Ms. Prometheus

By R. Z. Sheppard

THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT by CLAIRE TOMALIN

316 pages. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. $8.95.

In the early wars for women's liberation, even the heroines tended to remain unknown soldiers. Perhaps it was partly the fear of oblivion that made Mary Wollstonecraft sit down late in 1791 and in six weeks write the 300 pages of A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Earlier that year, she had broken out of a shell of ladylike anonymity to print a bylined edition of her previously unsigned pamphlet A Vindication of the Rights of Man. It was a loosely reasoned but passionate answer to Edmund Burke's reservations about the French Revolution. It made Mary Wollstonecraft at 32 a popular radical writer, whose name was thereafter frequently mentioned along with that of her friend Thomas Paine.

The Rights of Women became an international bestseller and exposed the lady to the baritone wrath of conservatives and liberals alike. She was vilified for arguing that women should be able to achieve financial independence and for suggesting that given equal education and opportunity, females would be the professional equal of men. Horace Walpole called her a "philosophical serpent" and a "hyena in petticoats." Even her friends, the liberal though pious Dissenters, were shocked by her challenge to the ancient wisdom that considered women to be imperfect men.

Yet it seems fair to conclude from Claire Tomalin's biography that had Mary Wollstonecraft not stoked herself up for Rights of Women, she would probably have ended up as only a historical footnote: radical editor and translator; wife of Philosopher William Godwin; mother of Mary Godwin, future wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of Frankenstein.

There was a bit of the pathetic patchwork monster about Wollstonecraft herself. Born into a graspy family of weaver-merchants who for several generations had been up and down the economic ladder, she had to pick up her education and her righteous indignation wherever she could find them. Appalled by the strictures of marriage, she attempted to support herself as a governess, then as the head of her own small school. But her temperament, says Biographer Tomalin, "was geared to drama, violent emotion and struggle" without nuance, irony or humor. She was a person who had to dominate people. An early victory was persuading her sister to run away from her loutish husband and baby. Where Wollstonecraft's confused sense of her own sexuality was concerned, she was as ambivalent and anguished a victim as ever slit her wrists in a Joyce Carol Gates story.

Spiritual Partner. Wollstonecraft's first serious love was for a gifted, flamboyant, vain and bisexual painter named Henry Fuseli. The affair was predictably exciting and predictably disastrous, a power struggle that ended in the humiliating scene: Mary begging Fuseli's wife to allow a menage `a trois in which Mary was to be a purely "spiritual partner." Mme. Fuseli was not agreeable. In France, where Mary's fervor for the French Revolution was eventually chilled by the Terror, she fell in love with a flaky American adventurer named Gilbert Imlay; he left her with an illegitimate daughter. No biographer can be expected to re-create the desperate, ineffectual rage that sometimes leads people to attempt suicide. In this clear and measured biography, Critic Claire Tomalin, the new literary editor of the New Statesman, wisely allows the facts to smolder on their own. In October 1795 Mary Wollstonecraft jumped off Putney Bridge into the Thames; the bargemen who pulled her out saved her for a more humiliating fate.

Two years later she became pregnant by and finally married William Godwin, the brilliant though priggish political philosopher, who was publicly opposed to matrimony. Five months after the wedding, a doctor with unwashed hands attended the birth of her daughter Mary. Wollstonecraft died of septicemia eleven days later. The final indignity was more ironic. When Godwin published his memoirs of Mary, he was honest about her love affairs, suicide attempts and pregnancies but apparently misunderstood the meaning of her life and death. He wrote about her, as Biographer Tomalin observes, "as the female Werther, a romantic and tragic heroine," ignoring her intellectual development and failing even to appraise her feminist ideas.

Perhaps it is too much to suppose that Mary Shelley had her mother in mind when she created the arrogant genius Dr. Frankenstein and subtitled her novel The Modern Prometheus. How much better a tribute than Father Godwin's female Werther: Mary Wollstonecraft, having stolen the fires of social equality for her sex, chained and suffering on the rock of her female biology.

R.Z. Sheppard

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