Frances Imlay (14 May 1794 – 9 October 1816), also known as Fanny Godwin and Frances Wollstonecraft, was the daughter of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the American commercial speculator and diplomat Gilbert Imlay. Wollstonecraft wrote about her frequently in her later works. Fanny grew up in the household of anarchist political philosopher William Godwin, the widower of her mother, with his second wife Mary Jane Clairmont and their combined family of five children. Fanny's half-sister Mary wrote Frankenstein and married Percy Bysshe Shelley, a leading Romantic poet, who composed a poem on Fanny's death.
Although Gilbert Imlay and Mary Wollstonecraft lived together happily for brief periods before and after the birth of Fanny, he left Wollstonecraft in France in the midst of the Revolution. In an attempt to revive their relationship, Wollstonecraft travelled to Scandinavia on business for him, taking the one-year-old Fanny with her, but the affair never rekindled. After falling in love with and marrying Godwin, Wollstonecraft died soon after giving birth in 1797, leaving the three-year-old Fanny in the hands of Godwin, along with their newborn daughter Mary.
Four years later, Godwin remarried and his new wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, brought two children of her own into the marriage, most significantly Claire Clairmont. Wollstonecraft's daughters resented the new Mrs Godwin and the attention she paid to her own daughter. The Godwin household became an increasingly uncomfortable place to live as tensions rose and debts mounted. The teenage Mary and Claire escaped by running off to the Continent with Shelley in 1814. Fanny, left behind, bore the brunt of her stepmother's anger. She became increasingly isolated from her family and died by suicide in 1816.
Life
Birth
Fanny Wollstonecraft was the daughter of the British feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the American entrepreneur Gilbert Imlay. Both had moved to France during the French Revolution, Wollstonecraft to practise the principles laid out in her seminal work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and Imlay to engage in speculative business ventures. The two met and fell in love. At one point during Wollstonecraft and Imlay's relationship, the couple could meet only at a tollbooth between Paris and Neuilly, and it was there that their daughter was conceived; Fanny was therefore, in Godwin's words, a "barrier child".St Clair, 182; Todd, Death and the Maidens, 54. Todd identifies the place as a "tollbooth" and St Clair, paraphrasing Godwin's 1798 edition of Wollstonecraft's and Imlay's letters, identifies it as a "toll gate barrier". In modern French, at least, poste de péage can mean both "tollbooth" and "tollhouse". According to St Clair, "the lovers had arranged uncomfortable assignations there during the time when Imlay was forbidden to leave the city limits" (182). Which of the many places named Neuilly is unclear. Neuilly-sur-Seine was known as "Neuilly" until 1897, when the name was changed, and is the most likely candidate. Frances "Fanny" Imlay, Wollstonecraft's first child, was born in Le Havre on 14 May 1794, or, as the birth certificate stated, on the 25th day of Floreal in the Second Year of the Republic,Tomalin, 218–19; Holmes, Footsteps, 118. and named after Fanny Blood, her mother's closest friend.Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 258. Although Imlay never married Wollstonecraft, he registered her as his wife at the American consulate to protect her once Britain and France went to war in February 1793. Most people, including Wollstonecraft's sisters, assumed they were married—and thus, by extension, that Fanny was legitimate—and she was registered as such in France.Tomalin, 218–19; Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 267.
Infancy and early childhood Initially, the couple's life together was idyllic. Wollstonecraft playfully wrote to one friend: "My little Girl begins to suck so manfully that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R[igh]ts of Woman" [emphasis in original].Qtd. in Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 258; see also, Tomalin, 219; Todd, Death and the Maidens, 22. Imlay soon tired of Wollstonecraft and domestic life and left her for long periods of time. Her letters to him are full of needy expostulations, explained by most critics as the expressions of a deeply depressed woman but by some as a result of her circumstances—alone with an infant in the middle of the French Revolution.Tomalin, 220–21; Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 258; Todd, Death and the Maidens, 22.
Wollstonecraft returned to London in April 1795, seeking Imlay, but he rejected her; the next month she attempted to commit suicide, but he saved her life (it is unclear how).Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 286–87. In a last attempt to win him back, she embarked upon a hazardous trip to Scandinavia from June to September 1795, with only her one-year-old daughter and a maid, in order to conduct some business for him. Wollstonecraft's journey was daunting not only because she was travelling to what some considered a nearly uncivilized region during a time of war, but also because she was travelling without a male escort. When she returned to England and realized that her relationship with Imlay was over, she attempted suicide a second time. She went out on a rainy night, walked around to soak her clothes, and then jumped into the River Thames, but a stranger rescued her.Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 355–56; Tomalin, 232–36; Todd, Death and the Maidens, 22–24; Seymour, 15–16.
Using her diaries and letters from her journey to Scandinavia, Wollstonecraft wrote a rumination on her travels and her relationship—Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)—in which, among other things, she celebrated motherhood.Tomalin, 225–31; Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 311ff; Todd, Death and the Maidens, 22–23. Her maternal connection to her daughter prompted her to reflect on a woman's place in the world:
You know that as a female I am particularly attached to her—I feel more than a mother's fondness and anxiety, when I reflect on the dependent and oppressed state of her sex. I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart. With trembling hand I shall cultivate sensibility, and cherish delicacy of sentiment, lest, whilst I lend fresh blushes to the rose, I sharpen the thorns that will wound the breast I would fain guard—I dread to unfold her mind, lest it should render her unfit for the world she is to inhabit—Hapless woman! what a fate is thine!Qtd. in Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 326–27.
Wollstonecraft lavished love and attention on her daughter. She began two books, drawn from her own experience, related to Fanny's care: a parenting manual entitled Letters on the Management of Infants and a reading primer entitled Lessons.Tomalin, 249; Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 259–60; Seymour, 26. In one section of Lessons, she describes weaning:
When you were hungry, you began to cry, because you could not speak. You were seven months without teeth, always sucking. But after you got one, you began to gnaw a crust of bread. It was not long before another came pop. At ten months you had four pretty white teeth, and you used to bite me. Poor mamma! Still I did not cry, because I am not a child, but you hurt me very much. So I said to papa, it is time the little girl should eat. She is not naughty, yet she hurts me. I have given her a crust of bread, and I must look for some other milk.Qtd. in Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 260.
In 1797, Wollstonecraft fell in love with and married the philosopher William Godwin (she had become pregnant with his child). Godwin grew to love Fanny during his affair with Wollstonecraft; he brought her back a mug from Josiah Wedgwood's pottery factory with an "F" on it that delighted both mother and daughter.Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 439–42; Todd, Death and the Maidens, 30; Locke, 130; Seymour, 18. Wollstonecraft died in September of the same year, from complications giving birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who survived.Tomalin, 271ff; Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft, 448ff; Todd, Death and the Maidens, 30. Three-year-old Fanny, who had been scarred from smallpox,Todd, Death and the Maidens, 22, 47. was unofficially adopted by her stepfather and given the name of Godwin. Her copy of Wollstonecraft's only completed children's book, Original Stories from Real Life (1788), has the initials "F. G." written in large print in it.Tomalin, 286. According to the dominant interpretation of Godwin's diary, it was not until Fanny turned twelve that she was informed in an important conversation with Godwin that he was not her natural father.St Clair, 180; Tomalin, 286–87; Seymour, 82–83. In the only biography of Fanny, Janet Todd disputes this reading, arguing instead that the conversation was about Fanny's future. She finds it unlikely that Fanny would have been unaware of her origins in the open and liberal Godwin household.Todd, Death and the Maidens, 54–55.
After Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin and Joseph Johnson, Wollstonecraft's publisher and close friend, contacted Fanny's father, but he was uninterested in raising his child. (Neither Wollstonecraft nor her daughter ever saw Gilbert Imlay after 1796.)St Clair, 296; Tomalin, 287; Todd, Death and the Maidens, 31–32. Wollstonecraft's two sisters, Eliza Bishop and Everina Wollstonecraft, Fanny's only two living female relatives, were anxious to care for her; Godwin, disliking them, turned down their offer.Todd, Death and the Maidens, 35–36; Seymour, 38, 40–41; see also Locke, 218. Several times throughout Fanny's childhood Wollstonecraft's sisters asked Godwin to allow them to raise their niece and each time he refused.Todd, Death and the Maidens, 52ff. Godwin himself did not seem particularly ready for parenthood and he now had two small children to raise and no steady source of income. However, he was determined to care for them.Todd, Death and the Maidens, 36. During these early years of Fanny's life, Joseph Johnson served as an "unofficial trustee" for her as he had occasionally for her mother. He even willed her £200, but Godwin owed Johnson so much money upon his death in 1809 that Johnson's heirs demanded Godwin pay the money back as part of his arrears.St Clair, 305; Todd, Death and the Maidens, 67.
Childhood Although Godwin was fond of his children, he was, in many ways, ill-equipped to care for them. As Todd explains, he was constantly annoyed by their noise, demanding silence while he worked.Todd, Death and the Maidens, 46–47. However, when he took a trip to Dublin to visit Wollstonecraft's sisters, he missed the girls immensely and wrote to them frequently.Todd, Death and the Maidens, 48–49; Seymour, 41–42.
On 21 December 1801, when Fanny was seven, Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont, a neighbour with two children of her own: three-year-old Claire and six-year-old Charles. She had never been married and was looking, like Godwin, for financial stability.Todd, Death and the Maidens, 56–58; Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit, 170; St Clair, 241. Although Clairmont was well-educated and well-travelled, most of Godwin's friends despised her, finding her vulgar and dishonest. They were astonished that Godwin could replace Mary Wollstonecraft with her.St. Clair, 242; St Clair notes that "it is easy to forget in reading of these crises [in the lives of the Godwins and the Shelleys] how unrepresentative the references in surviving documents may be. It is easy for the biographer to give undue weight to the opinions of the people who happen to have written things down." (246) Fanny and her half-sister Mary disliked their stepmother and complained that she preferred her own children to them.Todd, Death and the Maidens, 56–57. On 28 March 1803, baby William was born to the couple.St Clair, 242.