In Search of Mary (3 page)

Wollstonecraft herself has to stick with jobs she hates, and is no stranger to people pulling rank on her. As a governess to
the richest family in Ireland, the Kingsboroughs, she attends one of their social gatherings. A guest engages with her, this lively, dark-eyed young woman with a dazzling mind and a knowing sense of humour. The aristocrat only finds out later, face turning ashen, that she was accidentally conversing with the
staff
. Wollstonecraft’s parting shot to these people is an unflattering cameo in her next book, as she goes on to become a celebrated author. Ha!

This is how Wollstonecraft is still so compelling: she defies categories, she constantly bounces back and reinvents herself. She keeps finding out new treasure to hunt. She’s always pushing the boundaries of gender and class. What she’s doing is what we now call human rights and social mobility. What drives Wollstonecraft onwards? In spite of all the raging, it is love. Love: her “ardent affection for the human race” and her passion for its improvement.

Wollstonecraft remains quite poor throughout her life, but still manages to set up a school, travel alone, publish reviews and books, and live in Paris during the Revolution. She keeps on going. On top of supporting her family, and regular career breaks caring for whoever was about to die or have a baby (or both, in the case of her first love and best friend Fanny). She just keeps on going. This entirely rocks my twenty-something world.

3. Wollstonecraft and Motherhood

The third and decisive phase of my Wollstonecraft love-in centres on what Virginia Woolf calls her “experiments in living”. Her unusual domestic arrangements include attempting
a
ménage à trois
, her love for other women, having a baby out of wedlock, and even having the effrontery to call unannounced at the house of a man she rather liked, without a chaperone. These days our twenties are a series of misadventures in coexistence. Isn’t that what being young is for? Back then, such things get her into lots of trouble.

Of all Wollstonecraft’s life experiments, the one into motherhood is most moving. This is the one that sets me spiralling off on my mission. Some time in my thirties I read Virginia Woolf’s essay about Wollstonecraft, and the fascination floods back. “Mary’s life had been an experiment from the start, an attempt to make human conventions conform more closely to human needs.” Approaching the age at which Wollstonecraft died, I reckon I finally know what this means, this “experiments in living”: it’s discovering how best to share your life with other people.

Including small people. Motherhood happens to me at twenty-nine; four kids later I’m still catching up. It happens, as for many women, just as I am getting “power over myself”. Everything changes. My pre-dancer self, who enjoyed certainty and knew all injustices could be solved – where has she gone? Yes, it’s your basic mum-life crisis. The 1970s having-it-all heritage suddenly doesn’t fit. I begin to doubt feminism, and suffer from laundry-related rages. I feel unrepresented, guilty for letting the side down, and annoyed about feeling guilty.

I’m drawn back to
Letters from Norway
and the journey that Wollstonecraft makes, both on and behind its pages. I daydream about her Scandinavian treasure hunt, with her baby. The letters from the rocky and remote shores detailing
people, food, nature and politics. Her moments of madness and high passion, interspersed with dry social statistics. All this with a baby in tow. The woman pulled off multitasking before the notion was invented. I return again to those heart-felt, funny and demanding letters, but this time I’m not on a Sublime thrill-seeker’s mission. This time I only want to know one thing: how the hell did she do it?

Having a baby doesn’t stop Wollstonecraft writing or cramp her style in the least. Of course she does it the modern way, packing in an extra decade of travel and work-related madness before getting knocked up. She’s thirty-four, living in violent revolutionary France and dating the baby’s father, a dodgy two-timing American. Career versus motherhood? What
ever
. She simply scoops the baby up and takes it along on her Scandinavian adventure. She breast-feeds, which wasn’t fashionable at the time, and between writing books and trying to change the world she thinks a lot about children.

Despite her own appalling childhood (domestic violence and hours spent sitting in silent fear), Wollstonecraft becomes a tender and enthusiastic parent. She doesn’t limit the care to her own, either. She wants to change the way everyone brings up children, to create future “rational beings”. The first book that she writes is, after all,
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
.

Here am I, stuck in a self-regarding web of conflicting impulses, pitting motherhood against selfhood. And Wollstone-craft has it nailed long before mothers like me began carping about their diminishing horizons. I begin to think about her, and find her invading my rare private moments. Aghast, I
read about her death. It’s the most bitter blow. A few years after her first baby, she gets pregnant again and dies, cruelly, unnecessarily, in childbirth. She’s only thirty-eight. Mary Wollstonecraft campaigns, writes and dies for motherhood. She achieves remarkable motherhood – and then it kills her. She’s the mother of all mothers.

The baby who goes to Scandinavia with her in
Letters from Norway
is not much older than my youngest child, Will. Suddenly, ping! The revelation lands. This is what to do. This is how to move beyond the thinking, and the talking avidly in pubs about Wollstonecraft, to actually doing something. Here’s the way to illustrate her. She took her baby on that notorious Scandinavian voyage? OK, then I’ll do it too. I will recreate that trip. Just like her, with my own baby and everything.

Chapter Two

Half a Million Small Things

After a short silence that took a long time coming, I casually tell my husband Justin about the plan. Just this small plan – that I’ve been, you know, planning. The plan is that I want to go off with baby Will and retrace the eighteenth-century Scandinavian adventures of Mary Wollstonecraft. And her baby. He laughs:

“It’s brilliant.”

I frown. “But won’t you miss me – I mean, how will everyone cope without me? It’ll be at least ten days, maybe even longer: what about all the laundry and packed lunches and homework and other stuff, you know – there’s some school trips coming up, and also Eva’s dance exam, and of course the girls will miss me so much. So you’ll probably need me here, won’t you. Won’t you?”

“No. We’ll be fine. Go for it.”

Damn. Now we’ve got to do it. Before I attempt to raise the notion with the kids, it brings itself up. A morning, like any other – shouting, spilling breakfast, shoes and book bags in a heap. The eight-year-old asks:

“Where’s daddy?”

“He’s away working.”

“Again?”

“Yes.”

“He’s always away!”

“Well, that’s not true. But his journalism does involve rather a lot of fabulous and exotic travel, now you mention it.”

“Yeah, and your job is always in the same place, isn’t it – ha-ha, mummy gets to go on the Northern Line. Why don’t mums travel as much as dads?”

“They do, of course – they do! Just I –
eat your breakfast.
”

Deep breath once all three girls are safely in school and I’m pushing the baby back home. And I start to wonder: who are the travelling mums? Even the richest ones I know don’t do it: just take off travelling. They do loads of other stuff, but not that. Don’t they want to? Is it all down to money? Is it that we can’t? Or we just don’t?

I head to the bookshelf. There she is. The very sight of the spine of the book reassures me. The book is now in my hands.
Letters from Norway.
It flops open at favourite points and mementoes fall out, faded scraps of previous readings. A postcard. A receipt. For a moment the world readjusts around me as I skim the pages, back and forth. I find a sense of balance. And a vague feeling of indebtedness. This book is our portal. I look at Will:

“They did it – and we can do it.” I wave the book at him. “This is our treasure hunt.” Will snores gently.

I don’t have an excuse not to go. And the more I think about it, the better it gets. We’ll follow Wollstonecraft, retracing her steps, spying into her personal life and celebrating her public achievements, as possibly the best woman who ever lived. I
have an urge to tell the world about her adventures, and these passionate experiments in living. I am hoping to soak up some of her thoughts, to realize her, to get close to her. I’m basically a groupie.

But there’s a problem. How will I get any actual words written with a baby in tow? Will is nearly ten months old and a vigorous crawler. What if he falls into a pond while I’m contemplating the Sublime? Or eats a discarded cigarette as I’m marking a sacred footstep where Wollstonecraft trod? This is the reality of motherhood. If I never get this thing done, it will be because Will had a bad night, or wouldn’t eat and then got food all over both of us, or because he was struggling with a red face and a full nappy, and only I could make his life good (the best power of them all).

This is the thing. Countless days of women’s lives vanish into the haze of a new baby, exhausted toddler or anxious child. Sometimes there’s simply nothing left, no time left over, no separate sense of self. If I wasn’t so knackered, this would really get my dander up. It’s how mothers live: in the gaps between other people’s lives. Our essence is absorbed into theirs. But despite my grumbling, one thing is clear: an absorbed life is very much worth living. Indeed, this makes it better than it was. Somehow we’re not diminished: life is brighter, louder and altogether better.

But what about that tiredness, the amazing and famous tiredness of parenthood, so boring for everyone else and yet so fundamentally defining when it’s happening to you? Has anyone ever been this tired? Is it possible to die of tiredness? Lack of sleep and constant vigilance over a baby starting to
crawl can combine to vanquish pretty much anything an adult human might attempt. He’s so small, but the magnetic force of him radiates hugely in my life. I think about the dimples in his arms and sense the win-win: if I never get this thing done, I will still have him.

The trip is now happening. I’ve told everyone and spent many stolen hours setting it up, so it must. Luckily my day job at the World Service is freelance these days, and therefore flexible. Families, however, don’t share this quality, and I have to keep finding new hiding places to get stuff done. We’re due to set off in two weeks. My lists of instructions, advice, emergency numbers and school contacts are getting borderline freaky. Both Justin and Nori, our part-time nanny, repeatedly assure me that everyone will somehow cope.

While I cavort with baby Will, who is masquerading as Wollstonecraft’s baby Frances, we leave behind Will’s three sisters, Eva, Zola and Elsa, and their increasingly complicated social lives. The travel plans are squeezed around them: we’ll be leaving after Elsa’s assembly, and getting back just before Eva’s birthday. I point this out loudly and often, to make myself seem less selfish. No one is remotely bothered.

We hit an early logistics problem. In the interests of authenticity we must approach Norway from the sea, as Wollstone-craft did. But there are no longer any ferries to Norway from the UK. So Will and I must fly into neighbouring Sweden, then catch a ferry that’s 165 kilometres away. Between the plane landing and the ferry setting sail we have roughly six hours. But there’s no direct connection, and the combination of buses and trains adds up to over five hours.

I’m conveying this in relentless detail to a friend. She looks at me, then says she wouldn’t really be interested in reading a book about a woman with a baby missing a bus. “It’s not exactly
Touching the Void
, is it Bee?” No, maybe not. But for the record, the
Touching the Void
bloke may have broken most of his bones, but did he do it carrying a ten-month-old baby who smells of poo – poo that may well have squeezed out into several layers of clothing? No, he did not. So give it a rest with the “me and my broken bones”, thank you.

What is it with mountains anyway? I’ve always been a bit taken aback by the part in the
Vindication
where Wollstone-craft concedes that the greatest public works have proceeded from unmarried and childless men and women. But, she adds:

Which I choose to read as follows: instead of conquering something very very big, how about: get the kettle on, then conquer half a million small things. Like most of us do, most days.

Why isn’t Mary Wollstonecraft as famous as she ought to be? She has a habit of attracting eccentrics and boffins, historians and feminist theorists. Tantalizing company no doubt, but she deserves a much wider fan base. Look how everyone adores her near-contemporary, Jane Austen. They’re choosing the view into a tidy garden over one onto a crashing sea. Have courage,
readers! That Woolf again: “If Jane Austen had lain as a child on the landing to prevent her father from thrashing her mother [as Wollstonecraft did], her soul might have burned with such a passion against tyranny that all her novels might have been consumed in one cry for justice.”

And then there’s her daughter, who wrote one of the most enduring novels of all time. Yes, a lot of people don’t know that Mary Wollstonecraft, on top of everything else, is
Frank-enstein
’s granny. Yet despite everything she has remained in the cobwebby shadows, rarely visible – and regularly misspelt. The biographies of her are magnificent, but they’re mainly for people who read magnificent biographies. How to rescue her from the dust? Would a few mirror lights and a glitter-ball help get the
Vindication
out there?

My very first Mariac encounter gives me inspiration and doubt in equal measure. It’s an event at the Stoke Newington Literary Festival. The festival is a celebration of the radical London neighbourhood where Wollstonecraft lived and worked, and where happily she now gets her own gig.