Maria sought to raise my spirits by suggesting slyly that I skewer Ban in print. “If we were Papists and I a priest, I should exorcise you from your demon.”
At least she’d made me smile. “But we’re not, and you’re not.”
“You have always given Ban far greater due than I ever thought he deserved. And now I’m old enough to know what I’m talking about.”
And so from my sickbed, playing and replaying in my mind the tumultuous events of our relationship, I wrote a novel titled The False Friend—after which Maria determined it was high time I made some new ones. Of Treville, the antihero of The False Friend, I wrote that he was “a coxcomb by education; a deceiver by practice, a flatterer by profession; and a profligate by nature.” Ban’s avatar was a libertine of the most dangerous species—“A dissembling sycophant, a being who hovered round the wealthy and the highborn to poison domestic happiness….” Had I been a painter instead, my portrait would have been too realistic for the fashion of the times.
Perhaps it was because I had vented my spleen on the page, but suddenly one morning I awoke to feel more alive and vital than I had in years, as though a ponderous weight had been lifted from my chest. I had wallowed in my grief and loneliness long enough. No longer would I replay my recollections of Ban’s betrayal, his outbursts of temper, and his lies. I realized that although I still missed the pleasures we had shared over so many seasons, I had begun to consign our connexion to the rose-colored hues of fading memories.
In that instant, as the sunlight streamed through the casement, I knew I should have no trouble living without him for the remainder of my days. No trouble at all! The moment the spell which claims the senses is broken, the phantom of love takes flight, leaving no substitute but regret and indignation. The room no longer felt musty or gloomy; the Wedgwood-blue walls now seemed a cloudless open sky, offering endless possibilities for happiness and redemption.
I wanted to write a different sort of story. There was something that I, Mary Robinson, needed to tell the world: that I was not the flighty, shallow whore they accounted me, but a woman of parts, of sense as well as sensibility—with a fine mind, a devoted heart, and a profound soul.
My heroine would be a girl educated with a “masculine mind”—meaning that she was taught the same subjects, and in the same way, as a boy of the day would have been. And such a woman as I wished to draw is feared and despised, deemed “unnatural” by her own sex as well. Though there would be several adventures that were entirely fictitious, because of the heroine’s upbringing, and the savage and cynical world in which she lived, in many ways Walsingham would be my own story.
The seeds of this concept had been planted in my fertile brain for some time now, but it took Mary Wollstonecraft to water them. As my friendship with this esteemed woman and Mr. Godwin had blossomed, so my imagination ached to explore a marriage of the new (and prodigiously radical) pro-female philosophy with that of traditional storytelling.
Kneeling at the skirts of Meribah Lorrington, I had been inculcated with the concept that the mind has no sex. Hannah More in her early days as a pedant taught us the same lesson, as did my mother during her too-brief experience in the schoolroom. These women had molded their pupils’ minds into mellow instruments capable of performing in more than the simple key of C major.
It has been my observation all through life that, even among the greatest thinkers of the day, the Age of Enlightenment was reserved for the male of our species. Imagine my astonishment on reading that the visionary philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau firmly held that women’s minds should remain uncultivated—that we “might be most agreeable and companionable to men.” What utter rot—to have an empty brain, and little choice but to remain subservient and silly creatures. And for years I felt that I was wandering alone in the wilderness until I met Mary Wollstonecraft and keenly saw in her a kindred spirit.
I felt perfectly poised to create my unusual heroine, drawing upon my own education—and that which I had given to Maria—as well as by my experiences in the several trouser roles I had assayed as an actress.
The breeches roles were among my favorites in my Drury Lane days; they conferred upon their wearer a certain freedom. And the concept that, whether inside or out, “a man is not the sum of the parts of his suit” was something I now wished to convey in prose. Though a character is literally a female, beneath her skin resides a mind and a soul that should not immediately invoke a certain prejudice against (or for) her by the outside world. Perhaps that is why I delighted in shaking up society when I’d kept my theatrical costumes on, and wore my breeches in public at the pleasure gardens.
My rambling narrative was a salmagundi of literary genres, a stew comprised of one part gothic novel, one part sentimental romance, one part metaphysical discourse, one part burlesque, and one part satire.
Remaining true to my literary roots, I drew many of the characters in Walsingham from my life, penning portraits of my young self, my mother, and Mr. Robinson’s father.
The novel poured out of me, as if it was a raging river uncontainable by the dam of my imagination. I wrote until my fingers grew too stiff to handle the pen, and then I would continue to dictate the story to Maria. The next day she would read aloud my new pages, whilst, with closed eyes, William Godwin and I would listen to her voice coloring my words with its soft and subtle tones.
What a reaction I received when she got to the chapter in which the eponymous hero excoriates the
