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Updated: June 3, 2025
There was a change for the better, however, in her mental state, for though her grief was not completely cured, she at least voluntarily sought to recover her emotional equilibrium. Self-examination showed her where her weakness lay, and she resolved to conquer it. With but too much truth, she told Imlay: "Love is a want of my heart.
Imlay; but it was at least eighteen that he ought to have been banished, and would have been banished, had it not been for her scrupulous pertinacity in determining to leave no measure untried to regain him.
So passed this annee terrible, and with it Mary's short-lived happiness with Imlay, for before the end we find her writing, evidently saddened by his repeated absences.
Her affection increased with time, and Imlay, though discovered not to be a demigod, grew ever dearer to her. Her love for her child, which she confessed was at first the effect of a sense of duty, developed soon into a deep and tender feeling.
Mary reasoned in the same spirit as they did, and from no desire to uphold the doctrine of free love. Fearless in her practice as in her theories, she did not hesitate in this emergency to act in a way that seemed to her conscience right. She loved Imlay honestly and sincerely.
Through their kindness, the fever which consumed her was somewhat abated. Her temporary madness over, she again remembered her responsibility as a mother, and realized that true courage consists in facing a foe, and not in flying from it. Of the change in her intentions for the future she informed Imlay: LONDON, November, 1795. Mr.
She followed him to Havre, where, in April, their child Fanny was born, and for a while happiness was restored, and Mary lived in comfort with him, her time fully occupied between work and love for Imlay and their child; but this period was short, for in August he was called to Paris on business. She followed him, but another journey of his to England only finished the separation.
"The way to my senses is through my heart," wrote Mary Wollstonecraft to her lover Imlay, "but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a shorter cut to yours." She spoke for the best, if not for the largest part, of her sex. A man often reaches the full limit of his physical capacity for love at a single step, and it would appear that his psychic limits are often not more difficult to reach.
The only record of Mary's connection with Imlay, which lasted for about two years, are the letters which she wrote to him while he was away from her, his absences being frequent and long. Fortunately, these letters have been preserved. They were published by Godwin almost immediately after her death, and were republished in 1879 by C. Kegan Paul.
As Kegan Paul says, "No one can read her letters without seeing that she was a pure, high-minded, and refined woman, and that she considered herself, in the eyes of God and man, his wife." During the first part of his absence, Imlay appears to have been as devoted as she could have wished him to be.
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