In Search of Mary Read Online Free PDF

Paris, where Wollstonecraft has moved to be at the heart of the Revolution. And although she questions the institution, they pretend to be married. This way his Rev-friendly nationality can shelter her, as Paris becomes increasingly violent.
    While Wollstonecraft has been hanging with radical luminaries, writing, learning French, avoiding the Terror and getting knocked up by Imlay, he’s been doing business. Nice little earner. Paris is starving, and he’s smuggling silverware – fresh from head-chopped aristos – out of France and through the blockade to neutral Scandinavia to be exchanged for corn. He leaves Wollstonecraft and their new baby behind for months on end, through one of the coldest winters on record. The Seine freezes over. Wollstonecraft and her baby are cold and poor, and foreign.
    Imlay has a lot on his mind, you see. One of his ships has gone missing. A ship laden with silver. Back and forth he goes, between Paris, Le Havre and London, and the letters that follow him get more and more shrill. Wollstonecraft just isn’t so much fun now she’s got all these expectations of him. Imlay’s business and personal lives may be demanding, but he still finds time to shack up with an actress. Wollstonecraft finds out and despairs, and tries to kill herself with laudanum.
    Imlay spots a way to get her out of his hair and score himself a freebie at the same time. You’ve got to admire him: “Comeon love, get yourself out of town for a while – you can do me a little errand while you’re at it! Just a missing ship off the coast of Norway. Sea air’s what you need. And find my ship for me, there’s a good girl.” Kisses her pale forehead. Suddenly thinks of a sweetener: “I know, why don’t I come and join you afterwards? We could have a little holiday together – how about Switzerland?” He saunters out the door whistling a revolutionary ditty. Oh, she wants him back. She starts packing for the voyage.
    This, then, is the story behind the glorious treasure trail. And it stirs a mix of strange and bad feelings in me. Her book never mentions the treasure.
Letters from Norway
is arranged as a series of letters to a “dear friend”. She doesn’t name him, but they are obviously addressed to Imlay. In Letter One, Wollstonecraft, baby Frances and Marguerite the maid are already in trouble. After eleven days aboard a boat not intended for passenger travel, bad weather means they can’t continue to Norway as planned. The captain wants instead to carry onwards to Denmark. But Wollstonecraft has other ideas. She wants them to row her to shore right here:
    I exerted all my rhetoric to prevail on the captain to let me have the ship’s boat, and though I added the most forcible of arguments, I for a long time addressed him in vain.
    You just know this is true. She harangues him, deploying one tactic after another, while he grimly stares at the horizon. He is thinking: I should never have let them on board. If I ignore her for long enough, surely she will stop talking. But she doesnot stop, despite her dark hair whipping into her eyes and mouth. Finally, he rolls his eyes upwards. He is, after all, a good-natured man, according to Wollstonecraft. He gestures for her to talk to his crew. The ship’s sailors do her bidding “with all alacrity”, she triumphantly notes, overlooking the possibility that they can’t wait to get rid of her. They row her, the baby and the maid to land.
    This was not the plan. They’re now in the Swedish middle of nowhere. Looking out for any “vestige of a human habitation”, Marguerite timidly points out that there is none to be seen. Wollstonecraft snaps – “I did not listen to her” – and marches onto the rocky wild shore. This is how it happens in the book. In a private letter to Imlay, however, she describes how, shortly after landing, she is exhausted and falls down in a faint, injuring her head on a rock. But she’s not down for long.
    By Letter Two, Wollstonecraft