Mary Wollstonecraft by Janet Todd

Author:Janet Todd
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-03-05T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 24

‘Come back quickly to play with your girls.’

Wollstonecraft determined not to panic while Imlay was away; she would be active and maternal. Seeing a sad analogy between her love for baby and father, she hugged and kissed her ‘little darling’:

Poor thing! when I am sad, I lament that all my affections grow on me, till they become too strong for my peace, though they all afford me snatches of exquisite enjoyment – This for our little girl who was at first very reasonable – more the effect of reason, a sense of duty, than feeling – now, she has got into my heart and imagination, and when I walk out without her, her little figure is ever dancing before me.

She made enchanting images for Imlay to control her moods and lure him back: ‘the little damsel … has been almost springing out of my arm – she certainly looks very like you – but I do not love her the less for that, whether I am angry or pleased with you,’ she closed a letter. Fanny was ‘a little sprite’ at one moment, a ‘little Hercules’ at another.

She continued her social life, but her accounts were sour. She called on an ill-assorted French couple who lacked the fineness of herself and Imlay: the woman had the ‘manners of a gentlewoman, with a dash of the easy French coquetry, which renders her piquante’, but her husband, neither gentleman nor lover, cut an awkward figure. Another couple were ugly and had a house smelling of ‘commerce from top to toe’. The abortive attempts at taste only showed it could not be bought. She especially noticed a ‘pendule – A nymph was offering up her vows before a smoking altar, to a fat-bottomed Cupid … kicking his heels in the air.’ ‘[K]ick on,’ she mused, ‘the demon of traffic will ever fright away the loves and graces.’ Imlay would tell her to leave ‘the square-headed money-getters alone’ and be less severe.

Soon she was openly rebuking her own ‘money-getter’: ‘I merely thought of business; and, as this is the idea that most naturally associates with your image, I wonder I stumbled on any other.’ Imlay must rise above commercial obsession, she urged, be more imaginative, less materialistic: ‘as common life, in my opinion, is scarcely worth having, even with a gigot every day, and a pudding added thereunto, I will allow you to cultivate my judgment, if you will permit me to keep alive the sentiments in your heart, which may be termed romantic, because, the offspring of the senses and the imagination, they resemble the mother more than the father, when they produce the suffusion I admire. – In spite of icy age, I hope still to see it, if you have not determined only to eat and drink, and be stupidly useful to the stupid.’ ‘Suffusion’ was a word associated with sexual fulfilment: she insisted that sex was imaginative for her, for Imlay it seemed mere lust.

When asking about Tallien, the

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