Vindication (59 page)

Accordingly, back in Pisa, Mrs Mason founded a society of her own. Her new home, an apartment in the large and handsome Casa Lupi (known affectionately as the Cave of Wolves), became the venue for an Accademia di Lunatici consisting of forty-six members, including the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi who stayed for six months a few streets away in the Via della Faggiola. Other members were his friend Giovanni Rosini, Giuseppe Giusti, and a Frenchwoman, Sophie Vaccà (Dr Vaccà's wife). The
Lunatici
met every fortnight on Mondays (Moon days, appropriate to loonies). The name may have revived a theatrical Lunatica Accademia that had flourished in Pisa during the first half of the seventeenth century. Mrs Mason's
Lunatici
had an altogether more secret character at a time when Tuscany was ruled by the Austrian Archduke. ‘Madness', as with Hamlet, was a cover for deviance. Each member adopted the name of a constellation, and received a certificate of membership with the motto: ‘
se non son matti
,
non ce ne volemo
' (if you aren't mad we don't want you). Ostensibly, it was a literary society, consisting mainly of students from the University of Pisa, but the secrecy may have had a political vein. Several of the
Lunatici
–poet Angelica Palli, Francesco Guerrazzi, Antonio Mordini and Ferdinando Zannetti–went on to become political activists for the unification of Italy after 1848: links in a revolutionary chain from Mary Wollstonecraft and the French Revolution, to Margaret Mount Cashell and the Irish Rising, to the Risorgimento.

 

In 1832 when Claire returned to Pisa, she was invited to live with Mrs Mason, who had moved into the Via della Faggiola in the centre of town.
‘Nothing can equal Mrs. Mason's kindness to me,' she told Mary Shelley. ‘Hers is the only house except my mother's, in which all my life I have ever felt at home. With her I am as her child.' Claire was delighted to find a like character in seventeen-year-old Nerina, who ‘will walk by herself and think for herself'. Together, Claire and Nerina were ‘as wild as March hares', scoffing at men and love. Laurette's fashionable style had attracted a princely rogue, while Nerina was more suited to the subversive
lunatici
. She was darker and slighter than her sister, a playful talker, who pretended to moan over her education in languages and literature, since it would prevent her marrying ‘some blackbeard of an Italian' in search of a sewing wife.

Claire continued to teach long hours, serving ‘the tyrants', the English Bennets, from nine in the morning. At ten each night she returned to the Tighes, ‘a singular family–of the females of which it may truly be said, they form among their species, an oasis in the grand desert of society'. After many depleting years, Claire at last grew ‘fat and ruddy'. Mrs Mason, she felt, ‘understands me so completely–I have no need to disguise my sentiments, to barricade myself up in silence as I do almost with every body for fear they should see what passes in my mind and hate me for it because it does not resemble what passes in theirs'.

In 1834 Nerina, aged eighteen, married a member of the
Lunatici,
Bartolomeo Cini, a law student of literary, political and scientific tastes from a papermaking family in San Marcello Pistoiese. ‘Meo' was a good man whom everyone, including Claire, loved and trusted. He had a thin, sensitive face, with a large nose and delicate but firm lips. Nerina's aunt Diana came to help at the birth of her first child Margharita. Nerina's descendants lived in San Marcello, generation after generation. In the summer of 2001, my husband drove us through a blinding rainstorm up the perilously winding road of the Apennines, to meet Nerina's present-day descendant Andrea Dazzi and his wife Cristina in their book-filled rooms. A woman in her nineties entered with quiet dignity, Signor Dazzi's mother, Nerina's great-granddaughter, born Cini in 1909. Her eyes were so pale a blue they were almost white. Lady Mount Cashell's eyes, as Godwin described them to his friend Marshall in 1800. Was it fancy or did Giovanna
Dazzi look like the earliest portrait of Margaret King in her mid-teens? The rambling old house has been divided, but tucked away, doors open on a nineteenth-century library–untouched, intact–for Cristina Dazzi has refused to sell it off. There, still, are the Irish books of Lady Mount Cashell, her manuscripts and the love letters of ‘Laura' and ‘Vesuvius'.

In 1834, Tighe, distancing himself further from Lady Mount Cashell, required her to resume that name. She died at the age of sixty-four the following year. A portrait painted by her sister Diana, not long before her death, shows her level eyes and fresh complexion under the bonnet of an old woman–her persona in
Advice
. On her lap she holds the manuscript of ‘The Chieftains of Erin', one of her unpublished novels: a rather tedious tale of Ireland in the age of the Elizabethan invaders. Her Cini son-in-law remembered her as Irish, with her
amor della patria
and her talk of
oppressi compatriotti
.

Her practical benevolence recalls George Eliot's tribute to the unrecorded work of nineteenth-century women. Half the good in the world, George Eliot says, comes from those who lie in unvisited graves. This pupil and disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft lies in the English graveyard at Livorno, which she'd visited in 1803 with Lord Mount Cashell. The graveyard, off the Via Verdi, has been closed for a century and a half: the key turns in the rusty lock and the old iron gates open into an expatriate past. The ground is covered by the leaves of many winters, and the steady blue sky looks down through the pines on those who died far from home. At the back, two pediments have fallen from a large table-tombstone, with weeds growing between exposed stones. Much of the marble is stripped, but the inscription is still intact:

 

HERE LIE THE REMAINS

OF MARGARET JANE

COUNTESS OF MOUNT CASHELL

BORN A.D. 1773

DIED 29 JANUARY 1835

 

By her side is Tighe's matching tombstone, their estrangement engraved in the fact that she was not buried as ‘Mrs Tighe' but in her former identity as
the wife of Mount Cashell. Though she lived the second half of her life in obscurity–her name absent from the many editions and translations of her
Advice
–her influence on childcare was widely disseminated. One of her readers was an Italian expatriate in London, Gabriele Rossetti, who bought a copy to guide him with his children, Dante, William, Michael and Christina.

When William Godwin died, aged eighty, in 1836, he asked to be buried with Mary Wollstonecraft. So Mary Shelley stood once more at her mother's tomb as the gravediggers dug twelve feet down. ‘Her coffin was found uninjured,' she wrote to her mother's old friend Hays, ‘the cloth still over it–and the plate tarnished but legible.' By the time she herself came to die in 1851, the railway had broken through St Pancras churchyard. Her son Percy Florence moved the bodies of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin to Bournemouth where he lived. Mary Shelley was buried between her parents.

Independent, existing by her own skills and wits, Claire Clairmont lived on and on into the age of Henry James. He heard her story, and recreated her as the secret survivor–the beloved of a long-gone Romantic poet–in
The Aspern Papers
(1887). The artist John Singer Sargent remembered her in her seventies playing the piano for his dancing class in Florence. She ended there a Catholic, as she had begun, and at the age of eighty-one was buried with Shelley's shawl. She would have preferred to lie with Allegra in her unmarked grave, in unconsecrated ground near the entrance to the chapel at Harrow, Byron's old school.

Buried with these lives are stories of promise: counter-narratives to the cut-off plot of Wollstonecraft's death. Biography is ceasing to make death more final than it is. Continuities turn the focus from deaths, disasters and slanders to heirs in the next generation who manifest the staying power of her self-making. Three managed to survive through mutual support. Ever since reading Mary Wollstonecraft in 1814, Claire had been gripped by an idea of ‘the subterraneous community of women'. ‘The party of free women is augmenting considerably,' she remarked to Wollstonecraft's daughter in 1834. ‘Why do not they form a club and make a society of their own.'

T
here's no end to the reverberations of far-reaching lives. Mary Wollstonecraft can't be dissociated from her daughters–her biological daughters and those who come under her influence, her political descendants over subsequent centuries. A past experience revived for its meaning is ‘not the experience of one life only/ But of many generations'. Present-day generations, in the choices and opportunities open to us, are Wollstonecraft's heirs.

Women and men of the first generation after her death–mostly workers during the first half of the nineteenth century–took up the socialism of Robert Owen, a follower of Wollstonecraft, as he told Fanny Imlay in 1816. One of the earliest claims for women's enfranchisement was made by an Irish supporter of Owen, William Thompson, in his
Appeal of One Half of the Human Race
. Thompson's aim was to ‘raise from the dust that neglected banner which [Wollstonecraft's] hand nearly thirty years ago unfolded boldly, in the face of prejudices of thousands of years'. A practical outcome was that women could join a trade union. Owenite tracts and newspapers, followed by the
Chartist Circular
, regularly reprinted passages from
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
. A new translation also came out in France in 1826 (as part of the run-up to the 1830 revolution).

Whilst this was going on in England and France, a daughter of a New England clergyman published her thoughts on ‘The Natural Rights of
Woman' in the
Boston Monthly Magazine
in 1825. The Great Creator, she argues, crowned his labours by giving being to the most intelligent of his creatures:

This sermon examines small-mindedness from an American perspective. Ten years before Mount Holyoke, the first women's college, the author is hopeful of the schoolhouse with its custom of equal education, and fewer inducements to phoniness. To be sure, girls still leave with nothing more than ‘a smattering of
terms
', but ‘we feel the influence of the female character' in some shift from modish sensibility towards ‘sympathy for real distress'.

Curiously, this author's name was Mary Wollstonecraft. It was not an invention or coincidence. This American Wollstonecraft, a botanist, was in fact the widow of Mary's youngest brother, Charles. A dictionary of
Distinguished Women
, published by the owner of the
Boston Monthly
, finds the second Mary Wollstonecraft as eloquent and bent on domestic values as the first.

Her impression of the better-educated American girl was borne out by Alexis de Tocqueville. During his stay in 1832, he was ‘surprised and almost frightened' by the distance of the American girl from her European counterpart: an extraordinary absence of shyness and ignorance. Instead of training a girl to distrust herself, education was drawing forth her voice. Tocqueville finds a ‘singular skill' and ‘happy audacity' (happier than a philosopher stumbling along a narrow path) as this girl steers her thoughts and language through the traps of conversation.

While these voices carried Wollstonecraft's ideas further into the public arena, certain writers tried out the character she had brought into being. The future poet Elizabeth Barrett was only twelve in 1818 when she read the
Vindication
. At fourteen she declares her ‘natural' independence of mind and ‘spurns' the triviality of women's lives. Her outsider heroine Aurora Leigh, displaced from Italy to England, sees that the fatal lesson is imitation. She holds to ‘the inner life with all its ample room', aware that ‘feebler souls/ Go out', fading in the glare of obligatory artifice. This narrative poem of 1857 revives Wollstonecraft's unwavering focus on education, on the soft soul of a girl as she takes the imprint of what she and her speech are to be–be it the gush of affected sensibility in Wollstonecraft's time, or the docile ‘so be it' of Victorian womanhood.

Copies of the
Vindication
were scarce in Victorian England, George Eliot observed. She read it with surprise to find Wollstonecraft ‘eminently serious, severely moral' in her impatience with silly women. In
Daniel Deronda
, when the despairing singer Mirah dips her cloak in the river, George Eliot looks back to Mary Wollstonecraft soaking her clothes that rainy October night on the brink of the Thames. Mirah, like Mary, is restored to life; each lives to know a good man and unfold what she has to offer. George Eliot wrote an admiring leader for the
Westminster Review
on the common ground between Wollstonecraft and the New England reformer Margaret Fuller, with her ‘calm plea' in
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
‘that the possibilities of her nature may have room for full development'.

The nineteenth century pressed the issue of women's education; the twentieth century, that of professional advance; but the subtler question of our nature is still to be resolved. In 1869 John Stuart Mill says, ‘what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing'. In 1915 Virginia Woolf predicts it will take six generations for women to come into their own–if so, we're not there yet. ‘The great problem is the true nature of woman,' she alerts students at Cambridge. If this century is to solve it, the ‘new genus' of Mary Wollstonecraft offers a start. What is this genus? What will it contribute to civilisation?

A new-found creature–‘almost unclassified'–has been crawling out from under the stone of history. ‘I am a rising character' is the reply of
Charlotte Brontë's Lucy Snowe when people ask ‘Who are you?' ‘“Nature” is what we know–/ Yet have no art to say,' says Emily Dickinson as poems pour from her pen during her
annus mirabilis
, 1863. In the late 1870s Olive Schreiner, a young governess in a lean-to room on a rocky stretch of the veld, wrote a novel about a New Woman. Though she appears an oddity on a backward colonial farm, she does not yield her conviction of who she is in order to pursue the mediocre plots open to her sex. An authentic self seems to speak out of a stark and timeless landscape.
The Story of an African Farm
won over the intelligentsia when Schreiner brought it to London. Her eloquence broke in on the earnest deliberations of the Men and Women's Club as they sifted the nature of the sexes. Her manner was visionary, her gestures emphatic, her dark eyes glowed as she spoke. Mary Wollstonecraft, she says, is ‘one of ourselves'. So she puts it in an unfinished introduction for a centenary edition of the
Vindication
. Wollstonecraft ‘knew'. She had foreseen a transformation of gender, ‘the mighty sexual change that is coming upon us'. In the 1880s the two sexes seemed to Schreiner still a mystery: ‘what in their inmost nature they are…Future ages will have to solve it.'

Henry James approached this mystery through his vibrant cousin, Minny Temple. He looked on her as ‘an experiment of nature', surrounded by a circle of gifted Harvard men who were drawn to her honesty and hunger for life. ‘Let us fearlessly trust our whole nature,' Minny urged before her early death. She became the model for
The Portrait of a Lady
, where James tests the ‘
grande nature
' of an American girl who turns down marriage to an English lord. As she does this, she senses some undefined destiny: ‘Who was she, what was she, that she should hold herself superior?…If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater.' A century before, when Wollstonecraft's ‘Mary' rejects the practice of ‘giving' a bride in marriage, the author herself was germinating the new character.

As we trace her experiments, above all ‘that most fruitful experiment', her relation with Godwin, we see everywhere a single purpose: to centre the domestic affections as a counter to violence. Miseducation undoes those ties: the iron jargon of sacrifice fed to a female terrorist, sealing her
off from the beating heart of the baby she holds; invaders of other countries who ‘are the real savages', proving ‘how unfit half-civilized men are to be entrusted with unlimited power'; and bombarding images of bodies decked with prostitute-chic dispatched down the catwalks of the present. The traits Wollstonecraft outlaws threaten us as never before: the terror of violence too close to home, and the more insidious callousness of unregulated greed. She herself had to pierce through mask after mask, not just to observe but to experience in the most jarringly intimate way her father's violence, the blood on the cobblestones of Paris, and habits of fraud in the free port of Hamburg.

Her protest, when she heard the lash resound on slaves' naked sides, came fifty years ahead of the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840 where ‘the woman question'–a question of their wish to speak in so public a forum–took up the opening day. A group portrait of that London event includes Wollstonecraft's friend Amelia Opie in a towering black bonnet, seated beside Lady Byron, with Lucretia Mott from America, a leader of the silenced women delegates, just visible at the back.

Wollstonecraft is nearby, in the next room of the National Portrait Gallery. She ‘saved her soul alive', mused pioneering anthropologist Ruth Benedict in 1913, as she came face to face with her.

‘She is alive and active,' Virginia Woolf agreed, ‘she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now amongst the living.' That was 1929, the year Woolf wrote her essay ‘Mary Wollstonecraft'. She republished it in 1932, the year she planned to speak out for the untried possibilities of women–‘a great season of liberation', her diary says. Her own boldest move was to walk away from the edifice of power by calling on an ‘Outsider Society', heirs of that ‘party of free women' that Claire Clairmont proposed to Mary Shelley. This line of inheritance leads less to the limited suffrage movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries–the joiners of the dominant parties–than to the Virginia Woolf who refused heroes, honours, medals and war, and strode more freely, ‘enfranchised till death, & quit of all humbug'.

For all that, Mary Wollstonecraft does not terminate in disciples. Her ‘new plan of life' is growth, not fixity of form. Though she speaks an
eighteenth-century language of ‘rights', she looks beyond rights as an end in themselves, beyond the feminist goals of the last two centuries, towards an evolving intelligence–listening, sensitivity, tenderness–still untapped in public life.

Women who imitate men lack ambition, goes the old phrase. Though Mary Wollstonecraft came into contact with an array of able men, not least her husband, she held to a course of her own. Tugged off-course by an Adam of the American frontier, she came back from the brink of extinction, once, twice, with inventive renewals. ‘I am not born to tread in the beaten track,' she said, ‘the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.' Active, articulate, she takes the lead, takes it still, as she cuts her way to the quick of life.