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In the midst of her duties and dissipations she managed to find some little time for more solid pleasures and more congenial work. In her letters she speaks of nothing with so much enthusiasm as of Rousseau, whose "Émile" she read while she was in Dublin. She wrote to Everina, on the 24th of March,
For most of the time, however, both sisters were birds of passage. Everina was for a while at Putney, and then in Ireland, where she probably learned for herself the discomforts which Mary had once endured. Eliza was now at Market Harborough and Henley, and again at Putney, and finally she obtained a situation in Pembrokeshire, Wales, which she retained longer than any she had hitherto held.
Eliza and Everina were both at home to take care of her, but she could not rest without the eldest daughter, upon whom experience had taught her to rely implicitly. She sent for Mary, and the latter hastened at once to her mother's side. Her own hopes and ambitions, her chances and prospects, all were forgotten in her desire to do what she could for the poor patient.
When the desertion of her so-called friends made her most bitter, she wrote to Everina:
When she parted from Lady Kingsborough, and the time arrived for beginning her new life, she thought it best to communicate her prospects to Everina; but she begged the latter not to mention them to any one else. She seems for some time to have wished that her family at least should know nothing of her whereabouts or her occupations. She wrote from London on the 7th of November to Everina,
When she expected her sisters to stay with her, she begged them beforehand, "If you pay any visits, you will comply with my whim and not mention my place of abode or mode of life." She lived in very simple fashion; her rooms were furnished with the merest necessities. Another warning she had to give Everina and Mrs. Bishop was, "I have a room, but not furniture.
"I am very cool to Charles, and have said all I can to rouse him," she wrote to Everina; but then immediately she added, forced to do him justice, "But where can he go in his present plight?" It scarcely seems possible that such misery should have befallen a gentleman's family. Mr. Wollstonecraft's one cry, through it all, was for money.
Her family were naturally interested in her book from personal motives; but Eliza and Everina heartily disapproved of it, and their feelings for their eldest sister became, from this period, less and less friendly. However, as Kegan Paul says, their small spite points to envy and jealousy rather than to honest indignation. Both were now in good situations.
But, as thorough a hater of shams as Carlyle, she was disgusted with herself once the passing excitement was over. From Dublin she wrote to Everina giving her a description of a mask to which she had gone, and of which she had evidently been a conspicuous feature: DUBLIN, March 14, 1788. ... I am very weak to-day, but I can account for it.
I cannot give you no better advice than out of Proverbs, the Prophets, and New Testament. My best affections attend you both." Mary's family were not so cordial. Everina and Mrs. Bishop apparently never quite forgave her for the letter she wrote after her return to England with Imlay, and they disapproved of her marriage.
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