1There was a house in England where a girl slept on the bare boards of the landing, outside her mother's door.
2She did it so that her father would have to step over her. He was a man who had been left a fortune and had spent it, farm by farm, and when he had drunk enough he came up the stairs with his fists. The girl was perhaps twelve. She could not stop him. She could only lie there, so that there would be one thing between him and her mother, and he would have to look at it.
3Her name was Mary Wollstonecraft. Remember the landing. She spent the rest of her life on it, in one way or another, lying across a door.
4She had an elder brother. He was sent to a good school, and bred to the law, and when the grandfather's money came down, it came to him. Mary had some few years at a day school and what she could read by herself. No one thought this unjust. It was simply how the world was made, like the rain.
5Count the doors that stood open to a young woman of that time who had wits and no money. She might be a paid companion to a rich widow, and fetch shawls. She might be a governess, and eat neither with the family nor with the servants. She might teach a little school, or sew until her eyes failed. Or she might marry, and after that, by the law of England, she would own nothing, not her wages, not her children, not her own body; all would be her husband's, as his horse was.
6Mary tried every door but the last. She fetched the shawls. She started a school at a village green outside London with her sisters and her dearest friend, a gentle, gifted girl named Fanny Blood.
7Then Fanny married and went to live in Lisbon, for her lungs, and wrote that she was with child and very ill. Mary left the school and took ship. She came into Lisbon harbour after a rough passage and reached the house in time to hold her friend through the birth. Fanny died in her arms soon after. The child died too.
8She sailed home through winter gales. And here is a thing to know of her. On that voyage they came upon a French ship, dismasted and sinking, whose crew called to them for rescue. The English captain said he had not food enough aboard, and made to sail on. Mary, a passenger with a few shillings and a black dress, went up to him on his own deck and told him that if he left those men, she would lay the whole matter before the owners and the law the day they landed. He looked at her. He took the Frenchmen aboard.
9The school had failed while she was gone. She went as a governess to a great house in Ireland, and was sent away within the year. She was twenty-eight, in debt, with a few pages of a story in her bag.
10She went to the one man in London she thought might read them. He was a bookseller named Joseph Johnson, a small, quiet, asthmatic man who kept his shop in the yard of St Paul's church. He read her pages. He found her a little house and told her she might live by writing for him, if she was willing to work.
11For five years she did the labour of a galley slave. She wrote for Johnson's monthly paper on whatever he laid on her table: sermons, travels, novels, and one spring the life of an African who had been a slave and had bought his own freedom for forty pounds. And many an afternoon she sat at Johnson's dinner table above the shop, among the boldest talkers in the kingdom, and found she could hold her own.
12Then France rose against its king. A great statesman of England wrote a book against the French, full of sorrow for their queen. Mary answered it in less than a month. Hers was the first reply in print, before any of the men's. It made her name.
13But the men who were remaking France, when they came to draw up their plan for schools, wrote that girls need be taught only until they were eight, and after that should learn their duties at home. These were the friends of liberty. They had declared the rights of man, and they meant the word exactly.
14She read that, and she sat down and wrote the book that was in her. She wrote it in six weeks, sending the sheets to the printer as they left her pen.
15It said a thing so plain that it had hardly been said before. Women, as one found them, were often foolish, vain, cunning and weak. She did not deny it. She had been a governess. But why? Take any creature that can reason. Teach it from the cradle that its whole business is to please. Give it no knowledge but of ribbons, no exercise but of sitting still, no hope but of being chosen. Then wonder that it is not wise.
16The fault was not in the fire. The fault was in what the fire had been given to burn. She held that reason was given by God to every soul alike, and that to starve it in half of them was to waste his gift. Let girls and boys be taught together, the same lessons, in the same rooms. Let a woman have a trade, and the keeping of what she earned. Let her be a physician, or keep a farm, or a shop. Then see what women were.
17And she said what she was not asking for, since she knew what would be thrown at her. She was not asking that women should rule their husbands by turns of tyranny. She set it down in one line: "I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves."
18The book was read all over Europe and across the ocean. A great gentleman called its author a hyena in petticoats. She was thirty-two.
19At the end of that year she did what no one advised. She went to Paris, alone, to see the new world with her own eyes.
20She came there in December. She took rooms in a great house whose owners were away, with the servants far off in another wing, in a street of shuttered windows. And on a morning soon after, she heard drums. She went to the window. The King of France was going by in a hackney coach, through lines of soldiers, on his way to be tried for his life. The street was silent. Not a voice was raised. She saw him sitting there with more dignity than she had looked for, and to her own surprise she found the tears running down her face.
21That night she wrote to Johnson. She told him that all day she had not been able to get the sight out of her head. She was alone in the vast house. She had seen eyes glaring at her through the glass of a door, and hands that shook at her, bloody. And she ended: "I am going to bed—and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle."
22She had cause. The spring brought the Terror. The men and women she had dined with, the moderate party who had welcomed her, went one after another in the cart to the square. England and France were at war by then, and English people in Paris were being taken to prison. She did not leave. She began, in the middle of it, to write the history of what she was seeing, with both the hope and the blood in it.
23And in that city, at that time, she loved a man. He was an American, a captain and a trader, easy and handsome, named Imlay. He gave her the shelter of his country's name, entering her as his wife on the books of the American envoy, though no priest or mayor had married them, so that she would not be seized as an Englishwoman. She bore him a daughter, in a port on the coast, and named her Fanny for the friend who had died in Lisbon. She was happier that year than she had ever been.
24He tired of her. It was not more than that. He went to London, and when she followed with the child he sent her north on an errand of his, to Sweden and Norway, to trace a lost cargo of silver. She went, with the baby and a nursemaid, and did a merchant's hard business along those rock coasts, and wrote down what she saw. When she came back, she found he had another woman.
25Here the story must go carefully. She had lain across doors all her life for others. Now she found no one lying across hers. On a night of rain in October she walked for half an hour up and down by a bridge over the Thames, so that her clothes should be heavy with water, and then she went over the rail.
26Watermen saw it. They rowed after, and dragged her into their boat, and carried her to an inn, and she was brought round.
27She was angry at first to have been saved. Then, slowly, she was not. She had a child of a year old who knew her face. She had a pen. She took a lodging, and went back to work. She had walked to the Last Door and looked through it and come away. She did not speak lightly of despair after that, nor harshly of anyone who had felt it.
28In the spring she met again a man she had quarrelled with years before at Johnson's table: a philosopher named William Godwin, shy, stiff and honest, who had written a famous book against all government and did not know how to talk to a woman. He read the book she had made of her northern travels, and said that if ever a book was made to make a man love its author, this was the one.
29They did not move into one house. Each kept a study and a door, and they sent notes back and forth by the servant, and met in the evening as people who had chosen to. When she found she was with child, they married in an old church at the edge of the city, with one witness, and went on as they were, two people and two doors.
30She was thirty-eight. She was at work on a new book, about the wrongs done to women by the law. She told Godwin she expected to be down to dinner the day after the birth. She had done it before.
31The child was born late on a night at the end of August: a girl. They called her Mary.
32Then a thing went wrong that was small, and that in those days no one knew how to mend. The afterbirth did not come away. A doctor was sent for. He did what was then done, with his hands, for hours, and he had not washed them, for no one in the world yet knew that he should.
33For a few days she seemed well. Then she began to shiver so that the bed shook under her.
34Godwin did not leave the house again. He sat by her through all the days that followed. Near the end he tried to ask what she wished for the two little girls, without saying why he asked. She told him quietly that she knew what he was thinking of. She died on the tenth day of September, in the morning.
35Mark that date. It was on the tenth day of September, forty-eight years before, in a duke's house in Lorraine, that a woman who had put the laws of the sky into French died in childbed, with a daughter six days old in the next room. The Weave keeps no feast days. But two of the clearest minds of that age went through the Last Door by the same road, on the same day of the year, and it was the road by which most women then went. It would be closed in the end by people who took the trouble to find out why.
36Afterward he did a brave and foolish thing. He wrote the story of her life and told all of it: the American, the child born without marriage, the bridge. He thought that the truth about so good a person could only do her honour. The world took his book and beat hers to death with it. For near a hundred years her name was a word used to frighten girls away from thinking, as the grinder's name had been used to frighten men.
37But a book is a coal. It was read in secret by girls in parsonages and mill towns, and by women in America who would one day meet in a small chapel and write a declaration. Each lit her own fire from it, and those fires were not put out.
38And the child lived. Her father took her, when she was small, to the churchyard where her mother lay. It is told that she learned her letters there, tracing with her finger the name cut in the stone, which was her own name. Before she was twenty she had written a tale of her own that has not been out of print since.
39In the house where Mary Wollstonecraft died, they kept a fire burning in the grate through that September, for the sake of the new child. It was a coal fire. All London burned coal by then, and the sky over it was brown.
40North of that city, in the middle of England, the same black coal was being put to a new work. Men had built engines of iron that swallowed fire and gave back motion. Nobody yet understood them. Nobody could say how much work was in a bushel of coal, or where the heat went that was not turned into work, or why so much of it always seemed to slip away.
41And in Paris, in a palace that had been taken from a king, a little boy of one year was learning to walk. His father was a reckoner and a soldier, the man who had raised and ordered the armies of the Republic, and he had named his son Sadi, after a poet of Persia who had written, long before, that all the children of Adam are limbs of one body.
42That child would grow up to look at a steam engine and ask a question about fire that no one had asked. The ember passed to him: out of the candle, out of the lamp, into the furnace.
43One fire, many hands. Now hear what the fire itself was found to be.