“Wollstonecraft: A daring experiment” (TLS)

Falling in love with the author usually precedes the death of the author, and not in a simulacrum way as it was described by Barthes. 

In early 1796, the bachelor Godwin eagerly consumed Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. This epistolary travelogue had as its subtext the break-up of her republican or common-law marriage with the American revolutionary war captain Gilbert Imlay. The figure of Imlay hovered at the edge of the book, as the unnamed recipient of the author’s forlorn correspondence. Fanny Blood also featured as a ghost in Wollstonecraft’s Letters. Writing to her unnamed lover, the author recalls how she could hear her dead friend’s “soft voice warbling … over the heath” as she wandered along the ragged Scandinavian seashore. Undaunted by the spectres of the writer’s lost loves, Godwin went to call on Wollstonecraft – a talkative writer he had not liked when they met at a dinner party in 1791. Soon their unexpected friendship was, in Godwin’s words, “melting into love”. He would later look back on the Letters as a “book calculated to make a man in love with its author”.

Godwin and Wollstonecraft entered into what Virginia Woolf would call, following J. S. Mill, an “experiment” in living. They spent nights together, but kept separate apartments for work during the day, while sending messages to one another with email-like rapidity. Godwin’s seemingly scrupulous method of birth control failed because of his assumption that women were less fertile after their periods. And so the two most prominent British radical philosophers, who had spoken against the institution of marriage, took their vows at Old Saint Pancras Church in March 1797 for the sake of their future child. ©