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54 2 A “Very Sensible” American April came at last. Winter was over, and with it went Mary Wollstonecraft’s melancholy mood. Life was better, mainly because she was no longer alone. She had found friends within a community of English-speaking writers, some of whom she had known in London. Through Thomas Paine, she had become acquainted with French men and women such as Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville and his wife Felicité and Jean-Marie and Marie-Jeanne Roland de La Platière. Wollstonecraft’s friends were generally middling, provincial men and women in their late thirties who had sought fame and fortune through a literary career.The French Revolution, they were certain, had overturned institutions and attitudes that had too long thwarted the ambitions of men and women. It was making visible at last the pleasures and profits of a natural world in which friendship replaced patronage and talent mattered more than flattery. They were wrong, of course. By the time the weather turned cold and the leaves were falling from the trees in the Luxembourg Garden, many would be making conversation in prison cells and imagining the guillotine rushing toward their necks. We can wonder whether, if they had known what awaited them in October, they would have acted differently in April. But they didn’t know. No one knew. In spring, as France went to war with Great Britain and other European nations, as the National Assembly debated a future in the aftermath of the execution of Louis XVI, their confidence seemed entirely reasonable. Anything was possible. Paris was hardly the place to tame one’s fancy.What was revolution if not an act of imagination? In late April, Mary Wollstonecraft’s spirits were as high as they had been low in February. She was a woman consumed with hope, bursting with A “VERY SENSIBLE” AMERICAN / 55 energy. She was a woman in love. It was a feeling she knew; it had happened before, after all.What was novel was the strange sensation created by the knowledge that the feeling was mutual. For the first time in her life, she was experiencing the love of someone she loved.This time, she wanted and she was wanted. This time, she found someone necessary to her happiness and he found her necessary to his. A liberated Wollstonecraft accepted the existence of something she had begun to doubt she would ever know. Her “love was unbounded,” recalled William Godwin, and “for the first time in her life she gave a loose to all the sensibilities of her nature.” She had found a companion as well as a lover.1 His name was Gilbert Imlay, and he was nothing if not a sensible man, in the eighteenth-century sense of the word. A slave to fancy, Imlay lived a life shaped by his notions of the world as it could be rather than the world as it was. He lurched from possibility to possibility in a seemingly endless series of what his contemporaries called speculations or adventures. Most involved making money; all reflected an extraordinary imagination. Empowered to dream by revolution, Imlay never came to terms with reality. When he met Wollstonecraft, he was an American in his late thirties who had recently published two books in which he blithely argued that the best place to realize a natural society was neither London nor Paris but the Ohio Valley. The first, A Topographical Description of North America, detailed a lush, safe, and accessible landscape far from the artificial corruption of Great Britain; the second, The Emigrants, imagined educated individuals organizing a society around mixed-gender sociability. Like Wollstonecraft, Imlay, who had written and published his books in London, was in Paris because it was the epicenter of revolutionary power. But, whereas she was there to help promote change in Europe through education and writing, he was there to promote change in North America through trade and war. Just as A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had given her a measure of celebrity and authority, so, too, had his books conferred on him the status of an expert on America, at least with eager French leaders such as Jacques-Pierre Brissot. Wollstonecraft met Imlay in early April 1793, probably at the home of their mutual friends, Thomas and Rebecca Christie. Their initial encounter was not a success, at least from her perspective. She did not like him, although her disdain soon...

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