Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘The Most Sublime Virtues’: Wollstonecraft's Philanthropic Personae
- 2 ‘Original Spirit’: Translating the Maternal Educator
- 3 ‘Affection for the Whole Human Race’: Wollstonecraft's Cosmopolitan Love of Country
- 4 ‘A More Enlightened Moral Love of Mankind’: Philanthropy and the French Revolution
- 5 ‘Gleams of Truth’: Transparency, Eloquence and the Language of Revolution
- 6 ‘Imperious Sympathies’: Wollstonecraft's Philanthropic Traveller
- 7 ‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’: Authenticity and Diversity in Wollstonecraft's Narrative of Progress
- Coda. ‘Out-Laws of the World’: Cosmopolitanism in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - ‘Imperious Sympathies’: Wollstonecraft's Philanthropic Traveller
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 August 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 ‘The Most Sublime Virtues’: Wollstonecraft's Philanthropic Personae
- 2 ‘Original Spirit’: Translating the Maternal Educator
- 3 ‘Affection for the Whole Human Race’: Wollstonecraft's Cosmopolitan Love of Country
- 4 ‘A More Enlightened Moral Love of Mankind’: Philanthropy and the French Revolution
- 5 ‘Gleams of Truth’: Transparency, Eloquence and the Language of Revolution
- 6 ‘Imperious Sympathies’: Wollstonecraft's Philanthropic Traveller
- 7 ‘The Growth of Each Particular Soil’: Authenticity and Diversity in Wollstonecraft's Narrative of Progress
- Coda. ‘Out-Laws of the World’: Cosmopolitanism in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The blow dealt by the Terror to Wollstonecraft's political and moral ideals found its personal counterpart in the slow death of her love affair with Imlay. In February 1794, they moved from the outskirts of Paris to Le Havre, a suitable location for trade. Their daughter, Françoise ‘Fanny’ Imlay, was born in May and registered as legitimate. Shortly afterwards, traces of anxiety appear in Wollstonecraft's letters as she staves off fears that Imlay's love for her is cooling. Increasingly drawn to money-making ventures that promised instant fortune, Imlay departed frequently on business, which eventually took him to London. His dealings seem to have been, if not illegal, at least morally dubious, and they troubled Wollstonecraft's conscience. As doubts about Imlay's integrity stole into her mind, she swore that commerce was corrupting his character: ‘How I hate this crooked business! This intercourse with the world, which obliges one to see the worst side of human nature!’ For Wollstonecraft, the simple agrarian life extolled in Imlay's published works seemed infinitely more appealing than ‘commerce, which debases the mind, and roots out affection from the heart’. As time wore on, her disquiet intensified. Yet despite the pain of prolonged separation and the unrest in France, she was alarmed when Imlay urged her to join him. Evidently her homesickness had given way to an outright rejection of her native land: ‘am I only to return to a country, that has not merely lost all charms for me, but for which I feel a repugnance that almost amounts to horror, only to be left there a prey to it!’ During Wollstonecraft's residence in France, the Pitt government had declared war against the French Republic. Thirty members of her radical coterie had been arrested for sedition and three of them brought to trial on ill-founded charges of high treason. Acutely aware of British hostility to her ideological convictions, Wollstonecraft was to all intents and purposes a voluntary exile, preferring to invest her hopes in the Thermidorian Republic than to contend with the reactionary climate of her mother country. She also argued that Fanny would be ‘freer’ growing up in France, probably alluding to the legalisation of no-fault divorce, as well as legislative changes designed to secure state-run support for unwed mothers and inheritance rights for their children.
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- Mary WollstonecraftCosmopolitan, pp. 155 - 177Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022