In Our Time - Mary Wollstonecraft

Episode Date: December 31, 2009

Melvyn Bragg and guests John Mullan, Karen O'Brien and Barbara Taylor discuss the life and ideas of the pioneering British Enlightenment thinker Mary Wollstonecraft.Mary Wollstonecraft was born in 1759 into a middle-class family whose status steadily sank as her inept, brutal, drunken father frittered away the family fortune. She did what she could to protect her mother from his aggression; meanwhile, her brother was slated to inherit much of the remaining fortune, while she was to receive nothing.From this unpromising but radicalising start, Wollstonecraft's career took a dizzying trajectory through a bleak period as a governess to becoming a writer, launching a polemical broadside against the political star of the day, witnessing the bloodshed of the French Revolution up close, rescuing her lover's stolen ship in Scandanavia, then marrying one of the leading philosophers of the day, William Godwin, and with him having a daughter who - though she never lived to see her grow up - would go on to write Frankenstein.But most importantly, in 1792, she published her great work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which marks her out as one of the great thinkers of the British Enlightenment, with a much stronger, more lasting influence than Godwin. The Vindication was an attempt to apply the Enlightenment logic of rights and reason to the lives of women. Yet it was not a manifesto for the extension of the vote or the reform of divorce law, but a work of political philosophy. And surprisingly, as recent scholarship has highlighted, it was infused with Rational Dissenting Christianity, which Wollstonecraft had absorbed during her time as a struggling teacher and writer in north London.John Mullan is Professor of English at University College, London; Karen O'Brien is Professor of English at the University of Warwick; Barbara Taylor is Professor of Modern History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, by the time it was cut short in 1797, the life of the pioneering writer and thinker Mary Walsencraft was a gift to the obituaries. She'd escaped a grim upbringing at the hands of a spendthrift and brutal and drunken father and a bleak career as a governess to become a successful writer. She made herself, one of the leading intellectuals of her day and knew many of the others, from Thomas Payne to William Godwin, who became her husband.

She'd lambasted the political star of the era, Edmund Burke, for his attack on the French Revolution, and gone on to write a vindication of the rights of woman, an enduring classic and a founding text of the feminist movement. And she died in the wake of giving birth to the future author of Frankenstein. Given all this, it isn't surprising that Mary Wilson-Craft has become something of an icon. But beyond her dazzling and notorious life story, She was a fine enlightenment thinker

whose work stands comparison with the leading British philosophers of the day. With me, to discuss Mary Walsoncraft at Barbara Taylor, Professor of Modern History in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of East London, John Mullen, Professor of English at University of College London, and Karen O'Brien, Professor of English at the University of Warwick. Karen O'Brien, can you give us some idea of Mary Walsoncraft's early life?

Yes, she was born in 1759, to quite a wealthy family, her grandfather had been a prosperous silk weaver in London and her father inheriting some of this money decided that he wanted to move up the social scale and he bought a series of farms and tried to live a life of gentility. But unfortunately he was very unsuccessful in these ventures. So Mary Wollstonecraft's childhood experience was one of essentially of downward social mobility and instability. And as a result, as you mentioned in your introduction, Her father became increasingly brutal, drunk, and blatantly unfaithful to his wife.

So this clearly marked her early sense of what a family dominated by a tyrannical father might look like. In addition to that, she was the oldest daughter, but there was an older brother. And very early on in her life, she learned that her brother was going to inherit a very large slice of the family fortune, and she was to inherit nothing. And I think this deeply shaped her sense of not only of patriarchy, but of fraternity, as it was termed. in the French Revolution, the relationships between brothers and sisters, which should, by natural instinct, according to her, be equal, but are in fact unequal. We know the story of her father is very graphic and how she said to lay in, slept in front of the door of her mother's bedroom to stop her father getting in and so on.

What about her mother, she treated somewhat unsympathetically in the portrait that she gave of her mother in her earliest novel, but her mother was clearly someone who suffered immensely from the brutality of her father. She was essentially a woman who was, in educational terms, very ill-equipped to deal with the hand that life dealt her. And she became indolent, self-absorbed and really unable to take full charge of her family. So it fell to Mary to look after her sisters and to essentially fill that maternal role and try and protect her mother from her father. Quite early on the idea of getting an education, being educated, became very important to her. Where did that come from and how did she pursue it? I think it came initially from that understanding

that if she was to do anything in life she would need to be self-reliant and educate herself. Then, simply as a way of getting out of the family, she worked for a while as a lady's companion and then set up a school with her two sisters. It was a way of making a living. But she discovered, I think, in the process that she had quite a vocation as an educationalist.

She then worked for about a year as a governess to a wealthy aristocratic family in Ireland. And again, I think learning more about education, but also about the differences between education across the social classes. So here was her first experience of aristocratic life and of the kinds of educations that aristocratic young women were expected to have. And all of this brought fruit in her first publication. Her first publication was called Thoughts on the Education of Daughters,

which she published in 1787. And here she set out her views that the contemporary education given to women was superficial, promoted an obsession with appearance, with superficial accomplishments like sewing and singing, and did not equip women for independence of thought, of judgment, and for a life of hardship. And I think it's a very interesting work because it has a kind of philosophical underpinning,

which she derives, I think, from philosophers like Locke, which is the notion that the mind can be shaped by education, and also a religious underpinning in the sense that it conveys the notion that life will always be a struggle for men as well as for women, and education will help you with that struggle. Can I turn to John Mullen and take us on from there with more discussion about Locke, the effect that Locke had on her. She was a voracious reader, a philosophy, political philosophy, of her day.

These were recent writers. Can you just start with Locke and give us some idea of her intellectual makeup? Well, I think, as Karen's mentioned, I think not just for Wollstonecraft, but actually for lots of earnings. and genteel 18th century men and women. The sort of Lockean idea, which is laid out in his essay concerning human understanding, that essentially what we have in our heads

are made from our experiences, not sort of, we're not formed when we're born, we're actually filled up by our experiences, is a kind of, it's a sort of sine qua non of intellectual discussion. And lots of ideas are so widely dissemination. that it doesn't even require anybody to sit down and read their way through his philosophy. And I think Mary Wollstonecraft is one of the many who takes it for granted, really,

that because we're formed by our experiences and reason is the capacity that we're given in order to shape and understand those experiences, people can be changed, actually. So people are made by their education or their miseducation, for instance. And if you can change the way that people are taught, or if you can teach people who haven't been taught before, then you can make them responsible and rational citizens in the way they haven't been allowed to be in the past. Did you believe in a completely clean slate idea?

Did she think that nothing came from here? Everything was transferred. Well, we have God-given reason. And that is, as it were, the divine aspect of us. And that is... So she didn't think... that was learned. Reason was given. Reason is something that we have, but

that we can fulfill or not. And she is one of many writers of her particular generation in the late 18th century who have a tendency to see that anything that goes wrong in the world, not just with individuals, but in society is in a way to

do with irrationality. One of the peculiar things I think about her and it's something that happens in the late 18th century to a whole group of thinkers, is that they have a much greater faith in reason than actually some of the great Enlightenment thinkers do. I mean, Locke himself writes brilliantly about how dim the candle of reason is when actually compared to the force of conviction, enthusiasm, zealotry, because he's lived through in the late 17th century a time of great political upheaval and learned that men do not always act

reasonably. And perhaps the greatest British Enlightenment thinker David Hume was apt to say in his philosophy how actually most of the things which motivate men to act do not come from reason. He said it's not irrational for somebody to prefer the destruction of the world to the scratching of their finger. I mean, it's not a good thing, but it's not an unreasonable thing. Reason doesn't

necessarily make our most important decisions. But Wollstonecraft and many of those with whom she shared her values give us extraordinary sort of status to reason. So she forefronted reason, foregrounded reason, and she associated it with her idea of God. Yes, because when after she has worked as a governor, as she comes to London to Stoke Newington, which is actually then a village outside London.

And she tries to start up what she does. She starts up a school. And she becomes, although she herself has been a conventional Anglican in the past, she joins in with a circle of what we're called at the time rational dissenters, people who apply reason to their religious beliefs. and one of the great influences on her as an man called Richard Price, the leading Unitarian Minister in this community. I'll come back to that in a moment, John.

Barbara Taylor, one Enlightenment thinker who was particularly important to was Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. What did she take from him, positively, and what does she oppose him? The first mention we have of her reading Rousseau is in the 1787, when she's working as a governess in Ireland, and she's a young woman full of restless ambition, very unhappy, in the position she finds herself in. In reading Rousseau, she finds him, I think one could say both simultaneously inspirational and extremely aggravating.

I mean, she wrote her first novel, Maria Fiction, as a direct response to Rousseau's great didactic fiction, Emil, and she later directs much of the rights of women at him. So I think what she takes from him in the first instance is she hugely admires him as a social critic. She admires his anti-elitism, his attack on modern manners on what he regards as the corruption and worldliness

of modern manners. And she also very much admires his egalitarianism. There's a huge theme in Rousseau, the ideals of equality, and this is very important to her. She also, Rousseau strove all his life for a sort of vision of personal authenticity and this is something that has enormous appeal to Mary Wollstonecraft,

this idea of a self sort of stripped vanity and pretense. The authentic person rather than the person shaped by society, yeah. Absolutely. And he saw a distinction, which she saw too. Absolutely. Well, she really absorbs that from Rousseau, as many people did at the time. And she identifies with him. I mean, it's not just an intellectual appreciation.

There's a real sense of personal identification with his self-presentation as a maverick, a solitary walker, as he describes. In fact, she uses that phrase, applies it to herself at one time. But of course, she has a problem with Rousseau, which is that when she reads Emil, she encounters book five of Emil, which is on Sophie or the woman,

which is his portrait of the ideal woman. And this is, for her mind, enormously objectionable portrayal of a female ideal as self-abnegating, submissive, governed entirely by the needs and desires of men. And as she grapples with her so, she decides eventually to respond to this imaging of women in the rights of women. So I think one could say it's a sort of intellectual love affair in a sense with a sort of bitter edge to it. Can we take up something that John Mullen was talking about a few moments ago, and that's her falling in with

most fortunately with these dissenting Christians in the church still there, a beautiful little church on Newington Green, with Price and also with Joseph Johnson who ran a review magazine he invited her in to write for it. These were two massively lucky break because she got in effect some sort of university

in this place. Descenters couldn't go to university of course, and she got an opportunity to write and have her stuff in public. A double, huge double-break Can you just tell us more, tell this and more about that group, what they stood for, and how important they were to her? Well, this was, as you and John have both indicated, an enormously important moment for her. What you have is the Enlightenment pushed to its most radical conclusions with these men and women. Rational dissent, which later becomes known as Unitarianism, is a very humane rational form of Christianity

that believes in the free exercise of reason as the foundation of religious commitment. It's a fiercely anti-supretitious form of belief, denial of the divinity of Christ, but an identification of the Christian mission, as one that, particularly at the center of the Christian mission being universal benevolence, that is a world built on brotherly love. And in the case of the rational dissenters,

particularly Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, another leading revolutionary figure at this time, who was a rational dissenter, these are great supporters of the democratic revolutions of the age. They, initially of the American Revolution and then of the French Revolution, which they see as a working through of God's intention. Again, picking up something John was talking about, John Mullen was talking about, this fusion, I think it'll fascinate listeners,

of her belief in reason and also her commitment to the dissenting form of Christianity is extraordinarily powerful in her and very interesting. Could you tell us a bit more about that? Wollstonecraft, until quite recently, I think it hasn't been taken seriously as a religious thinker. And in fact, if you look closely at vindication of the rights of women, the aim really, the underlying aim of the book is to prepare women for a sort of spiritual destiny, to realize those spiritual subjectivity. She takes many of her ideas directly from rational descent, but also from another source, which reunite. forces the religious strand of her work, and that is from the sort of Christian platonist ideals as well. John Mullen, can we talk about her what she thought of as rights? 1789, the French Revolution began.

How did she articulate her idea of rights in this context? The idea of rights has a very powerful appeal to her and arouses some very powerful fears in those against whom she would take up the sort of polemical cudgels, because it suggests that we can kind of get behind all the corrupt institutions of society and in a sense remake a political society on a basis, on a sort of intellectual or moral basis. And when the French revolution happens, what people like her and many other people in England think at first,

is that when the Bastille is stormed, that what the French are doing is a version of what the English did 100 years before. In 1688, the English had their revolution and got rid of a would-be tyrant in the eyes of people like Mary Wilson and Grafrey, the Roman Catholic James II, and produced what we might now call a sort of constitutional monarchy, although it didn't go very far, it didn't go far enough as far as the radicals of the 1790s were concerned. And the French were now doing the same thing. They were going to have a society based on the natural rights of human beings, and indeed they had a declaration of natural rights,

which thinkers in England took as a kind of model of the sort of template of what a society should be based on. What spurred her to action was a publication by Edmund Burke, the conservative thinker philosopher and politician who had been for the American Revolution and wrote a book an indictment of the French Revolution, basically saying, society is held together by traditions and customs

to rip it all back and start again and make them artificial constructs is a recipe for disaster. And she objected to that, and fired into action with a very quickly written book, Vindication of the Rights of Men. This is the start of an extraordinary flourishing of pamphlet controversy in the early 1790s. And the key work, as you mentioned,

is Bert's reflections on the revolution in France. That actually is itself a response to a published sermon given by the man we've been talking about, Richard Price, who says, the French Revolution, it's the era of light and liberty fulfilled. So the whole of the Enlightenment, is, as it were, being justified in this political flowering. And Burke writes indeed to say that it's all actually madness.

It's going to end very, very badly. I mean, the actual, the force of the reflections is that it's a predictive work whose predictions turned out in the eyes of many to be quite accurate. He said it's been fostered by academics, by people, by intellectuals, by people with ideas, put into practice by lawyers. people with no practical experience of politics. And, you know, as he said, in the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows.

And this became an extraordinary powerful prediction. And Mary Wilsoncraft, before the revolution became violent, grappled indignantly and angrily with it in her vindication of the rights of men. Karen O'Brien, she's come an awful long way, hasn't she, from being a dissatisfied, in fact, almost depressed governess in Ireland to an aristocratic family, to writing this pamphlet challenging book. She didn't put her own name to it, but it became known that she, this woman, had stood up and shaken her fist at Burke. And then she went on to write what remains her most famous work,

a vindication of the rights of a woman published in 1792. Can you lead us into the vindication of the rights of woman? Yes, she has come an enormously long way because the, The vindication of the rights of men that we've just been talking about is in some ways a kind of diagnosis of false political education in society. What she's saying is that, contrary to what Berker said, people have come to believe in all kinds of strange ways that there's some kind of inherent authority and tradition

that hereditary and traditional notions of power, aristocracy, social hierarchy are to be believed. And if we can only re-educate ourselves, we can unbelieve all of those things. And it seemed, therefore, excuse me, a logical step to then think about the ways in which women and society in general might uneducate themselves about the ways in which they have traditionally thought about women and therefore having written a vindication of the rights of men,

she writes a vindication of the rights of woman. This vindication, however, is not in a straightforward sense a treatise about rights. It doesn't have a great deal to say about civil rights for women, rights to property, rights within marriage, rights to divorce, that kind of thing. And it doesn't have a great deal to say about political rights. the right to suffrage, for example. But all of those things are implicit in what she says generally. In other words, if society were reformulated

and if women were re-educated, those rights might eventually become a possibility. So what would you say, to reprise it, would the core of her argument in this? The core of the argument is a diagnosis of what she calls the current state of female manners. She uses that word manners a lot. It doesn't mean table manners.

it means the kind of cultural milieu in which they exist. And she's writing primarily about middle class women. She's not writing about either very aristocratic women or about working class women. And she's trying to show how women acquire a kind of false subjectivity, a false sense of themselves. So she's using that Rousseau idea

that women in particular accept the ascribe social identities that they're brought up with and their education reinforces that. And then she's trying to think her way out of those. identities. How can women take ownership of themselves? How can they become fully autonomous, spiritual and rational beings? How can they be educated for a kind of independence that would ultimately allow them to perform a civic role in society? Barbara Taller, what was the effect of this, what is now seen as an extremely important key piece of work? What effect did it have

on the intellectual society of the day? Did her parish literally almost at Newington Green embrace it and did it go further afield? It was well received. It was well and politely received. I think we need to realize that Walson Croft was not the first person to put forward some of these arguments. Among educated and thoughtful people in Britain, they had already been exposed not to such a full manifesto for women's rights, if you'd like, but to certainly intimations of the argument. So it comes into a world, especially around the question of reform of women's education, where people are already primed to think about some of these issues. So there's a chance.

chatter about it that's largely favorable. There's some unease around the degree to which she is seen as querying the sexual distinction, that is the very notion of sexual difference itself. Perhaps she's pushing the egalitarian argument a bit hard. And so there's some unease around that. And some women in particular reading it really enjoy her attack on Rousseau, who has irritated them also. I think it's important to see, however, that the reception of the book,

way the book is understood, then changes with the changing political climate. John Mullen, how much of a more general enlightenment project was her attack on female virtues? And it's a remark it's not very anti-men, is it? No, it's not. I mean, a lot of one thing that might surprise the contemporary reader is that a lot of indication, given that it seems to be about the consequences of, to use her word, tyranny, of domestic tyranny, is about women and how they behave and how they've got to change and get their act together and stop lying around on sofas

and modelling their aspirations on silly novels. It is about how, as she says, women are exalted by their inferiority. So it's an analysis of femininity and how femininity in an enlightenment fashion, which she, I think, would say, would argue, hasn't really been applied to a female man. as before. Femininity is made by society. It's not given. So as Barbara says, one of the things that took people aback

was her argument that there are no inherently female virtues. The women are put, gilded, they're put in little cages. Yes, they are. They're giving petticoats and whatever it is, so they can't move very freely. That's right. And they're taught this thing called sensibility, a kind of delicacy that they're proud of. They're taught to value beauty more than anything else. And it's funny that at the other end of the political spectrum, you can find writers like Jane Austen apparently interested in the same phenomenon at the same time. Her critique of sensibility is that it enslaves women.

They are taught it's one of the sort of arts of femininity. And she thinks that this is kind of disastrous for women. It stops them being kind of thinking beings. And it's taught through all sorts of means. It's actually one of the interesting things about the vindication is it's absolutely full of, quotations, not just from Rousseau, but all the other books that people are reading, which women are reading, which are teaching them,

to be thoughtless beings. Karen O'Brien, how did you relate love and sexual desire to the idea of reason? Because we have been talking about a pure being so far. She had a tremendous association with fuselie. It's not supposed to be in a fully consummated affair, but this libertine, this monstrous man fuselie. She had a... And wanted to go into a menorchot.

while with him and his wife. She was and then we can all go and talk later about one of two other things, a passionate woman. How did she bring these two together? Yes, I think as you were hinting, this was a period in her life when she was very troubled by her own sexuality, and the whole question of female sensuality

and sexuality is handled in a very contradictory way in the vindication. On the one hand, I think what she's trying to say in essence is that there isn't a right kind of femininity and a wrong kind of femininity. There's being a human being, and there's being socialised into being a woman.

And what she's trying to get across is the notion that women should be human beings first. And they may be women second. But they may be women for her only when they're in love. This is what she says throughout the vindication, that she'd rather that people were simply in some way non-sexual or asexual, except perhaps when they are genuinely authentically in love. And then they may assume a kind of gendered identity. So she's not ruling out the notion that in certain arenas of life,

women become women and men become men. but she's trying to very severely restrict the arenas in which that is possible because she's trying to say to women that the sorts of power that they have that comes from their attractiveness, their beauty, their sensuality, are really false kinds of power, and they should only really be exercised in the context of a loving relationship. So the vindication has become famous and was discussed a great deal in the later 20th century

in the context of its apparent denial of female sexuality, it's ambivalence about sexuality, as in some way an obstacle to clear rational thinking. Do you want to take that up? Discussion about women in the 18th century was almost entirely eroticised or countereroticised. I mean, it was almost impossible to talk about women except as sexual beings.

And I think we need to remember that when we look at a vindication of the rights of women. I mean, how much Walstoncraft is trying to set her face against that way of talking about the female condition. So, I mean, certainly there are very open expressions of hostility to what she calls the voluptuous, the voluptuary. That's fueled on the one hand by the egalitarian impulse in the book, also by her own relative inexperience at the time.

She is, in fact, we're almost certainly a virgin at the time that she writes this book, and I should add that her views on this do change later. But I think also there's a third thing to remember, which is that there is a very powerful story about love in a vindication of the rights of women, but it's about the love of God. and picking up the sort of platonic strand in her thinking, she sees eros, she sees that aspect of the human psyche

as really fundamental to all subjectivities, but the question is the direction that it takes and where it leads the person in a moral direction. And I think that so that strand is tremendously important and needs to be the context in which we look at her views on physical sexuality. So talk about moral due to, as well as a theory of rights. But we're not talking, just to emphasize, before we move on,

we're not talking about political rights, we're not talking about a divorce, we're not talking about legal position, we're not talking about having a vote, I'm not talking about women go to university, we're not talking about any of that in vindication of the rights of women. Not at any great length, but it's hinted out and it's implicit in a lot of what she says.

And she takes for granted a notion that rights are God-given and inherent in everyone, and they're in some way connected with a notion of duty in her writing. And quite a lot of the chapter headings have the word duty in them, duty of parents, duties of people to each other. But I think for Wollstonecraft, the highest duty one has is to oneself as a rational being. And that's actually a divinely imposed duty. And if one fulfills those obligations, one other things follow and one is able to exercise one's rights. Right, briefly, because we've got to get to pass. Well, I mean, I think that, again, the reader now would find some of her pronouncements on relationships between human beings. pretty austere. I mean, she actually says sexual passion should not in any good relationship

last long. I mean, it should be conquered, actually, and friendship is the word for any good relationship, any good marriage in the long term. And she seems, I think, very clearly suspicious of the kind of feelings which perhaps in her life often came to sort of dominate him. Baratelich, she went to Paris, Mary Walson-Graft went to Paris and arrived there in 1792 of the revolutions in full swing. What did you find that disturbed her? Well, I think disturbed and excited

her. I mean, she plunged into activity there. And in 1792, I mean, she arrives on the brink of the we're moving toward the regicide, declaration of war between Britain and France,

the introduction of the terror, she loses friends to the terror. She places herself in a very powerless position by undertaking writing a history of the early stages of the French Revolution, which had anyone discovered this, probably would have found her in the same position as Tom Payne, clapped into prison and possibly awaiting the guillotine. So she has chapters of this sent out. She's in a turmoil. She's gone from Newington Green into the sort of furnace of Europe, hasn't she? Absolutely. She's right at the heart of the revolution. She's hanging out with a group of

sort of political tourists, if you like, at the White's Hotel. But in great dangers, we see Tompain, who she knew was put in prison and was with an ace of being a guillotine himself. Absolutely. Plus, it's worth recalling also that although it's true that a vindication of the rights of woman doesn't dwell on the question of rights in its specifics in detail, she has publicly attacked the leadership of the revolution in a vindication of the rights of woman, which is also directed at the failure of the French Revolution to introduce women's rights. So she's come carrying that reputation.

The excitement and the turmoil and that boldness, you can see, why Godwin talked of her as a sort of heroic figure. Yet, to her, I should imagine, complete dismay, Edmund Burke, whom she'd attacked, she kept seeing had been right, as John Mullen pointed out earlier, that this was leading to monstrosities, this form of revolution. Yes, and her relationship to the changing character of the revolution is very complex. In fact, she defended the September massacres in the first instance, which might somewhat startle us now, but many people think that thought, well, there will be blood spilled. I mean, you know, this is a world-changing event. However, it's absolutely true that with the terror and with the ascendancy of Robespierre, she becomes

deeply, deeply alienated from the direction of the revolution. Although unlike many English radicals, she never turned her back on the long-term aspirations of the revolution. More has not than words with, yeah. Yes, I mean, that's exactly, she develops quite a full and thoughtful critique of the revolution. While this is happening in Paris, John Mullen, she's in the middle of all this. She, we presume, fall in love if you can use that phrase of Mary Orsoncraft, with this American chancer, oh well, entrepreneur, if you want, diplomat, whatever. Gilbert Imlay, who seduces her and gives her a child and then abandons her.

Now, can you just tell us about that part of her life and the effect that that part of her life had on her life? One of the things about the vindication that we've been talking about is how although the personal experiences with which we began the programme might have been very much behind it, it often seems a rather impersonal work. What happens in Paris is not just in a sense that her political sympathies are put to a frightening test by the reality of what's happening. It's not just the era of light and reason. Also in her personal entanglement with Imlay,

which I think is a deeply passionate relationship. for her. I mean, he sort of talked of as a bit of a sort of rogue and a seducer, but I think it's clear from the letters that we still have. But for her, this was at least for a time, what we might call it a fulfilling relationship. She had discovered love and sexual passion, and because she was thinking, but also, I think, an unhypocrical person, this tested her ideas. And after she came back from Paris and after Imlay appeared to have dumped her and have left her with a child, she went on an extraordinary journey on his behalf to Sweden and Norway to try and get back a ship that he'd lost. And the wonderful, I think, work that she wrote as a consequence of that, a short residence in Sweden,

is all about that in a sense, is all about the test of your personal feelings and the contradictions of your personal actions against your high, intellectual ideas. But we're talking about a great wound because she attempted to kill herself after she discovered he'd abandoned her, Karen O'Brien. How did she get through that, that period

before she met her up with Codwood? Well, it did wound her very badly, and that there were two suicide attempts, the second of which featured her jumping into the Thames and being rescued by a boatman, so it was a serious attempt. She moved back to London and she resumed some of her activities, writing for Joseph Johnson, and it was really

through that circle that She came to a period of calm in her life and also, I think, to understand some of the joys of motherhood. She writes very movingly in the letters from Sweden and elsewhere about her genuine and deep affection for her little girl. And she also theorises motherhood as a kind of female duty and as an arena of woman's life that is to be taken seriously. She's in her 30s now. She's in her 30s. She's in her mid to late 30s. And then at one dinner party, she meets the famous philosopher William Godwin. William Gobbin was already well known as the author of an inquiry concerning political justice published back in 1793

and he read her Swedish letters and I think partly fell in love with her through reading those letters and very slowly they became lovers and then when Mary fell pregnant they decided that despite Gobwin's theoretical objections to marriage as a kind of property sort of form of ownership of women by men that they ought to get married and they did so but they continued to live in separate houses. They had met previously, and it's a rather delicious story because they met at a dinner party where Godwin was hoping to have a good chat with Tom Paine. And instead, Godwin and Walson Cramp got into a savage quarrel about Voltaire and religion, which went on the whole evening

and Payne couldn't get a word in edgewise. And Godwin went away from this. This was several years before, really disliking Mary Wollstonecraft. And so I think he was quite surprised the next time he met her that he found her so charming and engaging. they formed a union of real intellectual camaraderie as well as sexual passion. But I think the question of its influence on her, I think it was more the other way, to be honest.

Her influence on him is quite obvious in many places. He actually, I mean, there are revisions in his thought that are attributed to her that follow directly, especially around questions of sexuality and marriage and so on, but more generally, taking seriously the emotional dimension of life. and he talks about some of these influences in his biography of her. I think she approached his thought with a certain caution. His communism, I think probably did have some impact on her. I mean, she already had expressed serious doubts about the rise of commercial society

and the impact of differentials of wealth on cultural life and so on. And I think that he probably pushed her further in that sort of communist utopian direction. John Mullen, how influential as a writer was she then? We're talking about towards the end of the 1790s. She's married to Godwin, live in separate houses. She's about to have a child who, well, marry Shelley as a young girl and write Frankenstein. But how was she in London, how influential writer was she? The vindication was given the fact that a bit later after her death,

Mary Wollstonecraft was demonised by many. During her own lifetime, a vindication was. received with, I think, surprising sort of respect, even amongst kind of those who were not radical sympathisers. And she also lassoud, Karen, she also lassude in the literary, great literary figures by, as what John was talking about earlier, the report from Norway, which and Sweden, which people were charmed by. Yes, it was a very successful work. And as John says, until shortly after her death when Gobwin produced this memoir of her, her reputation was, ran reasonably high and she sold quite reasonable numbers of copies of books and they were translated

into European languages. It might be just worth saying that the short residence in Sweden, I mean, one of the things about Walson Craft, which is important about her, is that she is a sort of quite an formally audacious writer. She tries writing in all sorts of different ways. And it's written the short residence in letters and she uses the letter form brilliantly to sort of dramatize the conflicts that are going on in her mind and in her life. Let's talk about this side ending. The greatest sadness is that she gave birth, and a few days later, she died. Then Godwin wrote her biography and was very open about it. Nowadays, we would read and think, what a tremendously open biography.

He writes per se, eric, courageous woman, and it spectacularly backfired. Can you briefly tell us something of that, Barbara Taylor? He believes in truth-telling at all cost, and he exposes in it her affairs, the illegitimate child, her suicide attempts, and this horrifies many people, including many erstwhile admirers. Also, however, he publishes with it an unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman or Mariah, which is a very, very different sort of book than Mary had ever published before, much, much more radical in the ideas that it espoused about sexuality, about women's rights, an attack on patriarchal marriage,

and at one point an open defense of, of sexual relations outside marriage. And the combination of the revelations of the memoir and the content of this new novel gave people a completely new image of Mary Walsdencraft and one that they really didn't like. Karen, how long, her reputation was blocked by this. People were afraid to like a publicer.

Most people were, as I understand it. And it took decades by reputation to gather again. Can you describe how long? it took? It took a great part of the 19th century, although she remained an underground presence and an inspiration to all kinds of feminist movements in the 19th century, socialist, feminist movements and others. Not least because, as Barbara mentioned, the wrongs of woman, the final unfinished novel that she left behind, showed that she was, in her thinking, reaching beyond the social class, which she'd hitherto described, and thinking much more about the lives of

really much poorer working class women. And so I think that that gave her a kind of purchase and a reach in the 19th century, but it wasn't a very widespread one. But Virginia Woolf admired her, and by the mid-20th century there was a biography, and it was really in the kind of post-wolf feminist movement that she became something of an icon. There were biographies, there were additions of her letters, and she became a hotly contested and important figure for redefining the relationship between the public and the private and sexuality and rationality and some of those issues. Finally, did her work have...

any influence before the end of the 19th century. Do you want to tackle that Marmer? It had influence in radical circles as Karen's already mentioned. She was a real heroine of the early socialist, utopian socialists

and the Chartist movement, radical democratic movements. And in America and likewise in America. At 1850 convention, she was brought up down, wasn't she? Yes, I mean from the beginnings in, I mean, everywhere there was, everywhere she was known about and acknowledged,

and there was unease that surrounded her, except in the most radical circles, until, but with the emergence of large scale, organized feminism, the suffrage movement and so on, in the late 19th century, she really becomes an icon of feminism. I mean, the suffrage movements, marches in London carried huge banners,

Mary Wollstonecraft, pioneer, and she was a real heroine. Well, thank you very much, Barbara Taylor, Karen O'Brien and John Mullen. Next week, Monday to Thursday, in a special series of editions of In Our Time, I'll be telling the story of the oldest national scientific society

in the world, the Royal Society, founded 350 years ago in 1660. Its fellows have included Newton, Darwin, Hook, Boyle, up to Stephen Hawking. That's in our time, the Royal Society and British Science starting next Monday. Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast,

why not try others such as Start the Week, the Radio 4 discussion programme, where Andrew Maher sets the cultural agenda for the next seven days. To find out more, visit BBC.com.uk forward slash podcasts.