Mary: A Fiction - Biographical and Literary Influences

Biographical and Literary Influences

Wollstonecraft wrote Mary at the town of Hotwells in Bristol while a governess for the Anglo-Irish Kingsborough family. Her relationships with the family provided fodder for the novel, a work that Wollstonecraft herself admitted was "drawn from Nature". Eliza, for example, is partially based on Lady Kingsborough, who Wollstonecraft believed cared more for her dogs than for her children. More importantly, the friendship between Mary and Ann closely resembles the relationship between Wollstonecraft and her intimate companion Fanny Blood, who meant "all the world" to her and, as Wollstonecraft's husband William Godwin later put it, "for whom she contracted a friendship so fervent, as for years to have constituted the ruling passion of her mind". Wollstonecraft's representation of Fanny as Ann has been called "condescending"; critics have speculated that because Wollstonecraft felt betrayed by Fanny's decision to marry, she depicted Ann as a friend who could never satisfy the heroine.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's philosophical treatise on education, Emile (1762), is one of the major literary influences on Mary. A few months before starting the work, Wollstonecraft wrote to her sister Everina: "I am now reading Rousseau's Emile, and love his paradoxes ... however he rambles into that chimerical world in which I have too often wandered ... He was a strange inconsistent unhappy clever creature—yet he possessed an uncommon portion of sensibility and penetration" (emphasis Wollstonecraft's). Rousseau, she notes, "chuses a common capacity to educate—and gives as a reason, that a genius will educate itself" (emphasis Wollstonecraft's). When Mary was published, the title page included a quotation from Rousseau: "L'exercice des plus sublimes vertus éleve et nourrit le génie" ("the exercise of the most sublime virtues raises and nourishes genius"). The novel is therefore, in many ways, an early bildungsroman, or novel of education.

Wollstonecraft's epigrammatic allusion to Rousseau's Julie (1761) signifies her debt to the novel of sensibility, one of the most popular genres during the last half of the 18th century. Along with other female writers, such as Mary Hays, Helen Maria Williams, Charlotte Turner Smith, Mary Robinson, Maria Edgeworth, and Hannah More, Wollstonecraft felt compelled to respond to the Rousseauvean ideological aesthetic that had come to dominate British fiction. Romantic heroines, Wollstonecraft scholar Gary Kelly writes, "represent woman constructed for man: the heroic feminine victim of the courtly rake and gallant, the virtuous feminine companion of the ideal professionalized gentleman, and the intellectually and erotically subservient companion of the ideal bourgeois man". Wollstonecraft would also attack Rousseau in her best-known work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, because of his sexism in the second part of Emile. She announces in the "Advertisement" (a section similar to a preface) of Mary that she is offering her heroine, who is a "genius", as a contrast to characters such as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Rousseau's Sophie. In addition the text is peppered with allusions to popular sentimental novels such as The History of Eliza Warwick (1778) and The Platonic Marriage (1787), which critique their presentation of the heroine of feminine sensibility. Mary is more akin to the charitable and industrious heroines of Bluestocking Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762) than to the passive, weepy heroines found in most sentimental novels. Debate concerning the relationship between gender and sensibility continued into the early 19th century; Jane Austen, for example, made it the explicit focus of her novel Sense and Sensibility (1811).