I’m currently reading a text, for my oral comprehensive exam, called Women and Romance: A Reader. It is a stunning compilation of essays, letters, fiction and non-fiction works, and literary criticism from as early as the 11th century to as contemporary as 1998 speaking about the idea of romance. The idea of love. What those concepts mean to us (generally speaking, women) as people and as writers or artists. The section I’m thumbing through at the moment is titled “Letters and Personal Writing.” I’ve come across a series of letters, “anguished protests,” that Mary Wollstonecraft wrote to her American lover George Imlay. She’s asking him not to leave her, reminding him that all she ever did was love him completely, and all he gives her is silence: “a refinement on cruelty.” And a broken heart when she is certain he has “formed some new attachment.”
My heart began bleeding for her. I was almost brought to tears, and then I realized that her heart was my bleeding heart. Her words were still striking chords, and they are inside me. (Too sentimental? A little melodramatic? I don’t care.)
These are her words:
“The tremendous power who formed this heart, must have foreseen that, in a world in which self-interest, in various shapes, is the principle mobile, I had little chance of escaping misery.—To the fiat of fate I submit.—I am content to be wretched; but I will not be contemptible.—Of me you have no cause to complain, but for having had too much regard for you—for having expected a degree of permanent happiness, when you only sought for a momentary gratification.”
And only one page later, in a different letter to Imlay:
“That being that moulded it thus (her heart, which is trembling), knows that I am unable to tear up by the roots the propensity to affection which has been the torment of my life—but life will have an end!”
We, and I know myself especially, have all been there. Staggering, beaten and bruised, after the one who claimed to love us, to care for us no matter what has found another. Only the end of life itself seems, in that moment, to be the cure for what is ailing our still-loving heart. It seems impossible to rip out the deep, dark tree of passion that has grown from what, looking back, seems like an itty-bitty seed. A moment that could have otherwise been insignificant, but because we received an instant of recognition from another heart that moment became a force of love that can never truly be forgotten.
Mary, we are still loving, being broken, and putting ourselves together again to love once more, and your words encapsulated that emotion with honesty and care. Thank you.
The excerpts of Mary Wollstonecraft’s words are from letters written in September and October, respectively, of 1795. They can be found in Women and Romance: A Reader edited by Susan Ostrov Weisser, published in 2001 from New York University Press pp 72-81.