shattered, and lost among its wrecks.
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.
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