Vulgar History - Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (part two)

00:00:00.000 Hi, everyone. I just wanted to give you a heads up that today's episode includes discussion of

00:00:04.920 depression, suicidal ideation, and attempted suicide. So if that's not something you want

00:00:10.020 to hear about today, you might want to listen to a different episode of the Vulgar History Podcast. 1.00

00:00:14.420 Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women's history comedy podcast.

00:00:30.300 My name is Anne Foster and we are in the midst of Mary Shelley Month.

00:00:34.780 It's right for the month of October.

00:00:35.980 We're talking about the friends and family and lasting legacy of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

00:00:41.580 Today is part two of Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelley.

00:00:48.540 We started her story last week, and today we're going to conclude it. And my main source for this

00:00:54.560 episode is a book called Romantic Outlaws, The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft

00:00:58.960 and Mary Shelley by Charlotte Gordon, a fantastic book. And it's like every chapter, it's like

00:01:03.180 there's a Mary Shelley chapter, and then there's a Mary Wollstonecraft chapter. And you really kind

00:01:06.920 to see the similarities in the way that that the mother's life influences the daughter and so when

00:01:13.820 we last left mary wallstonecraft she decided to go to paris because she was really moved by the

00:01:19.580 concept of the french revolution she had some friends who had been kicked out of england who

00:01:23.260 were living there and she was like you know i'm gonna do is go to paris in the midst of like

00:01:28.120 potentially the most gruesome part of the french revolution because she like the people who started

00:01:32.980 the French Revolution, was a big believer in the concepts of democracy and having a constitution

00:01:41.080 and having everybody be treated equitably in society, which were the goals of a lot of the

00:01:47.020 people who sort of were behind the beginning of the French Revolution. But as we talked about in

00:01:51.260 45 episodes last season, that's not quite how the French Revolution played out exactly. But so she

00:01:57.820 was going to go to Paris with some friends that fell apart. And eventually she's like,

00:02:02.420 I'm just going to go by myself and be like a foreign correspondent. I'm going to write some

00:02:06.480 stuff, like what I see, my observations about being in Paris, and then I'll send it back to

00:02:11.760 my friend Joseph Johnson, and he will publish it because he's my guy, he's in my corner,

00:02:16.400 and I'm a popular writer. So here we go. So she traveled by herself to Paris in December 1792.

00:02:24.060 She caught a cold en route, which I feel like there's a lot that's relatable about this story,

00:02:28.760 but how many of us have caught some sort of cold or flu or COVID or whatever while traveling on an

00:02:36.120 airplane or something? So she shows up in Paris. She's sick. She's by herself. She's never really

00:02:42.820 been by herself in a foreign country before. She went there because, well, all the reasons I just

00:02:49.340 said, but the person that she was going to stay with was her sister's friend, Aline Filitaz,

00:02:54.460 who so friend of a friend she's like i've got a place to stay this is fine like some of the people

00:02:59.640 who she admired like some writers who maybe she had met at you know dinner parties were there but

00:03:03.620 her only sort of true connection was this woman aline filitez so she arrived at the address that

00:03:08.780 she had been given which was 22 rue meslet uh side street um and she discovered that aline and

00:03:15.320 her husband had been unexpectedly called away but she was expected so the surfers were like

00:03:20.700 oui, oui, bonjour, except they didn't say oui, oui, bonjour. They spoke with a very strong

00:03:25.720 colloquial French language or dialect that was not the French language or dialect that Mary

00:03:31.620 Wollstonecraft knew. So like she had studied like scholarly French and they were speaking the French

00:03:36.460 of like the people in France. Anyway, so she couldn't really communicate to them. But the

00:03:42.940 house she was staying in Aline's house was grand residence, six stories high. It's like a beautiful

00:03:47.840 house probably the fanciest house Mary Wollstonecraft had been in since she was being a governess for

00:03:52.780 that time in Ireland and it was actually just a short walk away from the temple which was the

00:03:58.780 medieval fortress turned palace turned prison where at this point December 1792 Louis the 16th

00:04:05.640 and his wife Marie Antoinette were being imprisoned at the moment so that's the part of the French

00:04:10.380 revolution she arrived in and she's like a stone's throw literal people throwing stones all the time

00:04:15.860 and wooden clogs and things from where the king and queen were actually being imprisoned.

00:04:20.660 So she stayed indoors, just like recovering from her cold, not able to

00:04:23.980 make herself understood or to understand the servants. She was, you know, writing all her

00:04:27.800 observations because that survived. And she was like, I wish I brought like my cat with me or

00:04:31.660 something. Remember when she made money, she adopted a cat. She's just lonely. Everything's 0.97

00:04:35.760 kind of quiet and weird. Eventually she became well enough to go outside and she was like, great,

00:04:41.660 I'm in Paris. This is going to be like Emily in Paris or like in the summer term, pretty in Paris,

00:04:46.680 but it's Paris during the French Revolution in the midst of the French Revolution. So the city

00:04:51.660 to her, it looked, she described it as looking scarred. Like statues of the French monarchs

00:04:56.700 had been torn down and smashed. So there's just like empty pedestals surrounded by like smashed

00:05:01.840 up rocks. Iron railings have been ripped off windows so that people could have like

00:05:06.220 makeshift pikes that people could carry as weapons. There were signs posted everywhere

00:05:10.940 saying don't cheer for the king the revolutionary gang the psalms culottes where they were marching

00:05:19.980 all around wearing their uh big baggy palazzo pants everyone was wearing cockades she saw that

00:05:27.580 the the psalms culottes some i don't know all of them some of them she saw were carrying like a 0.95

00:05:33.540 flag instead of a flag it was a pair of pants on top of a pike um and they would wave that at 0.84

00:05:39.180 anybody who looked too fancy. She had been warned, don't speak English on the streets 0.99

00:05:43.800 because people didn't like English people right now. They believed all English people were

00:05:48.200 either nobles in disguise or spies. She also had a really tough time finding her way around

00:05:53.320 because the names of shops, streets, bridges, and even towns had been changed to eradicate any

00:06:00.000 royal allegiances. So it was like the King Street or Louis Street or whatever had been changed to

00:06:06.260 like Revolution Avenue. So she's like, I like this. I support the revolution, but also there's

00:06:12.460 not maps available. And so she had a really hard time finding her way around because everything

00:06:17.340 had a new name. There's also a stone wall surrounding the city that if you didn't have

00:06:22.100 the right paperwork, you weren't permitted to leave the city. So everyone's kind of trapped

00:06:26.060 there. The streets were dirty, even compared to London at the time, which was also a pretty

00:06:32.960 dirty urban situation. So in both cities, people would dump their chamber pots, their bathroom

00:06:41.360 detritus out of the windows. But in London, there were like sidewalks. And in Paris, it was just

00:06:49.840 streets. So it's just kind of like you're walking, there's carriages, people are like

00:06:53.400 flinging pee at you. And also she was just like, there's not parks here. Like in London,

00:06:58.560 and there was parks. It was just kind of like, oh shit, this place is kind of smells like pee, 1.00

00:07:03.260 and everyone wants to murder everybody. She was shocked to see the contrast of the rich and the 1.00

00:07:08.020 poor, just kind of how different it actually was from London, and how kind of fucked up it was. 0.94

00:07:13.880 It was also really hard for her to figure out the date and time, because the revolutionary 0.84

00:07:18.600 leaders had changed the clock and the calendar, which we've talked a few times in previous

00:07:23.320 episodes on this podcast about. It was like year one is when she arrived, because it's

00:07:28.540 like the first year of the revolution, even though I'm going to call it 1792. And so they changed the

00:07:33.940 names of the days of the week. So Mary had learned the days of the week in French, you know, like

00:07:38.640 Lundi, Mardi, Mercredi, but those were not the days of the week. So now there's 10 days per week.

00:07:43.940 There are still 12 months, but each month was divided into three revolutionary weeks.

00:07:48.840 It also changed to decimal time. So days were now 10 hours instead of 12 hours. Well, like 24,

00:07:56.920 So I guess 20. Each hour was 100 decimal minutes and each minute was 100 decimal seconds. So one

00:08:04.320 hour was 144, like 60 second minutes. Anyway, there were new decimal clocks, which no one could

00:08:10.980 read. So no one knew. Everyone was just kind of like stranded in dates and times and not really

00:08:15.560 knowing what to do. And so just everybody was really paranoid, understandably, reasonably,

00:08:23.220 because of the revolution that was happening on no one really knew what was going on right there's

00:08:29.200 not um not that we today can really verify what's going on either but it's like like there wasn't

00:08:36.480 a news broadcast to explain like here's what's actually happening and so there's everything's

00:08:40.800 rumors at this point so she couldn't tell what was true and what was not so what she was hearing

00:08:47.120 is like the king had escaped the austrians were invading the city there's going to be a coup in

00:08:52.500 the city. She didn't know what to believe and what to not believe. And she's still like her

00:08:56.340 French is still like developing. So she didn't know this person, but she knew that there was

00:09:01.240 a literary English woman living in Paris, Helen Mariah Williams. Mary had actually reviewed

00:09:06.640 Helen Mariah Williams's book the previous spring for her job for the magazine that she worked for.

00:09:13.540 And so Helen Mariah Williams was living in Paris doing kind of what Mary herself was planning to

00:09:17.700 do now too, just like writing reports of the revolution and what was going on. So she met

00:09:21.700 Helen, and they made friends right away. And she was able to learn what was actually going on,

00:09:27.280 which was, at this point, King Louis XVI was going to go on trial the day after Christmas.

00:09:34.140 And so the radicals there, the English-speaking radicals, were all just kind of like,

00:09:38.520 what do we think? Do we think the king, should he be executed? Or should they have a constitutional

00:09:43.140 monarchy? Should there be a republic? Mary Wollstonecraft herself, she was against aristocracy,

00:09:48.620 She was against monarchy, but she felt empathy for the king and hated how much murder was going

00:09:53.360 on. So she was against execution personally. She watched from the attic, the upstairs window of

00:10:00.020 her house. She watched the procession of the king going by on his way to go on trial. And she wrote

00:10:05.500 to her friend Johnson, I can scarcely tell you why, but an association of ideas made the tears

00:10:10.040 flow insensibly from my eyes when I saw Louis sitting with more dignity than I expected from

00:10:14.720 his character. And she knew that this was an extraordinary event to see a king going to trial

00:10:19.620 just like an ordinary citizen, like this was world changing. And that kind of gave her energy. So she

00:10:26.340 wrote a bunch of notes for her eyewitness account of the revolution. And she had figured out pretty

00:10:32.800 quickly that the new government, the revolutionary government, was just as corrupt as the previous

00:10:36.900 government. It was beginning to seem to her the only difference in change from before until now

00:10:42.140 was just a change in what the government was called. So she's just like, oh, this sucks. 0.98

00:10:47.800 This is not the, you know, revolution, the scholarly revolution based on ideals that I 0.97

00:10:52.980 had hoped for. This is just kind of a bunch of people, a bunch of men making power grabs and a

00:10:57.580 bunch of people murdering other people. She wrote, I am grieved, sorely grieved when I think of the

00:11:02.160 blood that has stained the cause of freedom at Paris. And so she also remained indoors the day

00:11:08.320 of the execution of Louis XVI.

00:11:11.840 Tensions were really high in the city.

00:11:13.160 No one knew what was going to happen.

00:11:14.720 And so she just kind of stayed indoors.

00:11:16.700 And when she heard about it later,

00:11:18.580 she was moved to tears.

00:11:20.540 She believed that this, his execution,

00:11:22.680 marked the revolution's turn towards utter disaster.

00:11:25.680 But she's like, but I'm a foreign correspondent

00:11:27.080 and I'm going to stay here on the scene.

00:11:28.980 This is Mayor Walsingcraft reporting live from Paris.

00:11:31.300 So she's still there,

00:11:32.920 but just very emotionally affected by all of this.

00:11:35.580 other English people, other British people, you know, there's Scottish people there too,

00:11:40.960 maybe Welsh people, I don't know. They were, decided to go back to England at this point.

00:11:45.700 Mary was like, maybe I should leave because she kind of sensed like there might be a time where

00:11:50.200 I'm like forbidden to leave, but she's like, no, for the sake of history, I'm going to stay here

00:11:54.180 and be a witness to all of this. And as a celebrated author, you know, she's English and

00:12:00.180 she's in France, but people had heard of her and they knew about her writing. Some of them have

00:12:03.820 been translated. She was invited to the soirees, to salons and political gatherings. And she found

00:12:10.600 that people liked her here. Despite the French Revolution that was happening, there were all 0.95

00:12:17.060 these scholarly people that she was surrounded by, and they valued her and her ideas in a way

00:12:21.700 that that had not been as common. In London, often she'd been the only woman at these dinner parties

00:12:27.440 of scholars. But in Paris, there's lots of other women there who are interested in the same sort

00:12:32.860 stuff. There's Manon Roland, there's Olympe de Gouges, there's Germaine de Stael, like there's 0.95

00:12:37.480 other thoughtful women were being celebrated as well. The revolution at this point had also played

00:12:44.100 a positive role in women's lives, which was such an important thing to her as this early feminist

00:12:50.020 thinker. Divorce had been legalized in Paris. The government had decreed that daughters could 0.96

00:12:56.020 inherit property. And as well, at the same time, there's kind of a sexual revolution happening 1.00

00:13:01.200 were just people in Paris had long, you know, taken lovers and whatever, but now it was just,

00:13:07.500 but now people talked about it too. It's just kind of like to them, it felt like, well,

00:13:10.940 everything, all of society is, is changing. So like, why don't we just do this too?

00:13:16.880 Also, it's just like, everyone's murdering everybody. Let's just like, fuck what we still 1.00

00:13:20.240 can. So it seemed like nothing was now taboo. Like people didn't take marriage vows seriously 1.00

00:13:26.560 And political and sexual liberty were kind of going hand in hand, as Mary had kind of hoped they would, as her sexy friend Fuseli had kind of been talking about with her as well.

00:13:37.160 And this is kind of what she had envisioned in her philosophical treaties, the rights of women.

00:13:43.560 If the tyranny of kings could be overcome, then maybe the bonds of unequal marriages could be broken, and then women and men could be treated the same in society.

00:13:53.380 and she soon took a lover her first she had been a spinster up until now she had not been interested

00:14:02.660 she thought that um she's not interested in sex or anything but now talking to fuseli and kind of

00:14:07.840 like thinking more about sex and like the importance of sexual energy and stuff and being

00:14:12.060 around france she was just like maybe i'm gonna do this too and so her lover was an american man

00:14:16.620 called gilbert imlay he was a ladies man a womanizer veteran of the american revolution

00:14:22.280 And he was kind of a business guy. He was described here as a land speculator on the lookout for fast money. So he's just kind of like trying to make some wheeling dealing in the French Revolution. Some people suggest maybe he was also a spy. He was also on the run from creditors. And he hoped that in Paris, he could sell land on the American frontier to people and convince people to move to America. And somehow that would make him money.

00:14:48.500 He met Mary. Well, he saw Mary and he was just like, she's so confident and well-spoken and intelligent and beautiful and independent. And he was just like, hell yeah. And so they spoke with each other. They discovered they had really similar political views. They both believed in liberty, equality, women's rights. They supported the revolution, but not the murder parts of it.

00:15:08.500 So they were kind of falling in love as the revolution was becoming more and more unhinged, like the king had been executed, but that didn't seem to solve anyone's problems. The poor people were still starving, bread was still expensive. And this is where there was the two sort of strands of French revolutionary political people.

00:15:27.700 There's the Girondists, who are kind of more moderate, and then there's the Jacobins, who are more just like extreme.

00:15:35.280 And these two sides were really battling it out.

00:15:37.780 Gilbert and Mary were both inside of the Girondists, and she knew that if the Jacobins came into power fully, like right now it was kind of the Girondists and the Jacobins sharing power, but if the Jacobins took over, people like her would be in great danger.

00:15:51.660 English, English people who sympathize with the Girondists.

00:15:55.120 Also, at the same time-ish, England had declared war on France.

00:15:59.740 So British citizens were now enemies of the state.

00:16:02.980 Gilbert Imlay was American.

00:16:04.520 So he was safe because the French were cool with Americans because they had supported the American Revolution. 0.94

00:16:10.640 But she was English and maybe in a bit more danger. 0.52

00:16:14.820 So about six weeks after they met, and because everything, it's just like, you know, the world is ending.

00:16:20.200 It is how it feels.

00:16:21.120 So just everything is sped up.

00:16:22.620 So he declared his love and asked her to move with him back to America.

00:16:25.940 And she was like, yes, this is great.

00:16:28.580 Hell yeah, I'm going to do this.

00:16:30.040 America, the land of the free, a place where there was a revolution, but based on like

00:16:34.940 philosophical concepts instead of just like murder, this is great.

00:16:39.500 So she was so into this idea that she agreed to make love with him. 0.94

00:16:43.500 And so they had sex for the first time, which is her first time having sex.

00:16:47.280 and she was excited that she found herself in this a new kind of relationship like with where

00:16:52.500 a man and a woman were equals it's not like this sort of subservient wife to the all-powerful

00:16:58.120 husband that she had seen in other relationships she just never thought this was even possible

00:17:02.920 but here she was anyway meanwhile the revolution is revolutionizing the jacobins were taking more

00:17:08.820 power they arrested leaders from the girondins anyone who was not french had to chalk their

00:17:15.040 names on their doors so people knew where they were from. Girondists were forced out of government.

00:17:20.660 The city had become kind of a prison. Mary was worried that the authorities might arrest

00:17:25.960 Aline and her husband, who had come back by now. But because she was British, she was worried that

00:17:32.800 Aline might be arrested for harboring a British spy. People might think Mary was a spy. 0.67

00:17:36.820 So instead, she decided to leave the city. She moved to a cottage owned by a friend of a friend,

00:17:42.680 like some of Aline's friends in Nui, a place about four miles northwest of the city. 0.97

00:17:49.020 And what was great about that is because she and Gilbert couldn't really like fuck in Aline's house 0.69

00:17:53.980 because that was, even though it's kind of like sexual revolution, like Aline was not down with 0.97

00:17:58.040 that. But now she was in a house by herself. So Gilbert could come and they could just like

00:18:02.080 have sex constantly. And also she's in the countryside. Remember how much this girl loves 0.81

00:18:06.860 the country so she went there and she's just like hell yeah like sheep grass trees a lover

00:18:15.220 like this is great um except for he couldn't be there all the time because he had business 0.94

00:18:19.500 interests in paris and she like we saw with her previous uh relationships with jane with fanny

00:18:27.440 blood and then even with fuseli like this became her person and she was so like to the point where

00:18:34.300 I feel like she would have really benefited from talk therapy.

00:18:38.940 She just put all her hopes and dreams on this person,

00:18:42.660 and she wrote him nonstop letters about how much she missed him

00:18:46.000 and how much she needed him.

00:18:47.920 Meanwhile, the Jacobins were arresting and throwing into prison

00:18:53.240 many of their friends.

00:18:55.140 One day she decided to go to Paris just to see what's up in the city,

00:18:59.140 and she found blood running like rainwater down the street

00:19:03.840 from the nearby guillotine things were pretty shocking like she realized like oh blood is

00:19:10.860 running like rainwater down the street and i just stepped in it and she gasped understandably

00:19:14.960 and i passed it by was like no you can't you can't act horrified you have to express joy

00:19:20.060 over the daily murders or else you might be charged as a collaborator or a traitor to the

00:19:24.620 revolution like thought crime sort of thing so she was like huh maybe i should leave france

00:19:30.200 but i can't because she's um she's a foreign correspondent gilbert is there and also she

00:19:37.660 wanted to be here for this moment in history to watch this revolution happening so but they

00:19:42.580 decided just for safety reasons because americans were okay and british people weren't they would

00:19:47.160 have gilbert register mary as his wife at the american embassy they were not married but if

00:19:52.400 they just said that she was mary imlay his wife she would be safe from the french authorities

00:19:57.300 because she was seemingly married to an American man.

00:20:00.980 I want to verify, just so we all understand.

00:20:03.800 They were not actually married.

00:20:05.080 He just registered her as his wife to keep her safe

00:20:07.720 because she was against marriage, you guys.

00:20:09.600 They're a new kind of relationship.

00:20:11.700 But also, in the eyes of the world,

00:20:14.460 they were husband and wife

00:20:16.100 without her having to... 1.00

00:20:17.640 What happened to a woman who got married at this point, 1.00

00:20:20.020 she didn't have to forego any of her legal rights,

00:20:22.380 but also he didn't have to swear to,

00:20:24.600 you know till death do his part to to love and support and protect her by the end of the summer

00:20:30.660 she's like okay i can't be without gilbert i'm gonna live with him in paris but soon after she

00:20:36.360 arrived he left for business um so she was alone in paris now and he was off in la hav overseeing

00:20:42.280 his trading deals and then robespierre who's in charge of the government at this time kind of

00:20:48.860 started going door to door just like grabbing people they're trying to find any remaining

00:20:53.040 British people who were still in Paris. He locked 250 of them into a palace called the Luxembourg

00:21:01.040 that had been converted into a jail, which was not far from where Mary was living. But again,

00:21:04.920 she was okay because on paper, she was the wife of an American. She witnessed the secret police

00:21:09.980 going around just like kicking in doors, arresting people in public. And the attitude towards women 1.00

00:21:16.340 suddenly took a sudden dramatic turn for the worst. So Marie Antoinette, the queen of France,

00:21:23.240 was executed. She had been the scapegoat for everything for so long with her murder. Everything

00:21:30.080 kind of got even more unsettled. And just as a kind of like, she was dead, but the revolutionary

00:21:36.120 leaders were just like, oh, but she was a woman and she was terrible. They wanted France to be

00:21:41.760 ancient Rome, where women and men were kept very separate, where women didn't have any influence

00:21:46.620 over politics or anything. They were inspired by Rousseau. So Mary Wollstonecraft herself had

00:21:52.920 been inspired by Rousseau's concepts of equality. Nature is great, but she didn't love Rousseau's

00:21:59.360 thing about women should stay at home and not have any rights. But the Jacobins really liked 0.81

00:22:03.300 that part of Rousseau. Anyway, they were like, women should be at home raising children. So they 1.00

00:22:08.340 rescinded the rights the women had won like the divorce to be able to inherit property 0.79

00:22:12.560 and women were no longer allowed to join revolutionary clubs or take part in political

00:22:17.000 demonstrations and mary knew that it would be dangerous if she spoke out about this so she 0.94

00:22:22.340 just kind of hid away mostly um the girondists who were still around at this point this is like

00:22:28.800 october 31st were put to death um she fainted when she heard that this had happened those were a lot

00:22:34.460 of her friends. And maybe she also fainted because she was now pregnant. Gilbert had not come back 0.55

00:22:40.920 from Lahap. So she's by herself. She's somebody who's emotionally needy, but also understandably

00:22:49.840 wants him there because she's surrounded by the murder of all their friends, blood running down

00:22:54.140 the street like rainwater. She's kind of panicked. And she's like, why are we not together? Is this

00:23:01.080 not a relationship of like two equals it seems kind of like we're not even in a relationship

00:23:04.860 anymore so he was like okay join me in lahav so she did and she worked to finish her writing she

00:23:12.000 was writing this thing about the revolution she wanted to finish it before the baby came and she

00:23:16.200 finished it about a month earlier and then she gave birth to a daughter and when she was giving

00:23:20.660 birth she didn't call for a doctor or anything i forget if she even had a midwife but everyone was

00:23:25.540 like are you sure are you sure you can do this yourself she's like yes of course i've read all

00:23:28.300 the books. I know all about, you know, what's more natural than giving birth. And she did and it was

00:23:33.200 fun. So she had a daughter who she named Fanny, named after her dead friend Fanny Blood. So Fanny

00:23:39.980 Imlay is her daughter. She didn't hire a wet nurse either. She wanted to breastfeed Fanny herself 0.87

00:23:46.220 because that's the Russo thing. And she felt great pleasure at being a mother. And so she kind of 0.95

00:23:52.440 settled into a routine with Gilbert um the two of them and their little baby so like they're this

00:23:59.460 cute little happy family at this point meanwhile in the outside world the French Revolution

00:24:03.660 happening the terror part of it basically so she's having this nice time but she is still kind of like

00:24:11.280 following the news from Paris as much as she could which was that Robespierre ended up being

00:24:15.600 overthrown in a dramatic coup he was guillotined and suddenly the terror was over question mark

00:24:22.440 Paris was kind of like back to normal, sort of. And Gilbert went to London to oversee his business

00:24:31.480 concerns there, leaving Mary in France. So she decided to go back to Paris where everything

00:24:36.440 seemed to have calmed down. So she took Fanny back to Paris and they stayed in Gilbert's apartment.

00:24:41.380 She missed him obviously a lot and wrote him a lot of letters, but she appreciated seeing Paris

00:24:46.500 like slowly returning to life. People were walking through the streets, people were having a nice

00:24:50.760 time they were able to gossip without being worried about being arrested and stuff she was

00:24:55.920 glad to see that also the the fashion like clothing fashion had changed so what the vibe was

00:25:03.620 now so instead of if you picture like the really ostentatious pre-french revolution outfits like

00:25:09.980 the big poof wigs and the really wide hoop skirts and everything like now everybody is just like

00:25:15.160 let's dress like ancient rome and grecian times so women would wear sort of like diaphanous

00:25:20.920 gowns that sort of would cling to your natural form so not concealing your body shape and mary

00:25:27.880 was like hell yeah because she had never liked those those sort of artificiality the lots of

00:25:33.780 frilly outfits and stuff she was like this is so much more comfortable you can move around so much 1.00

00:25:39.640 more easily in these outfits without complicated and restrictive undergarments um dresses also 0.99

00:25:45.040 had these like the empire waistline like the higher waistline so you could breathe really 0.97

00:25:48.680 easily you could walk because the skirts were wider because there's like a slit in the skirt 0.98

00:25:52.440 anyway she was just like um she loves this new look and also she's like a tall gorgeous woman

00:25:58.380 and these outfits really look hot on her so she had not earned any income for a year because

00:26:04.580 she had been paid in advance for her french revolution book and she did not have another

00:26:09.820 book yet to write. And she's by herself by this point, right? Gilbert Imlay off in England.

00:26:16.120 So he had left instructions with a friend to provide her with funds, but she didn't want to

00:26:19.760 take this money. She felt that would make her be like his mistress. She didn't want to be

00:26:24.380 that sort of arrangement. And so she just tried to use the money she had left. She moved to a 0.83

00:26:30.260 less expensive apartment. And then because she was by herself with no servants or anything,

00:26:34.220 she had to carry the baby everywhere. So Fanny went with her to the marketplace to visit friends, 0.91

00:26:38.780 even just to go buy a newspaper down the street she had to say no to lots of parties because she

00:26:43.480 had this baby with her she was exhausted but too anxious to sleep so she her new lodging she was

00:26:50.860 staying with this german family and which is like a husband and wife with children and when she saw

00:26:55.520 the husband helping the wife with the children she was moved to tears because she didn't have

00:27:00.440 help like that gilbert started writing like less and less letters to her and the letters weren't

00:27:04.980 really kind. She was so exhausted. She didn't have the time or energy to work, which for her

00:27:10.220 would be writing. She knew time to read a book. She eventually was like, okay. So she went to

00:27:15.340 Gilbert's friend to ask for money. And this worked out well for her because he gave her enough money

00:27:21.580 that she was able to hire a maid who was a woman called Marguerite. Who's going to be in the story

00:27:26.440 to the end of it. Cause Marguerite is like ride or die. She's like great. She's down for anything. 1.00

00:27:31.520 she was ready for venture and she was such a helper so mary was also able to hire a servant

00:27:37.400 to do household chores which meant that she was able to work a little bit sleep i hope so this is

00:27:45.700 the era when it's the little ice age weather is chaotic and bizarre so the winter of 1794 95 is

00:27:52.980 the coldest on record ever which fucked up all the crops bread became even more expensive

00:27:58.480 meat became an unthinkable luxury wood was so expensive that people in paris couldn't get wood

00:28:04.900 to like burn their fires but so cold so they started just like burning their own furniture

00:28:08.600 mary caught a cold that turned into a lung infection she was worried that she was going

00:28:14.020 to die and leave fanny alone in the world so she told gilbert like she's non-stop writing him

00:28:19.200 letters right and he's every now and then being like hey babe like how are you and she would write 0.74

00:28:23.060 these letters these like extremely intense passionate letters anyway she told him like

00:28:27.560 please, you know, if I die, please let my German landlords raise our daughter. They seem like cool

00:28:33.480 parents. Gilbert was like, why don't you just come to London where I am? And she's like, hell

00:28:38.840 yes. Like, let's be together. He loves me. This is great. So she weaned Fanny before she left France

00:28:45.500 because at this point, common wisdom was that nursing mothers were not supposed to have sex 1.00

00:28:50.440 with their husbands. And she was just like, I'm going to go back there and I'm going to fuck 1.00

00:28:53.760 Gilbert. And that's what's going to happen. So she went to England with baby Fanny, her maid 1.00

00:28:59.100 Marguerite. But as soon as she saw him, she saw he was cool with her. And I don't mean like,

00:29:05.780 oh, he was cool with her. I mean, he was cool. He was chilly. He was not seemingly super happy

00:29:10.500 to see her there. Though he did say, I've been renting this house. You can stay in this house

00:29:15.580 that I've been renting with me. Mary taught Fanny how to say Papa, hoping that this would

00:29:20.860 touch Gilbert's heart. And he was nice to the daughter, but he was preoccupied with business

00:29:25.540 concerns at this point. He would go away every night and refuse to say where he was going.

00:29:31.420 And Mary, who is prone to depression and who is still dealing with, I would think,

00:29:36.780 some postpartum stuff, her depression returned. She called this her dark mood. She became incapable

00:29:44.600 of do anything but weeping. She was exhausted all the time. She had no strength. She refused

00:29:49.480 to reach out to friends for help

00:29:51.400 finally of all the people

00:29:53.500 to go to she went to see Fuseli

00:29:55.340 her like ex crush

00:29:57.200 and he refused to see her

00:29:59.180 and that was kind of it

00:30:01.260 she was just like life is not

00:30:03.480 worth living so she 0.94

00:30:05.560 a month after her 36th

00:30:07.460 birthday she

00:30:09.060 tried to kill herself she swallowed a 0.69

00:30:11.560 lethal amount of laudanum

00:30:13.500 which is like opium

00:30:15.320 mixed with

00:30:16.500 alcohol usually

00:30:19.480 So she had written to Gilbert being like, Hey, guess what? I'm killing myself. And so he rushed

00:30:24.320 to her and found her and he sent for a doctor who basically pumped her stomach and she was saved.

00:30:30.760 And a few days later, like she had a few days to recover from this, like traumatizing suicide

00:30:35.880 attempt. Gilbert was like, girl, I have an idea. I'm having some trouble with my business in

00:30:40.680 Scandinavia. Could you figure out some business issues? Can I send you there on my behalf?

00:30:45.080 which is a bananas thing to suggest to a mother of a toddler who's like in depression and just

00:30:52.060 tried to kill herself but maria was like this is great if i do this and he'll love me again

00:30:56.600 so she was like this is actually promising development and i will do this yes so she

00:31:01.480 took a few days to pack up and then just went to scandinavia with fanny who is now just over a year

00:31:06.320 old marguerite came along because she's always there and mary found healing in the beautiful

00:31:12.700 Swedish countryside. She would go for long walks, which was like, nature is so healing for her,

00:31:18.580 but also I think just like being able to exercise is good for her. Being in the sunshine is good

00:31:22.720 for her. She was slowly returning to like health, like physically and mentally. And in her

00:31:28.680 investigations to try and help with this business problem, she figured out she had to go to

00:31:32.320 Talmsberg, Norway, which is where one of Gilbert's former employees lived.

00:31:38.080 And now for a quick advertising break.

00:31:40.220 the war is over and both sides lost kingdoms were reduced to cinders and armies scattered

00:31:48.760 like bones in the dust now the survivors claw to what's left of a broken world praying the

00:31:55.940 darkness chooses someone else tonight but in the shadow dark the darkness always wins this is old

00:32:03.360 school adventuring at its most cruel your torch ticks down in real time and when that flame dies

00:32:09.560 Something else rises to finish the job

00:32:11.860 This is a brutal rules light nightmare

00:32:14.140 With a story that emerges organically

00:32:16.860 Based on the decisions that the characters make

00:32:19.460 This is what it felt like to play RPGs in the 80s

00:32:21.880 And man, it is so good to be back

00:32:24.160 Join the Glass Cannon podcast as we plunge into the shadow dark

00:32:27.240 Every Thursday night at 8pm Eastern

00:32:29.280 On youtube.com slash the glass cannon

00:32:31.580 With the podcast version dropping the next day

00:32:34.820 See what everybody's talking about

00:32:36.260 And join us in the dark

00:32:38.940 welcome to the realms of peril and glory explore the mechanically magical vistas of vale

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00:33:14.580 Hi, listeners.

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00:34:26.940 And we're back.

00:34:28.060 At this point, it just made sense for this journey for her to go alone. So she left Fanny with Marguerite. And this was the first time she'd ever been apart from Fanny since Fanny had been born. And while she was not able to solve Gilbert's business problems, but traveling and being on her own and like being away from her daughter, like she was able to kind of rest and like remember who she was and stuff and be in nature.

00:34:50.220 she had the energy to think and write again regrettably with this newfound energy she

00:34:56.540 she had the energy back again to try and win Gilbert's love which is like she kind of got

00:35:01.500 over him and then she's just like no I'm better now and I'm gonna fight even harder for him

00:35:05.920 but when she arrived back in Sweden Marguerite was like hey here's three letters Gilbert wrote

00:35:10.960 while you were away um in these letters he broke up with you and she's like no I don't take no for

00:35:16.780 answer. And so she returned to London. So Gilbert had rendered her a new house just for her and

00:35:22.000 Marguerite and Fanny, but he would not live in the house, but he had gotten also a full staff

00:35:26.180 for this house. So like she set up there, but she's just like, but I need Gilbert. Like this

00:35:30.820 is my like obsession. So she forced one of the servants to tell her where Gilbert was and learned

00:35:37.900 that he was living in a different house with his new live-in mistress, an actress. And the book I

00:35:43.100 red. And I don't think anyone knows the name of this actress. So she's always just called

00:35:46.940 the young, beautiful actress. So Mary went right to that house. Um, and she's like, Hey,

00:35:52.700 and so she met the actress and she's like, here's my proposal. What if I move in with you two? 0.91

00:35:57.780 So Fanny can have her father nearby and we can all just like have this cool, interesting, 0.98

00:36:02.940 different relationship. You know, it's the revolutionary era, et cetera. The actress

00:36:06.740 was like, fuck no, and kicked her out. And Mary decided again to kill herself. She wrote a letter 1.00

00:36:14.880 to Gilbert explaining what she wanted to have done. She wanted Fanny to be sent back to France

00:36:18.760 to be raised by those German people she had met. Marguerite should be given Mary's clothes. And 0.96

00:36:23.640 she also vowed in this letter that her ghost would haunt Gilbert to remind him how shitty he was to 0.98

00:36:29.000 her. So she kissed Fanny goodbye and left her with Marguerite. And then she went to this place 0.69

00:36:36.720 called the Putney Bridge. So it was pouring, pouring rain. And the Putney Bridge was kind

00:36:40.500 of known as a place where people often would attempt or complete suicide by jumping off this

00:36:46.000 bridge. So she was drenched from the rain, which she was like, this is good. It makes my dress

00:36:51.200 heavier. So I'll sink even better into the water. And so she stepped off this bridge. But the Royal

00:36:57.340 Humane Society had recently developed a policy of they knew that people jumped off this bridge a lot.

00:37:02.340 And so they paid rewards to people who rescued people who tried to kill themselves.

00:37:07.560 So Mary had thought that there wasn't anybody around.

00:37:09.980 But in fact, there was two fishermen on the lookout for a suicide because they wanted the money they would get from saving them.

00:37:16.040 So they ran out to get her.

00:37:18.000 Within a few minutes, they got her on their boat.

00:37:20.500 They resuscitated her.

00:37:21.640 And then they dropped her off at the nearest tavern where they collected their reward.

00:37:25.860 And Mary is just like, what is happening?

00:37:27.640 the tavern keeper's wife sort of tended to her like wrapped her warm blankets removed her wet

00:37:32.580 dress and within a few hours somebody came to pick her up not gilbert but instead it was this woman

00:37:39.620 called rebecca christie who had been friends with mary in france and rebecca was and mary had been

00:37:44.120 supportive of rebecca when rebecca was going through it back in france because her husband

00:37:47.740 was having an affair and rebecca was like girl come with me like come back to my house she sent

00:37:52.840 for marguerite and fanny and so she's just staying with rebecca and just like getting it all like

00:37:57.640 you know, becoming healthy again, recovery from the situation. And so Mary, once she had her

00:38:03.520 strength with her, she went, or I guess she wrote a letter to Gilbert being like, here's what we

00:38:08.700 should do. Gilbert, we should all live together. You, me, your mistress, Fanny, Marguerite, let's

00:38:15.600 all live in a house together. And Gilbert's like, okay, fine. So she moved in with them.

00:38:20.020 The actress is like, what is happening? And so Mary sort of was like, the actress was younger

00:38:24.920 than her mary's like in her 30s at this point the actress is probably in her 20s or teens i don't

00:38:29.700 know anyway so mary was just like oh i'm gonna teach her the way that i taught when i was a 0.92

00:38:33.840 governess like i'm gonna school her in like feminism so she kept like preaching the benefits 0.99

00:38:39.160 of independence to the actress the actress had no interest in this at all and eventually the 0.98

00:38:44.220 actress was like veto i veto this situation this is this is too fucked up for me and so gilbert 0.96

00:38:50.460 left with the actress for a trip to Paris. And he tried to send Mary, like he tried to give her 0.98

00:38:57.280 money, but she refuses offers. Cause again, she's just, she's so, she's so much pride about money. 0.83

00:39:01.740 That's a real, a real thing with her. But she did ask for is like, I would like back all the letters

00:39:06.160 I sent you Gilbert, which he sent back. And then she started editing those together along with her

00:39:11.660 writing from Scandinavia. So she could turn her broken heart into a book that would sort of be

00:39:16.040 sort of one part travelogue of her trip around scandinavia and one part like sort of a memoir

00:39:21.760 of her struggle with brokenheartedness so it's kind of like a new kind of book no one had ever

00:39:26.560 really written a book like this it's a really eat pray love type book like a travel book but also

00:39:30.920 about her like inner journey travel writing itself was traditionally only men did that because women

00:39:37.260 couldn't really travel but she had reviewed a bunch of travel books when she was being the

00:39:41.380 magazine reviewer and she felt confident she could write a travel book and so she thought to

00:39:45.940 herself like you know she had been rescued by these fishermen she'd been brought back to life

00:39:50.300 she didn't know why she was still here but maybe there was a reason and maybe she would find that

00:39:55.560 reason if she really committed to writing again which is what she did so she moved out of the

00:40:02.900 house she'd been in the gilbert actress now vacant house um she found her own place to stay

00:40:08.300 and she just like had the letters she like cut them up and reassembled them and reorganized them

00:40:12.540 into sort of a manuscript and writing was giving her energy. It was giving her like a reason to

00:40:17.560 live. She was starting to wake up every day, anticipating, looking forward to what was to

00:40:22.620 come. And her friend, Joseph Johnson, of course, published this. It's called Letters Written

00:40:27.480 During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. This came out in January, 1796. And the

00:40:32.800 book sold really well. It earned her more money than any of her previous books. It got translated

00:40:37.440 into German, Dutch, Swedish, and Portuguese. And in fact, years later, this book would inspire

00:40:43.400 her daughter, Mary Shelley, who wrote travel books. And she modeled them after her mother's

00:40:47.920 work combining kind of like, you know, your innermost thoughts with what you're traveling

00:40:52.100 and seeing. And so she was back in London. She'd been in Paris for a few years. And when she came

00:40:57.400 back, she learned that there was a new guy on the scene. He'd been on the scene before,

00:41:01.460 but now he's really famous. And he was a writer called William Godwin. It was the toast of the

00:41:06.040 town. So she had met him before at like dinner parties and found him just kind of like awkward

00:41:11.520 and weird and didn't really enjoy his company. But he had become really famous because, so 12

00:41:18.540 radical intellectuals had been arrested for treason in 1794 because they had proposed like

00:41:24.600 legal reforms. And this is a time in English history where it was illegal to criticize the

00:41:31.340 monarchy or the government. And these guys did. But William Godwin published this article defending

00:41:36.260 them, which was really brave because it was like they'd been arrested for treason. Him defending

00:41:40.940 them could be kind of treason also, but this really stirred public outrage and led to the

00:41:45.860 12th Amendment actually being released. And so he was hailed as this hero for his commitment to

00:41:50.900 political freedom. And he remembered her also at this dinner party they had been at a few years

00:41:56.760 ago. She had found him really like quiet and weird and awkward. And he had found her like overly

00:42:01.580 talkative and annoying. So there's no reason for them to want to reconnect at all, except

00:42:06.880 they have a mutual friend called Mary Hayes. And Mary Hayes is like, this is my one best friend

00:42:11.300 and this is my other best friend. And I want them to be friends with each other. She was kind of

00:42:15.400 setting them up. So she insisted that they both come to her house for tea and they did. And they

00:42:21.680 met each other again and they saw that both of them had developed over the years they had not

00:42:26.960 seen each other into people who got along a lot better mary was kind of more chill after having

00:42:33.940 lived through various tragedies she was less like strident and godwin was a bit more he had developed

00:42:40.460 some more social skills he was a bit less like pedantic and they're like huh and they kind of

00:42:45.020 got along godwin was like she's interesting and also beautiful in her like grecian style dress

00:42:51.160 And so he purchased a copy of her book, her travelogue, and he thought it was great. He was captivated by her writing style and by what she wrote about, how she wrote it. Mary, however, still hung up on Gilbert, but she was like, I have to get over this. I need to move on from this obsession I have with Gilbert.

00:43:09.740 And so in a way that I know people have done this too, um, sometimes it's good to just like physically remove yourself from a situation to really officially get over somebody. It's like deleting them from your phone, stopping following them on Instagram. So she and Fanny went for a trip to Berkshire to visit some friends, um, in the country, always so healing for her. She replenished her energy. She knew she wasn't going to run into Gilbert, um, because he wasn't there. And when she returned to London, she wrote him a letter saying, I part with you in peace.

00:43:38.740 and that's it. She's over. So she moved to a new house in London. There was more in the

00:43:44.560 countryside, a more rural feeling area. And it was away from the house. She associated with Gilbert.

00:43:49.820 She and her daughter could just like go and see like fields and creeks and farmland.

00:43:54.540 And Fanny was, was loving it. It was great. William Godwin was just like, kind of had a crush.

00:44:00.600 And so he stopped by hoping to see her, but she wasn't home. When she heard that this had happened,

00:44:04.680 she was flattered and so she's like oh maybe he's gonna come by again and when he didn't she's like 1.00

00:44:09.420 you know what whatever and so she just walked to his house and respectable women were not supposed

00:44:14.160 to visit men alone but she did and he welcomed her in because they're like unconventional people

00:44:19.060 and they had tea and then they just started seeing each other constantly they went to plays they had

00:44:23.980 more teas they went for walks in nature they went to dinner parties together and they both really

00:44:29.480 liked each other but they were both so scared so she was scared because she'd been hurt before

00:44:33.960 and he was scared because he had never kissed a woman before they're just kind of like little

00:44:39.280 awkward nerds but eventually godwin took courage confessed his love by kissing her and she was like

00:44:45.180 oh my god this is great but still they're both like they're both like so scared to take the next

00:44:49.100 step so this affair proceeded slowly like mary was being really vigilant about this because like the

00:44:54.680 whole thing with inlay had happened like it was such a passionate thing she's like i can't put

00:44:59.400 myself through that again so she's being so careful about it but they were writers so they

00:45:04.520 confessed their feelings in letters to each other um like every time they saw each other they would

00:45:09.120 then like write letters back and forth about how what a nice time they had and stuff and eventually

00:45:13.360 so like they met in the spring and then by august they had sex for the first time which was for 0.94

00:45:19.240 godwin his first time having sex with anyone ever and he realized like oh my god sex is great i love

00:45:24.880 this and so they have all these like sexy letters they write back and forth to each other about how 0.87

00:45:28.860 much fun they're having with each other. And by December, Mary was pregnant. She's 37 years old

00:45:35.520 at this point. I just wanted to let you know, um, Fanny is like three, she's like 37. That's

00:45:40.680 the situation. Like so much of her, her life, like in terms of like romantic relationships,

00:45:44.680 like she didn't do anything like in a sexual romantic way until she was in her mid thirties

00:45:49.260 at all. So it's all happening in this era of her life. So the thing with them is that both of them

00:45:54.340 had become famous. Like they're both famous, like writers, philosophers, and they're both known for

00:45:57.980 writing marriage sucks and it's a horrible institution and I will never do it. So they're 0.55

00:46:03.800 like, well, we can't get married, but she's pregnant. And they knew that if she had a child

00:46:08.080 out of wedlock, that that would ruin her reputation. But that's complicated because

00:46:12.720 remember the thing in France. So Imlet had recorded that he and Mary were married. So

00:46:18.340 everybody thought they were married. She had never corrected that assumption. So everybody assumed

00:46:23.880 Fanny was a legitimate child. But if Mary married Godwin, then it would become apparent that she had 0.98

00:46:30.340 not been married to Emily because otherwise it'd be bigamy. So retroactively, it would make Fanny

00:46:35.520 suddenly illegitimate. And then maybe that would wreck Fanny's life. But they're like, but if they 0.98

00:46:39.440 don't get married, then their new child, it will maybe ruin their life. And they're both like,

00:46:43.640 oh, we don't want to get married, but like society sucks. And eventually, sort of reluctantly, 0.93

00:46:49.360 They got married on March 29th at St. Pancras Church.

00:46:53.500 But it was really, it's like people who get married just for tax purposes.

00:46:57.260 It's like there's no celebration.

00:46:58.500 They had one witness there.

00:47:00.120 They only did this because of societal prejudice.

00:47:02.820 They reluctantly decided to move in together, but with compromises.

00:47:08.200 I mentioned the age as well, because Mary had been living on her own, basically, for most of her adult life.

00:47:14.240 And she was just like, I'm not going to just be your little wife.

00:47:16.780 Just know that.

00:47:18.480 So what they decided was that Godwin, who also really valued his alone time,

00:47:22.020 he rented some cheap rooms down the street from their home.

00:47:24.340 So he could every day go there to write and be alone because he knew his alone time.

00:47:28.380 He's an introvert.

00:47:28.940 But in return, he would not expect Mary to assume full domestic responsibilities for the household.

00:47:35.040 He would respect her right to work.

00:47:36.740 She would respect his right to work.

00:47:38.920 This was incredibly unusual for this era,

00:47:41.320 but they wanted to have a partnership that would foster the independence of both of them

00:47:46.080 to have like a true equal relationship which was very strange to everybody at this time it was

00:47:55.100 truly not a thing for a man and a woman to not live together and they were living together but

00:48:00.060 only barely really so they leased a new house in a beautiful neighborhood with like you know

00:48:06.280 fields and sheep and trees so that fanny could run around in nature and stuff they moved in together

00:48:12.160 So they got married on March 29th. They moved in together on April 6th. And at this point, 0.86

00:48:17.400 it was impossible to hide the fact that this had happened. The Times printed the news. Mr. Godwin,

00:48:22.060 author of a pamphlet against matrimony, had married the famous Mrs. Wollstonecraft,

00:48:25.820 who wrote in support of the rights of women. They hadn't told any of their friends that they

00:48:29.740 were even dating each other. But at this point, they're like, I guess we have to tell everybody.

00:48:33.460 So they reluctantly wrote these sort of like the opposite of wedding invitations,

00:48:37.520 where they wrote letters to their friends that were very like philosophical and kind of funny

00:48:41.280 to me, not to them. They were just kind of like, I regret to inform you that we've got married,

00:48:46.460 but it's not like a regular marriage. It's a cool marriage. We're not going to like,

00:48:50.540 you know, have gender roles. Like this is still in line with our philosophical

00:48:55.020 thinking, et cetera, et cetera. And their friends who love them were like, this is great.

00:49:00.420 The fans, you know, like the philosophers and people were just kind of like, oh, 0.99

00:49:05.500 oh look at these hypocrites or whatever but they were like fuck that who cares we're happy and 0.99

00:49:09.480 their friends are happy for them and that's what matters and so they settled into this new normal 1.00

00:49:13.800 in this house where he would go and write in his little office and she would stay at home and

00:49:18.380 because of that they would write letters back and forth to each other which I feel like is a really

00:49:22.460 important part of their relationship but so there's a lot of letters exist that they wrote back to

00:49:26.380 forth of each other and he was just like did his best as this little awkward guy to like really

00:49:31.480 reassure mary like i'm not leaving you like i'm not gilbert like this is fine like i love you very

00:49:37.560 much um and she was working on a new novel she was writing called the wrongs of women which was

00:49:43.620 going to be sort of a novel about just explaining all the thoughts that she had about like how shitty

00:49:47.760 society was to women but putting it in sort of like a fictional thing she was also writing stories

00:49:53.520 children's stories for fanny talking about their adventures together i want to mention fanny really

00:49:57.240 like Godwin and she liked him right away. She started calling him man. Um, and she'd be like,

00:50:01.820 when is man going to come and visit? And then when they got married, she was so delighted that man

00:50:05.500 is now her papa. And like, he really got along with Fanny. At one point he took a little business

00:50:09.260 trip and he came back with a mug with an F on it. F for Fanny. Like he was, he was the father who 0.96

00:50:14.740 was stepping up for her. Anyway, the second week in August, a comet streaked across the sky,

00:50:20.860 which confused a lot of people who didn't know about astronomy and mary hoped it meant the child

00:50:27.380 would be born soon and that it was like an auspicious symbol thing happening the morning

00:50:33.180 of august 30th um she knew she was like the first beginnings of labor but she's like oh but this

00:50:39.860 will take a while and like you don't need to be here for a gilbert so he like went no sorry not

00:50:44.520 gilbert godwin godwin went down the street to his office and he liked it his usual writing

00:50:48.820 and she like in Lahav when she had given birth to Fanny she was like I've read all the books I

00:50:53.860 know how labor works don't worry about it I don't need a doctor because Fanny's birth had gone

00:50:58.120 without any complications she found a midwife and she's like but you probably wouldn't have much to 0.99

00:51:02.460 do but like thanks lady anyway by midday she's still pacing around the house the labor was a

00:51:07.360 lot slower than it had been with Fanny and at two o'clock in the afternoon she went up to her room

00:51:13.420 and summoned the midwife she wrote a letter to Godwin down the street saying that baby's going

00:51:17.060 to be born soon, but the baby was not born soon. He came home and she was still, she still hadn't

00:51:24.020 given birth. The labor was, it was nine more hours. The baby was finally born around midnight,

00:51:30.520 August 30th, 1797. The midwife invited Godwin in to meet his child, which was a girl who is

00:51:36.660 at this point, Mary Godwin, later to be known as Mary Shelley. Mary Wollstonecraft, like this was

00:51:43.500 such an ordeal physically for her she was too tired to speak but he stayed by her side

00:51:48.800 holding their daughter and just like being so thrilled and so happy um just being like wow

00:51:53.940 this child is like a representation of our relationship and our love eventually the

00:51:59.800 midwife shooed him out because mary still needed to deliver the placenta which is a part of birth

00:52:05.000 the birth process but after two more hours she had not delivered the afterbirth which meant that she

00:52:12.020 like a person would be now would be a risk of developing an infection if the placenta is still 0.99

00:52:18.080 inside. So Godwin rushed. He got a doctor. I don't know how he chose this guy, but he found a guy

00:52:22.460 called Dr. Poignard who came back and Poignard went right to work. He's like, the placenta's

00:52:27.320 inside. I will rip it out with my unwashed hands without any anesthetic, which caused Mary the

00:52:33.520 greatest pain she had ever experienced. After many hours, yikes, he was like, okay, I extracted

00:52:41.120 all the placenta. Everything's fine. I'm just going to leave and I'm going to not wash my hands.

00:52:45.940 Mary was finally able to sleep and everything seemed okay. So Godwin summoned another doctor,

00:52:53.140 like, I don't know where Dr. Poignard came from, but he summoned like a better doctor called an

00:52:57.420 old friend of Mary's called Dr. Forteis, who stopped by to check up and make sure she was

00:53:01.620 okay. And he was like, yeah, no, I think Mary's recovery is going to go fine. Don't you worry

00:53:05.440 about a thing and so they went to sleep that night just like happy like contented like in love

00:53:11.380 delighted with their new family fanny got to meet her sister she like came in and got to give her

00:53:16.260 kiss she was staying with like family friends while this was all happening but it's just like

00:53:19.740 oh this cute little family so the next two days were just like restful happy days of just like

00:53:24.940 snuggling little family but uh mary soon developed a sudden fever um she started shivering so acutely

00:53:32.200 that her iron bed bumped across the floorboards, rattling the whole house. Not looking good. So

00:53:37.900 Godwin called for Dr. Fortes. Again, Dr. Fortes pretty quickly diagnosed what was going on.

00:53:44.360 Purpurl or childbed fever. So I asked a modern day obstetrician friend of mine

00:53:50.660 for her take on this situation. And she unofficially, you know, she was not there.

00:53:56.620 But yeah, childbed fever is what she said too. So this is caused by group A strep from unwashed

00:54:01.520 hands. This was common and lethal in many historical eras where doctors didn't wash their

00:54:06.980 hands. Nobody washed their hands. People didn't know about germs. So a doctor might go and like

00:54:13.240 dissect a dead body in an autopsy and then not wash their hands and then come and then like pull 1.00

00:54:18.520 some placenta out of a woman and just pass along this infection. So the cause, you know, I don't

00:54:26.100 know. Another doctor at this time wouldn't have behaved differently, but Dr. Poignard would never

00:54:30.700 know that it was his unwashed hands that caused this infection that was causing all these terrible

00:54:36.120 things to happen so this condition retained placenta does still happen today to people

00:54:41.720 to people who give birth and doctors still remove the placenta with their hands but they do this

00:54:46.640 under sterile conditions and give antibiotics so it's not so deadly anymore if a doctor is helping

00:54:53.680 you anyway so the baby baby mary shelley was sent off to join fanny with the family friends because

00:55:00.680 Mary Wollstonecraft not thriving at this point. She was pale. She was underweight. 0.93

00:55:05.940 They didn't tell her that things were as bad as they were, but they were just like,

00:55:10.700 for reasons we can't tell you, you can't nurse your daughter. But like her breasts were like 0.74

00:55:15.800 full of milk and straining. So then they did this thing they did in this time where they brought in 0.97

00:55:19.540 puppies to nurse at her breasts, which is quite a thing to do. Anyway, so Godwin moved into Mary's 0.54

00:55:27.480 room, sleeping in the chair next to her bed. And for the next 48 hours, she just like went in and

00:55:33.700 out of consciousness. The shaking had stopped. Um, but she, the doctor had said like, this woman is

00:55:40.420 going to die. Godwin knew she was going to die. And Mary, no one told Mary that, but like she

00:55:44.480 had figured this out for herself. Her last words, um, were that Godwin is the kindest, best man

00:55:50.440 in the world. And then she kind of felt unconscious. He went to sleep because he needed

00:55:59.000 to sleep. But he said, wake me up the second anything changes. And so at 6am, the doctor

00:56:02.920 called him to Mary's side. And he sat with her until she died. And he was understandably

00:56:09.900 devastated. Everybody who loved her was. He wasn't able to even organize a funeral. He was so upset.

00:56:14.880 His friend organized the funeral. Godwin provided the guest list. And even though both of them had

00:56:20.340 been atheists. It was a religious ceremony. So five days after she died on September 15th,

00:56:27.020 her friends and family gathered in the churchyard of St. Pancras, close to where she and Godwin

00:56:32.240 had gotten married just five months before. Godwin did not attempt the funeral. Her friends

00:56:38.160 helped him pay for a plain monument to mark her grave. It says simply, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin,

00:56:45.500 author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, born 27th April 1759, died 10th September 1797.

00:56:54.880 And so Godwin, I said, like he made the guest list for the funeral. He had not included Henry

00:57:01.460 Fuseli, Mary's past crush, but also good friend. Fuseli was really mad about this. He was mad at

00:57:07.600 Godwin. And so in revenge, he started spreading rumors about Mary, that she was like so desperate

00:57:14.440 for Fuseli's love, that she bombarded him with letters. She pursued him so relentlessly for sex

00:57:21.680 that he was embarrassed for her. Like there's a story that comes up in a lot of biographies

00:57:26.560 of Mary Wollstonecraft about her going to Fuseli and suggesting that she, that the three of them

00:57:32.740 live as a throuple and the wife kicking her out. And did that happen? She didn't write about it.

00:57:40.020 Fuseli wrote about it. So I don't know. Anyway, so this is kind of where her reputation starts to

00:57:44.640 be affected. So when she first died, there were like moving obituaries and articles about her

00:57:51.960 and magazines saying like, you know, how important she had been and what a loss this is that she's

00:57:57.260 dead now. And Godwin was like, I don't like other people writing about her. I should write about

00:58:02.360 her. People need to know what she was like and how cool she was. And so before she'd been dead 0.85

00:58:07.120 a week, he started to write her biography. And so he called it a memoir of the author of the

00:58:13.820 vindication. And this, so he had only known Mary for the last 18 months of her life, really, but

00:58:21.440 she, they had traveled back to her hometown. She had told him a lot about her childhood. So he's

00:58:25.720 like, I can write this biography because I know her better than anybody. I know her soul. I know

00:58:30.460 her spirit. He went through her unpublished manuscripts. He read her old letters and he wrote

00:58:35.620 to friends for any other letters they might have in their possession. He never actually contacted

00:58:39.920 Mary's sisters who could have told him a lot about her childhood, but he didn't want to hear what

00:58:45.620 they had to say. He really had a point of view he wanted to put across about Mary and their input

00:58:52.380 was not valued. And this really offended them to the point that they completely estranged themselves

00:58:57.580 from him. And so they weren't involved with either of their nieces, with Fanny or with Mary for their

00:59:02.320 whole lives. So Godwin had written novels before. He knew how to make a narrative. So he really

00:59:07.860 wanted to highlight Mary's passion and her femininity and her womanliness. So he skimmed

00:59:15.680 over her jobs and her work, but really focused on her relationships with Fuseli, with Gilbert

00:59:23.080 Imlay, and with himself. So this book presents Mary as a tragic heroine. Not a person making

00:59:28.880 your own choices or living her own independent life, which is what she was, but more just a 0.91

00:59:32.740 woman who only existed in relation to men. So the book was sort of like a page turning gothic

00:59:38.980 drama. He wrote it in about eight weeks and it was published soon after. And it fucked up Mary's

00:59:46.000 reputation instantly because it was talking about like, he was like, she's such a cool person. Like

00:59:52.380 I want everybody to know how passionate she was and stuff. But everyone's like, oh, she's a whore. 1.00

00:59:56.820 she is a slut and a tramp and a disaster person so her philosophy like all the ideas people had 1.00

01:00:04.940 respected about her suddenly were overshadowed by her notoriety as just this like slutty slut slut 1.00

01:00:11.180 and he was like part of it is just he needed money because he's like a single dad with with 0.99

01:00:18.020 these two little daughters now so he was like okay i'm gonna publish another book it's gonna be sort

01:00:22.200 of like never before published Mary Wollstonecraft writing and but what this was was like remember

01:00:27.700 when she was putting together her travelogue about Scandinavia she was taking her letters

01:00:31.940 and cutting them apart and only putting in parts that she thought would be good in this book he

01:00:35.560 found those other parts she cut out which were a lot of her most like unhinged letters to Gilbert

01:00:40.760 Imlay where she's like at her it's like if anyone goes through someone else's diary or emails or

01:00:47.720 texts and publishes like the most unhinged things you write when you're like in your most extreme

01:00:53.340 mood. And it's like, this is what Ann Foster is like. I'd be like, oh no. So he took kind of her

01:00:58.360 most revealing, vulnerable writing that she didn't want to have published and published it in a new

01:01:02.800 book called The Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Women. And any

01:01:08.960 part of her reputation that she had left was now completely decimated because he had published

01:01:15.440 these letters, like the letter she sent to Gilbert. And so she is now known entirely only

01:01:21.820 as a crazed, self-destructive, sex-starved extremist. Experts warn parents, don't let 1.00

01:01:28.740 your daughters read Wollstonecraft's books. Her words could promote suicide. It could make girls 1.00

01:01:34.020 turn into whores. It could destroy the very fabric of decent society. And so her reputation was 1.00

01:01:42.440 demolished by this. It's such that in the years after her death, it became risky,

01:01:48.160 increasingly risky for women to write about philosophy or about politics. Because if you're 0.99

01:01:54.120 a woman philosopher, like that was just seen as just like, oh, you're a whore, like Mary Wollstonecraft 1.00

01:01:58.920 too. Like you're just like a hysterical, like prostitute. So anyone following her footsteps 1.00

01:02:06.620 risked being called a whore, reputation ruined. And it was like that for a really long time. 0.98

01:02:12.440 Her tombstone is still in the graveyard of old St. Pancras Church, but her remains were moved to Bournemouth in 1851 so that she could be buried with her daughter, Mary Shelley.

01:02:26.780 And so in terms of her reputation, so she died, what was it, 1798 and then 1797.

01:02:34.340 And then even a hundred years later, when like the suffragette movement was first starting up, some women like would acknowledge her as kind of like a fundamental, like a founder of like the concept of feminism and suffrage.

01:02:48.080 But even that was kind of risky.

01:02:49.860 But women who are fans of hers, like fought for her reputation.

01:02:54.140 Virginia Woolf was a big fan of hers, but really she didn't start getting taken seriously as a writer again, because she was taken seriously as a writer before Godwin wrote these things.

01:03:04.340 until like the 1970s when kind of like feminist thinkers of that time started re-examining her

01:03:10.980 works on their literary merit and looking at her life and not just taking for granted the way that

01:03:15.620 Godwin had portrayed her such that when it was the 200th anniversary of the vindication of the

01:03:21.720 rights of women there was a huge like international celebration about it like she's now included um

01:03:27.560 She is thought of as an important writer of this time.

01:03:32.220 It's an important, like, grandmother of the entire, of feminism generally.

01:03:38.280 And she is much more respected now.

01:03:41.460 Like, her work is included in, like, women's studies classes and philosophy classes and stuff.

01:03:45.300 So, finally.

01:03:47.380 And I wanted to also mention this bad statue.

01:03:50.100 So, there's this sculpture from Mary Wollstonecraft.

01:03:52.340 It's called A Sculpture from Mary Wollstonecraft.

01:03:54.140 It's a public sculpture celebrating her.

01:03:56.740 and it's in Newington Green in London, which is where she was a little kid. It is made by the

01:04:03.760 British artist Maggie Hambling. It was unveiled in 2020. And so this statue, what it is, is like

01:04:10.900 a naked woman emerging in order of sort of this big glob of like organic matter. This quote is

01:04:18.660 written on it. I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves. So this statue did 0.99

01:04:25.400 not go over well. Some people thought like, is this a giant nude statue of a nude Mary Wollstonecraft?

01:04:30.680 Like, do we not just get over this thing about like, she was an important thinker. She's not

01:04:34.880 just a whore. But the campaign behind it says it's a sculpture of an idea. The artist wanted this 0.99

01:04:41.740 figure, the nude woman to represent an every woman. And this statue signifies the birth of

01:04:46.960 the feminist movement rather than depicting Wollstonecraft herself. And one of the reasons

01:04:53.840 why the statue was commissioned was because there's so many more statues of men than of women

01:04:58.240 in england and statues that there are of women in england are mostly like an allegory it's like a

01:05:02.800 woman and she represents freedom or whatever but this so it's like we want a statue of mary

01:05:07.220 wallstonecraft but it's like well this isn't a statue of mary wallstonecraft anyway hambling

01:05:11.640 defended her work saying the figure was not created to look like mary wallstonecraft but

01:05:16.220 she thought the clothes would have restricted her statues in historic costume look like they

01:05:19.620 belong to history it's crucial that she is of the now um and that so it's just that's that's

01:05:26.500 the statue of mary walsenkaft so as i like to do in all the episodes of this podcast we're gonna

01:05:33.000 give mary walsenkaft a score in four different categories the first category is scandalousness

01:05:39.460 how scandalous was her life in the context of of the world and the era she lived in and i think it 0.99

01:05:45.220 was highly scandalous I think being a writer being for such a long time like a woman supporting

01:05:50.500 herself um being a radical having a child out of wedlock and then not marrying the husband 0.70

01:05:57.580 like getting having this unconventional relationship with Godwin like I think

01:06:02.560 I think she's going to Paris like everything she did was and then even not discounting the way that

01:06:08.360 she was thought of later on like I just think her scandalousness is quite high I'm gonna give her 0.90

01:06:14.180 I think seven, seven of scandaliciousness. The next one is scheminess. Um, and for her, 1.00

01:06:20.940 she wasn't coming up with schemes. Like even when she was like throwing herself at men,

01:06:24.200 she wasn't like trying to trick them to be with her, but she was just like,

01:06:28.180 her scheminess is just like getting a job, finding work, finding books to write, like

01:06:32.580 finding a way to support herself. Um, I'm going to give her five for scheminess. Her significance, 1.00

01:06:38.720 I think is 10. I think she was very significant in the era. I think she's such a significant

01:06:42.440 philosopher writer figure to all of history and the fourth category is sexism bonus where it's

01:06:50.480 just like we give points for how much did uh sexism and misogyny hold this person back and

01:06:55.160 she gets a straight up 10 for this because she documented this herself like she wasn't able to

01:07:00.680 go to as good of a school like without a husband or a father figure to be supporting her like 1.00

01:07:07.160 her life could have been so much easier if she didn't have to put up with this bullshit 1.00

01:07:12.620 all the time. And then especially the way that her legacy and her reputation was affected by 0.99

01:07:18.220 the sexism of her husband. So let's see. So this is a total score of 32 from Mary Wollstonecraft.

01:07:25.820 In terms of our scandalousness scale, which is where I put all the people who've scored on this

01:07:30.280 podcast, if you can see the whole thing, if you go to vulgarhistory.com, there's a thing there of

01:07:34.220 the scores, you can see what everybody does. But I'm just saying, you know what? You know who else

01:07:37.680 is a 32? Marie Antoinette. So another significant figure of this period. See, also with the 32, 1.00

01:07:44.460 Sally Hemmings, the American person. So people of this era getting a 32. And that's where she

01:07:50.540 lands on the scandalousness scale. So we're in Mary Shelley month. And the next episode coming

01:07:54.940 out actually in a few days is going to be Mary Shelley herself telling a story of Mary Wollstonecraft's

01:08:01.100 daughter, Mary Shelley, who really lived in the shadow of her mother and who her mother was and

01:08:05.880 this weird reputation that her father created for her mother. And for Mary Shelley, really trying

01:08:10.160 to kind of live up to what she thought her mother would want her to be like, which affected some of

01:08:15.180 her decisions in many ways. So I do also want to mention, I have written a book like Mary Wilson

01:08:21.120 Craft. I am a writer and my book is called Rebel of the Regency, The Scandalous Saga of Carolina

01:08:26.440 Brunswick, Britain's Uncrowned Queen. It's available for pre-order in Canada and in the

01:08:31.780 USA at any bookstore, any website that sells books. You can get all the links to buy it at

01:08:36.880 rebeloftheregency.com. If you're looking forward to reading it, you can add it in your To Be Read

01:08:41.520 on Goodreads and on Storygraph. And you're on NetGalley, you can request it there as well.

01:08:46.220 So again, get all the info with the book at rebeloftheregency.com. And if and when you do

01:08:50.700 pre-order it, if you send me a picture of the receipt, then you can get some gifts from me.

01:08:55.980 Like you can get a free year's membership to my sub stack, a free year's membership to my Patreon, and a Carolina Brunswick digital paper doll.

01:09:04.440 And you can submit that, your receipt as well.

01:09:06.500 There's a form at rebeloftheregency.com.

01:09:10.120 So yeah, Mary Shelley Month.

01:09:11.900 Next time we're going to be talking about Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter, Mary Shelley.

01:09:15.460 Can't wait to get into that with you. 1.00

01:09:17.100 So until next time, keep your pants on and your tits out. 1.00

01:09:21.860 Vulgar History is researched, scripted, and hosted by Anne Foster. 1.00

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Vulgar History - October 15, 2025

Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft (part two)

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