This Long Pursuit by Richard Holmes

Author:Richard Holmes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-08-15T04:00:00+00:00

If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book. She speaks of her sorrows, in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands our full attention.

On Mary’s return to London in 1795 she discovers that she has been abandoned and betrayed by Imlay, and twice tries to commit suicide, first with an overdose of opium, and then by jumping into the Thames. Godwin’s vivid and moving account of this second attempt includes another unforgettable image: that of Mary all alone at night in the pouring rain, pacing back and forth on Putney Bridge, hoping that by soaking her clothes she will drown more quickly when she summons the courage to leap from the parapet. Paradoxically, it opened Godwin to the charge of trying to make a moral defence of suicide.

The remaining two chapters become increasingly confessional. Yet they are written in the same admirably limpid and economic style, in which tight understatement is deliberately used to contain overwhelming emotion. Godwin describes how they fell in love in the spring of 1796, and began sleeping together in August, long before their mutual decision to marry – which was only taken after Mary became pregnant. Such a candid admission opened Godwin to further mockery and abuse, although he refused to alter it in the second edition.

Finally, at great length and in almost gynaecological detail, without the least reference to the traditional comforts of religion, Godwin painfully and minutely describes Mary’s death, eleven days after bearing her second child. It was the first time a deathbed had been described in this intimate way, including such unsettling details as Mary being given puppies to draw off her breast-milk, and being dosed with too much wine in a vain attempt to dull her pain.

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