Mrs Shelley | Page 5

with the appearance of
Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman. These were
strong reasons to attract Mary to France, strange as the time was for
such a journey; but even then her book was translated and read both in
France and Germany. So here was Mary settled for a time, the English
scarcely having realised the turmoil that existed. She arrived just before
the execution of Louis XVI., and with a few friends was able to study
the spirit of the time, and begin a work on the subject, which,
unfortunately, never reached more than its first volume. Her account, in
a letter to Mr. Johnson, shows how acutely she felt in her solitude on
the day of the King's execution; how, for the first time in her life, at
night she dared not extinguish her candle. In fact, the faculty of feeling
for others so acutely as to gain courage to uphold reform, does not
necessarily evince a lack of sensitiveness on the part of the individual,
as seems often to be supposed, but the very reverse. We can well
imagine how Mary felt the need of sympathy and support, separated as
she was from her friends and from her country, which was now at war
with France. Alone at Neuilly, where she had to seek shelter both for
economy and safety, with no means of returning to England, and

unable to go to Switzerland through her inability to procure a passport,
her money dwindling, still she managed to continue her literary work;
and as well as some letters on the subject of the Revolution, she wrote
at Neuilly all that was ever finished of her Historical and Moral View
of the French Revolution. Her only servant at this time was an old
gardener, who used to attend her on her rambles through the woods,
and more than once as far as Paris. On one of these occasions she was
so sickened with horror at the evidence of recent executions which she
saw in the streets that she began boldly denouncing the perpetrators of
such savagery, and had to be hurried away for her life by some
sympathetic onlookers. It was during this time of terror around and
depression within that Mary met Captain Gilbert Imlay, an American,
at the house of a mutual friend.
Now began the complication of reasons and deeds which caused bitter
grief in not only one generation. Mary was prompted by loneliness,
love, and danger on all hands. There was risk in proclaiming herself an
English subject by marriage, if indeed there was at the time the
possibility of such a marriage as would have been valid in England,
though, as the wife of an American citizen, she was safe. Thus, at a
time when all laws were defied, she took the fatal step of trusting in
Imlay's honour and constancy; and, confident of her own pure motives,
entered into a union which her letters to him, full of love, tenderness,
and fidelity, proved that she regarded as a sacred marriage; all the
circumstances, and, not least, the pathetic way she writes to him of
their child later on, prove how she only wished to remain faithful to
him. It was now that the sad experiences of her early life told upon her
and warped her better judgment; she who had seen so much of the
misery of married life when love was dead, regarded that side, not
considering the sacred relationship, the right side of marriage, which
she came to understand later--too late, alas!
So passed this _année terrible_, and with it Mary's short-lived
happiness with Imlay, for before the end we find her writing, evidently
saddened by his repeated absences. She followed him to Havre, where,
in April, their child Fanny was born, and for a while happiness was
restored, and Mary lived in comfort with him, her time fully occupied
between work and love for Imlay and their child; but this period was
short, for in August he was called to Paris on business. She followed

him, but another journey of his to England only finished the separation.
Work of some sort having been ever her one resource, she started for
Norway with Fanny and a maid, furnished with a letter of Imlay's, in
which he requested "all men to know that he appoints Mary Imlay, his
wife, to transact all his business for him." Her letters published shortly
after her return from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, divested of the
personal details, were considered to show a marked advance in literary
style, and from the slow modes of travelling, and the many letters of
introduction to people in all the towns and villages she visited, she was
enabled to send home characteristic details of all classes of people. The
personal portions