In Search of Mary (4 page)

I arrive early, all a-flutter, as the first contributor is preparing for her reading. She has a shawl draped loosely over her shoulders, presumably to channel Mary Wollstonecraft. I look around. The woman on the door also has a shawl, and so does the woman giving out teabags with poetic phrases attached. I inwardly kick myself: why don’t I have a Wollstonecraft shawl? They’re obviously throwing some kind of gang sign.

The first reader gives a galloping account of Wollstonecraft’s life, then there’s a statue campaign. Then two installation artists talk about their projects, and finally we’re all urged to chat
to one another. It’s all a bit earnest, and sparsely attended. I’m torn. On one hand I unreservedly admire the contributors for trying to bring her to new audiences. But on the other, Wollstonecraft deserves so more than this. She deserves a more convincing, a more resounding, a more fabulous, great, big, clanging, sky-rocketing, flame-throwing, heart-bursting memorial. Not a handful of ladies in a warm wooden room.

Taking advantage of the allotted chat time I approach the person who spoke about Wollstonecraft’s life, and congratulate her. The woman is Roberta Wedge, the Wollstonecraft blogger, and it turns out that she’s something rather special. Emboldened by our joint adventures in adoration, I casually ask if she’d like to have a coffee some time. She says yes, and I leave with a spring in my step. I’m going on a Wollstonecraft date!

Roberta chooses the place of our meeting: the café inside the towering Gothic splendour of St Pancras station. I rush in with my high-vis bike gear flapping, and she’s already sitting there in a composed, somehow old-fashioned way. It all feels a bit special interest. Roberta’s face is old and young all at once: sweet, with dimples, radiating quaintness – and somehow out of kilter with the world, at least the bustling King’s Cross world outside.

“Wollstonecraft’s grave is just a few minutes away from here,” says Roberta, and as our coffees arrive, we launch off. The first thing we put to rights is that Wollstonecraft’s memory has been failed, and that a reboot is most definitely in order.

“What the world needs is
Wollstonecraft: The Movie
,” says Roberta. “What elements of a Hollywood blockbuster does her life not contain? Sex? No problem. Violence? We’ve got the
French Reign of Terror. What could be more violent? The only thing it doesn’t have is a fast car chase, but I’m sure we could arrange something with the time her stage coach overturns…”

Roberta used to work in higher education. “Mary has given me a new project, a new life.” I get the sense she almost lives
as
her, or at least through her. She speaks in elegant paragraphs as academics do, but with a “right?” at the end of her sentences, which lessens the feeling of a lecture. It draws me in and makes me feel that we’re in cahoots. I ask what most inspires her about Wollstonecraft.

“She made her way as a young woman without resources, moving around a lot, living in other people’s spaces, as a governess, as a lady’s companion, and always struggling and striving to the betterment not just of herself but of others around her.” We nod in vigorous agreement. “She knew injustice from her earliest days,” Roberta goes on. “She knew that what her father was doing to her mother was not right, but she didn’t have a framework to put that into. Until she moved to Newington Green, in what is now London. She became part of this village of high-minded anti-establishment Dissenters, who wanted to create a better society. So what’s not to love?”

Roberta also tweets in the actual person of Wollstonecraft, listening out for people who mention her and replying in her voice. Generally they are students having to write an essay, and often they can’t spell her name. But nonetheless up pops Roberta in full eighteenth-century mode, asking how she can help. Sometimes she is sought out directly. I ask how she knows what to say.

“I try to project, based on the texts. For example I was approached on Twitter about the SlutWalk. In reply I gave them soundbites of Wollstonecraft’s opinions on modesty.” She pauses. “I never heard back.”

Wollstonecraft’s not all about disapproval, though. She’s often mischievous, and she enjoys the beauty of people she meets on her travels. Especially noteworthy is her observation that women in their thirties are hotter – the “perfect state” of “majestic seriousness” – than their twenty-something counterparts. By my calculations, if we allow for inflation, then these days that sexy majestic seriousness lasts well beyond our forties. Result.

Roberta lives alone and far from her family. After losing her job, she started her Wollstonecraft blog on the anniversary of Wollstonecraft’s death. “I’m not obsessed…” she says lightly, and not for the last time. I don’t mind if she is or not. I’ve been Wollstonecrafting in solitude for so long that I get carried away, overexcited with the companionship of the moment.

“Do you actually want to make her be alive – to bring her back?”

Roberta hesitates, but doesn’t pick up on my half-baked hopes of a séance. “I think the world would be better if there were more people in it like her, willing to stand up and speak out, willing to take a risk.”

I feel foolish, as though I’d tried to invoke Wollstonecraft’s ghostly presence with us right here at the table with our flat white coffees and lemon cakes. Nonetheless I leave this encounter completely abuzz. She’s among us – she’s alive on social
media: Wollstonecraft is at large. I’ve found a comrade, indeed a fan club, after all the lonesome admiring.

I hop on my bike, rushing back for my childcare deadline, and cycle past the back of St Pancras Old Church. After a dark railway tunnel, near an ugly house with white vans outside, is a row of steps and a heavy iron gate. On the other side of the gate – it’s right there. It’s necessary to stop here, and have a moment for Wollstonecraft’s gravestone. Like her, it may be old and modest, but it’s real, and it’s here. Her remains have since been reburied in Bournemouth, but I greet her anyway, waving merrily as though she can see me…

Chapter Three:

“I Feel Myself Unequal to the Task”

I’m leaving on the trip next week. I’m starting to need a deep breath when I say it. The trip. Next week. Just remind myself again – what, exactly, am I letting myself in for? Flip open my well-thumbed copy of
Letters from Norway
.

It’s June 1795. Europe is at war. Wollstonecraft sets off, with only her baby, Frances, and her maid, Marguerite, for company. They’re travelling from Hull to Sweden, and onwards to Norway, in an increasingly precarious combination of wobbly boats and strangers’ carriages. Along the way she writes the series of letters that will become her bestselling book. It’s a journey that most men would balk at: highwaymen and pirates are still very much at large. But not Wollstonecraft:

She’s putting on a brave face, though. Scared of boats, horses or pirates? No, she fears something far worse. Her deepest fear is losing her love, and her whole faith in love. Wollstonecraft has a shattered heart.

Here’s the story behind
Letters from Norway
. That dodgy American boyfriend of hers? Gilbert Imlay. He’s a tall, handsome frontiersman who claims he was a captain in the American War of Independence. Gilbert. A proper cad’s name. They get together in Paris, where Wollstonecraft has moved to be at the heart of the Revolution. And although she questions the institution, they pretend to be married. This way his Rev-friendly nationality can shelter her, as Paris becomes increasingly violent.

While Wollstonecraft has been hanging with radical luminaries, writing, learning French, avoiding the Terror and getting knocked up by Imlay, he’s been doing business. Nice little earner. Paris is starving, and he’s smuggling silverware – fresh from head-chopped aristos – out of France and through the blockade to neutral Scandinavia to be exchanged for corn. He leaves Wollstonecraft and their new baby behind for months on end, through one of the coldest winters on record. The Seine freezes over. Wollstonecraft and her baby are cold and poor, and foreign.

Imlay has a lot on his mind, you see. One of his ships has gone missing. A ship laden with silver. Back and forth he goes, between Paris, Le Havre and London, and the letters that follow him get more and more shrill. Wollstonecraft just isn’t so much fun now she’s got all these expectations of him. Imlay’s business and personal lives may be demanding, but he still finds time to shack up with an actress. Wollstonecraft finds out and despairs, and tries to kill herself with laudanum.

Imlay spots a way to get her out of his hair and score himself a freebie at the same time. You’ve got to admire him: “Come
on love, get yourself out of town for a while – you can do me a little errand while you’re at it! Just a missing ship off the coast of Norway. Sea air’s what you need. And find my ship for me, there’s a good girl.” Kisses her pale forehead. Suddenly thinks of a sweetener: “I know, why don’t I come and join you afterwards? We could have a little holiday together – how about Switzerland?” He saunters out the door whistling a revolutionary ditty. Oh, she wants him back. She starts packing for the voyage.

This, then, is the story behind the glorious treasure trail. And it stirs a mix of strange and bad feelings in me. Her book never mentions the treasure.
Letters from Norway
is arranged as a series of letters to a “dear friend”. She doesn’t name him, but they are obviously addressed to Imlay. In Letter One, Wollstonecraft, baby Frances and Marguerite the maid are already in trouble. After eleven days aboard a boat not intended for passenger travel, bad weather means they can’t continue to Norway as planned. The captain wants instead to carry onwards to Denmark. But Wollstonecraft has other ideas. She wants them to row her to shore right here:

You just know this is true. She harangues him, deploying one tactic after another, while he grimly stares at the horizon. He is thinking: I should never have let them on board. If I ignore her for long enough, surely she will stop talking. But she does
not stop, despite her dark hair whipping into her eyes and mouth. Finally, he rolls his eyes upwards. He is, after all, a good-natured man, according to Wollstonecraft. He gestures for her to talk to his crew. The ship’s sailors do her bidding “with all alacrity”, she triumphantly notes, overlooking the possibility that they can’t wait to get rid of her. They row her, the baby and the maid to land.

This was not the plan. They’re now in the Swedish middle of nowhere. Looking out for any “vestige of a human habitation”, Marguerite timidly points out that there is none to be seen. Wollstonecraft snaps – “I did not listen to her” – and marches onto the rocky wild shore. This is how it happens in the book. In a private letter to Imlay, however, she describes how, shortly after landing, she is exhausted and falls down in a faint, injuring her head on a rock. But she’s not down for long.

By Letter Two, Wollstonecraft has already made her way from that rocky landing to a Lieutenant’s cottage, befriended his wife, slept in a juniper-strewn room and drunk illegal coffee. They are now in Gothenburg. Despite the frequent sadness of the book, parts of it are very funny. She’s often extravagantly rude. She is particularly preoccupied with Scandinavian teeth, regularly reporting their badness:

In Gothenburg she has to sit and eat for several hours, as “dish after dish is changed, in endless rotation, and handed round
with solemn pace to each guest”. Eventually, fed to exhaustion, she begs her hosts to let her escape for a walk. “Well!” they surely tut, when she leaves the room. “Did you see how she poked at the meat? She asks
man’s
questions. No wonder she’s single.” (Wollstonecraft’s barbs on “very fat” Swedish women are still causing outrage five years later, according to the French wag de La Tocnaye in his own Scandi travel book.)

Later, along with some thoughtful gardening tips and a rousing attack on the way Swedish people treat their servants, Wollstonecraft turns in some observations on Swedish gender politics: “The men stand up for the dignity of man,” she remarks, “by oppressing the women.” Swedish women have lives of abject drudgery, their hands crack and bleed from washing clothes in icy river water. And will the menfolk help them? Not a chance: it would “disgrace their manhood.”

As she travels north to Strömstad, she is regularly and powerfully assaulted by the “detestable evaporations” of the local farmland fertilizer. It’s made out of “putrefying herrings”, and is so stinky that even when dining indoors – perhaps developing a profound line of thought on the perfectibility of mankind – the smell gets in, distracting and irritating her.

And then there’s the duvet. The first ever time I read
Letters from Norway
I nearly shouted with laughter when I realized what she was talking about:

Mary Wollstonecraft was quite possibly the first British woman ever to sleep under a duvet. But there’s much more than mad bedding and smelly fish. There’s the Sublime, the wild beauty of Wollstonecraft’s landscapes. She’s travelling in June, marvelling at “the beauty of the northern summer’s evening and night”. There are frequent crunching gear changes, like this one, from irritation straight into contemplative awe: