800 Years of Women's Letters
bend to support that body – God of heaven, save thy child from this living death!
    I scarcely know what I write. My hand trembles – I am very sick – sick at heart.
    Through Johnson she met the poet-painter Blake and the painter Fuseli, with whom she had an obsessive, unpromising relationship. She travelled alone to revolutionary France in 1792, and met Gilbert Imlay, an American writer and businessman. They fell in love, and later had a daughter in Le Havre. To her grief, he soon lost interest, and she attempted suicide. She despised Imlay’s affairs with ‘beings whom I feel to be my inferiors’, yet to hate his behaviour would be to lose her dignity as a rational human being. However she could not prevent herself from expressing her hurt to him, while emphasizing her ‘feminine’ needs.
    1794
    Gracious God! It is impossible to stifle something like resentment, when I receive fresh proofs of your indifference. What I have suffered this last year, is not to be forgiven.
    Love is a want of my heart. I have examined myself lately with more care than formerly, and find, that to deaden is not to calm the mind – Aiming at tranquillity, I have almost destroyed all the energy of my soul . . . Despair, since the birth of my child, has rendered me stupid . . . the desire of regaining peace (do you understand me?) has made me forget the respect due to my own emotions – sacred emotions that are the sure harbingers of the delights I was formed to enjoy – and shall enjoy, for nothing can extinguish the heavenly spark.
    CLAIRE TOMALIN, THE LIFE AND DEATH OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (1974)
‘AN EXCESS OF MOROSENESS’
    Middle-class girls in the nineteenth century wanted some fulfilment in marriage. They also wanted to please their families, to help if possible. The Parisian Stéphanie Jullien was twenty-two when she wrote this to her father. Her worries about whether to marry make her anxious about her whole life and exacerbate her self-doubt.
    Feb. 20, 1836
    You want an answer to your letter and I believe, in reality, that this is the best way to express a thousand things that one can lose sight of during a conversation in which one speaks only with difficulty and embarrassment. . . . I don’t want to enumerate my anxieties about the future, the discord in my family that I felt more than anyone else, the vexations my mother endured and to which I was the only witness and consolation, the six months passed in anguish and despair over her deathbed. . . . I only want you to understand that I know grief. You men have a thousand occupations to distract you: society, business, politics, and work absorb you, exhaust you, upset you. But all these things also help you forcibly. As for us women who, as you have said to me from time to time, have only the roses in life, we feel more profoundly in our solitude and in our idleness the sufferings that you can slough off. I don’t want to make a comparison here between the destiny of man and the destiny of women: each sex has its own lot, its own troubles, its own pleasures. I only want to explain to you that excess of moroseness of which you complain and of which I am the first to suffer. My life has been sad, and my character shows it. But even now, when I do appear to be calm and happy, what anxieties, what worries about the future don’t I have? I am not able to do anything for myself and for those around me. I am depriving my brothers in order to have a dowry. I am not even able to live alone, being obliged to take from others, not only in order to live but also in order to be protected, since social convention does not allow me to have independence. And yet the world finds me guilty of being the only person that I am at liberty to be; not having useful or productive work to do, not having any calling except marriage, and not being able to look by myself for someone who will suit me, I am full of cares and anxieties.
    Is it astonishing

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