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Updated: June 3, 2025
She even tells them her story, which, as a picture of degradation, equals that of some of Defoe's heroines. Darnford then tells his, and the reader at once recognizes in him another Imlay. Finally, by a lucky accident the two prisoners make their escape, and Jemima accompanies them.
Prior, a master at Eton, introduced as governess to the family of Lord Kingsborough; then, after doing hack-work for Johnson, the chief Liberal publisher of the period, she went to Paris, and unluckily fell in with a handsome scoundrel, Gilbert Imlay, an American soldier.
She could hardly have passed through Havre without feeling the bitter contrast between her happiness of the year before, and her present hopelessness. "I sit, lost in thought," she wrote to Imlay, "looking at the sea, and tears rush into my eyes when I find that I am cherishing any fond expectations.
Imlay became acquainted with her purpose at a moment when he was uncertain whether or no it was already executed, and that his feelings were roused by the intelligence. It was perhaps owing to his activity and representations that her life was at this time saved. She determined to continue to exist." This event sobered both Imlay and Mary.
Imlay continually postponed, she determined, in January 1794, to join him at Havre. One motive that influenced her, though, I believe, by no means the principal, was the growing cruelties of Robespierre, and the desire she felt to be in any other place, rather than the devoted city, in the midst of which they were perpetrated. From January to September, Mr.
Rigorous reason has forced me to resign; and now my rational prospects are blasted, just as I have learned to be contented with rational enjoyments." To pretend to depict her misery at this time would be futile; the best idea can be formed of it from the fact that she had planned her own destruction, from which Imlay prevented her.
"They are," says Godwin, "the offspring of a glowing imagination, and a heart penetrated with the passion it essays to describe." She was thirty-five when she met Imlay. Her passion for him was strong with the strength of full womanhood, nor had it been weakened by the flirtations in which so many women fritter away whatever deep feeling they may have originally possessed.
She bids me remind you of the earnest way in which you pressed me to prevail upon her to change her name, and she directs me to add that it has happened to me, like many other disputants, to be entrapped in my own toils; in short, that we found that there was no way so obvious for her to drop the name of Imlay as to assume the name of Godwin. Mrs.
In the mean time she had become the mother of a female child, whom she called Frances in commemoration of her early friendship. Before she went to England, she had some gloomy forebodings that the affections of Imlay, had waned, if they were not estranged from her; on her arrival, those forebodings were sorrowfully confirmed.
Know all men by these presents that I, Gilbert Imlay, citizen of the United States of America, at present residing in London, do nominate, constitute, and appoint Mary Imlay, my best friend and wife, to take the sole management and direction of all my affairs, and business which I had placed in the hands of Mr. Elias Bachman, negotiant, Gottenburg, or in those of Messrs.
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