When Mary wollstonecraft Was Duped by Love...

one windy day in June 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft, her 1-year-old daughter, and her nanny, with a small crew of men, pushed off in a boat into rough waters from a port on the eastern shore of England. Wollstonecraft’s baby wriggled in her arms as the boat rocked and swayed in the gigantic gray waves of the North Sea. Yet Wollstonecraft would not be deterred by the dangers of the passage. This was an opportunity for her to write about her travels and to capitalize on her reflections by selling her stories. When the jagged shoreline of Sweden finally appeared after days of endless ocean, she began to record her observations.

Wollstonecraft wrote about how traveling as an unattached woman could be unsettling: when she had to stay at the cabin of a strange man.1 It could be demeaning: During a dinner conversation, her male host complimented her for asking “men’s questions.”2 And it could be enraging: when she learned that men in the Swedish village she was visiting stood by unbothered as women washed linens in an icy river, causing their hands to crack and bleed.3 “The men stand up for the dignity of man, by oppressing the women,” she observed.4 Her heart was heavy when she thought of her daughter, who would one day experience being a woman in the world: “I feel more than a mother’s fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex,” she wrote. “Hapless woman! what a fate is thine!”5

Her hope was for women to live, work, and think as freely as men.

From a young age, Wollstonecraft aspired to support herself so she would not need to depend upon a man for her well-being. This was a hope that she had for all women and that she expressed in her philosophical and literary works. By her early 30s, she was already the well-known author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and had achieved her dream of self-sufficiency through her writing.

Wollstonecraft’s travels around Scandinavia provided her with an opportunity to unleash her insatiable curiosity and powers of reflection. Her uninhibited and wide-ranging examination of landscapes and lifestyles challenged the philosophy of Rousseau, found observational support for the theory that evolution selects for species and not individuals, and captured astonishing encounters in the natural world, as when her boat drifted over a constellation of sea creatures “like thickened water” that closed at the touch of her paddle.6

The other motivation for her trip was more personal. She was chasing down a ship captain on behalf of Gilbert Imlay, the father of her daughter, Fanny. Imlay had sent Wollstonecraft to Scandinavia both to attend to some business on his behalf (the details of which are unclear) and, also likely, to shake her off.7 It was a humiliating mission made worse by the fact that only two weeks before her departure, Wollstonecraft had attempted suicide after learning Imlay had cheated on her with a young actress.8 (A man his age, he said, needed “variety.”) Although it wasn’t easy, she was willing to forgive Imlay, harboring hopes that her travels would cement her and her daughter’s fate to his. But as each day on her trip passed, these hopes dwindled. “I am weary of travelling – yet seem to have no home – no resting place to look to. – I am strangely cast off. – How often, passing through the rocks, I have thought, ‘But for this child, I would lay my head on one of them, and never open my eyes again!’”9

Being rejected by Imlay was traumatic, as was the realization that a man had the power to make her miserable. In Rights of Woman, she’d disparaged women for putting themselves in a position like this, characterizing those who staked their well-being on men as “weak, artificial beings” with a “spaniel-like affection.”10 She warned that “many innocent girls become the dupes of a sincere, affectionate heart”11 and was disillusioned when this happened to her. She shared these thoughts in a letter to a friend: “It seems to me, that my conduct has always been governed by the strictest principles of justice and truth. – Yet, how wretched have my social feelings, and delicacy of sentiment rendered me!”12

The intrepid journey did not cure the ills at home. When Wollstonecraft returned from abroad, she discovered that Imlay was with a new woman. She threatened suicide again: “I shall plunge into the Thames where there is the least chance of my being snatched from the death I seek … In the midst of business and sensual pleasure, I shall appear before you, the victim of your deviation from rectitude.”13 Then she went to a quiet bridge outside of London, tied rocks to her legs, and tipped over into the river. To her consternation, bystanders pulled her out and revived her. Months later, she finally gave up on Imlay and told him: “It is now finished.”14 She would raise Fanny on her own.