Godwin’s Case: Melancholy Mourning in the ‘Empire of Feeling’

Abstract

‘There are moments, when any creature that lives, has power to drive one into madness. I seemed to know the absurdity of this reply; but that was of no consequence. It added to the measure of my distraction.’ In his Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), this is William Godwin’s description of his feelings shortly after questioning the nurse just coming out of the room where his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, lies dying. To Godwin’s question, what she thought of her mistress, the nurse responded that ‘in her judgment, she was going as fast as possible’.1 Godwin’s distracted condition during Wollstonecraft’s fatal illness continued well beyond her death. It is from the state that verges on the borderline of madness that he started to mourn her. After Wollstonecraft’s death from septicaemia following the birth of the future Mary Godwin Shelley, Godwin, symbolically taking his dead wife’s place, moved into her room at the Polygon, where she used to live and work separately from Godwin during the day. Here he immediately immersed himself in work, re-reading all her books and letters. As a reaction to his pain at her loss he started writing the Memoirs, and also began to edit and then publish her posthumous works in 1798, among them her last, unfinished novel, Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman, and her letters to Gilbert Imlay.