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Prologue: A Revolution in Favor of Love
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1 P R O L O G U E ❦ A Revolution in Favor of Love Gilbert Imlay was a citizen of the United States, and Mary Wollstonecraft a subject of George III of Great Britain. He avoided confrontation, she embraced it. He had been a soldier and speculator, she a teacher and governess . They were both writers. His Topographical Description of the Interior of North America had appeared in 1791, and he would soon publish a novel, The Emigrants, which would achieve a well-deserved obscurity. Her Vindication of the Rights of Woman became enormously influential. To Paris in 1793 these restless adventurers came to join other radicals in the heady business of renegotiating all aspects of human life. In the capital of revolution in the last decade of the eighteenth century, they talked, wrote, flirted, and fell in love and into bed with each other. It was a “PLEASANT exercise of hope and joy!” famously recalled William Wordsworth of life in Paris in the early 1790s. For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood Upon our side, we who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!1 In actuality, neither Wollstonecraft nor Imlay was very young when they met each other. She was thirty-four; he was probably thirty-nine. Nor did they fall in love in a time of unlimited bliss. Members of a generation born 1. William Wordsworth, “French Revolution, as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement ” (1804, 1809), in The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth: With Memoirs and Notes (New York, [1880]), 158. 2 / PROLOGUE between the late 1740s and the early 1760s, Wollstonecraft, Imlay, and their friends in Paris and London were old enough to know disappointment well. They would come to know it even more intimately in the summer and fall of 1793 as they found themselves or witnessed their friends inhabiting filthy prisons, mounting the steps of the guillotine, fleeing Paris in search of a safe haven in the midst of a Continental war, and protesting repression from frightened governments in London and Philadelphia. By spring, even the once happy bond between Wollstonecraft and Imlay was fraying. Around the time Wollstonecraft gave birth to a daughter, Fanny, in May 1794, Imlay took up with another woman in London, precipitating a series of bitter exchanges , suicide attempts, and fleeting reconciliations. None of this was especially remarkable. Unhappy love affairs were commonplace in the floating community of British and American writers to which Wollstonecraft and Imlay belonged. The twenty-three-year-old Wordsworth, for example, had returned to London in late 1792, about the time Wollstonecraft arrived in Paris, leaving behind his lover, Annette Vallon , and their illegitimate daughter, Anne Caroline, neither of whom he saw again for a decade. More generally, a woman seduced and betrayed by a scoundrel was a ubiquitous trope in eighteenth-century Anglo-American literature and, indeed, in transatlantic popular culture. By 1798, however, people throughout the English-speaking world were talking about the Wollstonecraft-Imlay affair as a particularly revealing moment in a decade of dramatic episodes.Why? Why did anyone care about the problems of two people when the world as a whole was turned upside down?2 They cared because Mary Wollstonecraft was no ordinary Clarissa, the heroine of the eponymous novel by Samuel Richardson. She, of all women, should have known better. And yet she had embraced her own Lovelace, Clarissa’s seducer, if that in fact was what Imlay was. Wollstonecraft was the celebrated author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which 2. See Nicola Trott, “Sexing the Critic: Mary Wollstonecraft at the Turn of the Century,” in Richard Cronin, ed., 1798: The Year of the Lyrical Ballads (New York, 1998), 32–67; Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, N.J., 2004); Rodney Hessinger , Seduced, Abandoned, and Reborn: Visions of Youth in Middle-Class America, 1780–1850 (Philadelphia, 2005); Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore, 2007); Marion Rust, Prodigal Daughters: Susanna Rowson’s Early American Women (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008); and Tom Mole, Romanticism and Celebrity Culture, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 2009). On the political transatlantic political context, see Philipp Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution (Charlottesville , Va., 2010); and Seth Cotlar, Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic (Charlottesville...