Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators, and the Construction of Authorship

Editing Minervas: William Godwin’s Liminal Maneuvers in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman

Literary collaboration has been a subject of recent critical fascination. The editors of a collection of essays on mostly twentieth-century literary couples suggest that “although most of the artists and writers concerned have not escaped social stereotypes about masculinity and femininity and their assumed roles with partnership, many have negotiated new relationships to those stereotypes,” citing the “richness of the private interactions that operate within relationships.”1 In this essay I will examine an earlier period in which stereotypes about masculinity and femininity were being challenged, reshaped, and reinscribed, namely, the early Romantic period of the 1790s. The Romantic writer of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century has famously been a solitary type. This myth has been challenged by revisionary scholarship on the social nature of Romantic writing, work that provides a context in which to reexamine collaborative literary work and its stakes—the cultural desires involved in reading, writing, annotating, editing, revising, and marketing .2 The case I discuss here is all the more significant for the sexual politics of collaboration because it involves a celebrated intellectual pair: a 81 Editing Minervas William Godwin’s Liminal Maneuvers in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman   In many works of this species, the hero is allowed to be mortal, and to become wise and virtuous as well as happy, by a train of events and circumstances. The heroines, on the contrary, are to be born immaculate ; and to act like goddesses of wisdom, just come forth highly finished Minervas from the head of Jove. Mary Wollstonecraft, Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria. A Fragment founding figure of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft, and her lover, William Godwin, internationally famous philosopher of his day and influential figure in the careers of major Romantic writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The closing decades of the twentieth century witnessed growing critical and popular fascination with Wollstonecraft, Godwin, their daughter Mary Shelley, and her lover Percy Bysshe Shelley. Scholarship and speculation on the loves, lives, works, and biographical and textual interactions among these four writers has steadily accumulated. Here I wish to reflect upon the erotics of literary collaboration and the shadows it cast upon futurity by closely examining William Godwin’s editing of Mary Wollstonecraft’s novel Wrongs of Woman. In so doing I hope to provide a fresh perspective on a very traditional way of fashioning intellectual relationships—pedagogy, imagined as mentoring. In his study Erotic Reckonings (1994) Thomas Simmons uses mentoring to theorize the negotiation of tradition and authority among three pairs of twentieth-century American poets: Ezra Pound and H. D., Yvor Winters and Janet Lewis, and Louise Bogan and Theodore Roethke. For Simmons the role of the mentor is inescapably conflicted, “divided between allegiance to a tradition and allegiance to the personhood of the apprentice. Implicit in this consideration are principles of seduction, dominance, and cruelty that potentially threaten the mentor-apprentice relationship.”3 In all three cases Simmons finds that each poet who acted as mentor struggles with his or her identity and pedagogic role: “Without question the artist identified as a mentor takes on the mantle of power, instruction, and direction, even though he may attempt to wield it benignly” (3). Of the many texts that treat mentorship, Simmons selects two as archetypal. The first is the relationship in Homer’s Odyssey of Mentor and Athena (or Minerva) to Telemachus, which Simmons considers “seminal, a cultural starting point” (3). The second is that of Peter Abelard and Heloise in the twelfth century, as contained in the famous letters: “This text is central because it marks another beginning , the overt equation of mentorship and eroticism in post-classical culture” (3). Strikingly, these two powerful myths of pedagogy in Western culture that Simmons identifies—Mentor-Minerva and AbelardHeloise (with its variant in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s myth of the new Héloïse)—recur and intertwine in the texts of Godwin and Wollstonecraft , a coincidence I wish to explore in greater detail. 82   A Scene of Writing Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria. A Fragment was first published as the first and second volumes of Posthumous Works of the Author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which were edited by William Godwin and published by Joseph Johnson in January 1798. Godwin’s Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared in the same month...