Ordering Lives

...they regard it as history...

...Brevity was also unthinkable...

...Tomalin's book is such a carefully drawn portrait of a woman as complex as any fictional character, one is led to think about biography as a literary genre...

...A biographer of necessity must attach an ordered meaning to his work-there must be a reason for recounting this particular and uncommon life, or why bother...

...after their illegitimate daughter Fanny was born in 1794, he made himself scarce, finally absconding to Surinam...

...In the ardently hopeful early flush of the upheaval, "the patriarchal family, emblem of the monarchical system, was to be recast, and women were to have the same property rights as men, and an equal voice in family matters...

...This dependence on written evidence weighted those large brown biographical tomes heavily on the side of willed, deliberate, purposeful activity, with a corresponding neglect of childhood, impulse, anger, and "the sudden force of moral inspiration...

...Cobb, in contrast, is so inflexibly opprobrious, so magisterially derisive, one can only conclude that his animus stems from a deep-seated distaste for clever and independent women...

...They soon became lovers, but not until March 1797, when Mary was well along with child, did Godwin lay aside his rigidly principled opposition to marriage ("the worst of all laws...

...But the malicious denigration by lady writers in Victorian England is more puzzling...

...Tomalin's most intriguing chapters deals with feminist developments in revolutionary France, which were extraordinarily far-reaching and painfully short-lived...

...After A Vindication became a best-seller, making her famous, she went off to Paris to see the future for herself...

...Curiously, the outspoken author of A Vindication remained silent about these developments, not only because she was an enemy alien but also because her very English sensibility was offended by the French feminists' violence and exhibitionism...

...In Mary's prosperous but unstable Yorkshire family, only the sons were thought worthy of love, education and money, and from early years she "nourished the sense that she was unappreciated and denied affection that was her due...

...In the steady march toward his particular destiny of greatness, a celebrated Englishman not only affirmed the political ideal of imperial progress, but fulfilled a religious prophecy as well...

...Tomalin's attitude toward Mary Wollstonecraft strikes an admirable balance of critical judgment and feminist sympathy...

...It might even be argued that the finest writing of our time is no longer fiction...

...By the end of 1793, however, as the Reign of Terror took over, feminism was crushed...

...A century would pass before women took any public interest in Mary Wollstonecraft's thought...

...One of Mrs...

...Mrs...

...The subject of a Victorian study had to be both admirable and a heroic achiever...

...the biographer had to conform to unquestioned standards of public taste and propriety that made perfect candor, especially about sex, unthinkable...

...Whose view of this revered figure in the pantheon of women's emancipation should we accept...

...Besides, she had more pressing problems...

...Her death coincided with the advent of the Napoleonic wars, when "the wave of defection from revolutionary ideas of any kind swept along almost everyone in England...

...and the writer had to rely with stately trust on the voluminous documents-particularly the long, long letters that flowed from every heroic hand-which accrued to the energetic life-span of an eminent Victorian...

...As portrayed by Richard Cobb, Professor of Modern History at Oxford, in his London Times Literary Supplement review of the book, she was repellent, self-serving, grotesquely aggressive, hysterical, and silly (he uses some form of silly eight times in four pages), a pathological case study of no intellectual or historical importance...

...Beyond the clamor of recorded events, the life of a notable Victorian was felt by his biographer to have a meaning at once objective and mysterious...

...In Paris she had met and fallen deliriously in love with Gilbert Imlay, a handsome American bounder...

...Back in London, desperate for professional help in her struggle to support herself and her baby with her writing, Mary sought out William Godwin, by then a hugely admired rationalist philosopher and successful man of letters...

...It is the source of the self-confident moral passion and vitality that pervade the representative Victorian biographies Cockshut selects for close scrutiny, such as George O. Trevelyan's Macaulay, A. P. Stanley's Thomas Arnold, J. A. Froude's Carlyle, and John Morley's Gladstone...

...Yet the comment explains in part why biography is so much more substantial and interesting than fiction today...

...She does not fudge the fact that her subject was far from likable...

...He admits that it is easier to generalize about biographies of the earlier period because they were linked to a common frame of reference...

...We read this in 1975 and smile, as we are meant to do...

...Mrs...

...Cockshut puts it brilliantly: "The biographer himself reads the evidence of the life as if it were a novel, and God were the novelist...

...why bother indeed...

...For example, despite their overwhelming mass of detail, neither Joseph Blotner's Faulkner nor Sybille Bedford's Huxley has much value as interpretation because the tone in each is too indiscriminately worshipful...

...And it accounts for the Victorian belief in the importance of an intellectual elite-an idea that persists, altered but recognizable, in such Bloomsbury descendants of Clapham Evangelicals as E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf...

...Writers & Writing ORDERING LIVES BY PEARL K. BELL Claire Tomalin's The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 316 pp., $8.95) is the most recent account of the prickly 18th-century author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, among the earliest and boldest ideological briefs in the history of feminism...

...How is the common reader to judge these conflicting biographical judgments of the same person...

...As for the crucial role of religion in the formation of Victorian character, Cockshut reminds us that "the intellectual and spiritual history of Victorian England is, in the main, the history of developments from Evangelical Protestantism...

...Tomalin, Mary was both a tormented woman and an intellectual heroine...

...Yet as A.O.J...

...Thrown on her beam-end in London in 1787, at the age of 28, Mary was luckily admitted into the coterie of Joseph Johnson, a radical and Dissenting publisher who enabled her to earn a living as a writer, and introduced her to such radical intellectuals as Tom Paine...

...At this time, too, she became hopelessly infatuated with the crafty (and already married) painter Henry Fuseli, wrote her feminist tract and produced an angry rebuttal to Burke's attack on the French Revolution-for Mary and her circle, France, like Russia for Lincoln Steffens, was the future that worked...

...As Mrs...

...Most of the novels 1 look at these days have only the most trivial or opportunistic reason for being...

...her failures as schoolteacher and governess (the only jobs then open to women of genteel background, like Jane Eyre) simply exacerbated her operatic sense of cosmic injustice...

...As portrayed by Mrs...

...In any attempt at evaluation, the writer's tone is surely one of the most important clues...

...Tomalin notes, these women shrewdly and fearfully recognized the connection between feminism and "the specters of revolution, irreligion and sexual anarchy," and tucked in their skirts for safety...

...Is it possible that Oxford continues to be Matthew Arnold's "home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs...

...Five months later, at the age of 38, Mary died of blood-poisoning after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary, who eventually married Shelley and wrote Frankenstein...

...Cockshut, a lecturer in 19th-century literature at Oxford, observes in his astute, witty book Truth to Life: The Art of Biography in the 19th Century (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 220 pp., $7.50), literary critics have been curiously reticent about discussing biography as art...

...Though Cockshut is principally concerned with Victorian lives and letters, his arguments are consistently sharpened and enriched by his vigilant awareness of 20th-century biography...

...that the original, venturesome, crafted novel is dwindling into extinction like the whooping crane, while biography flourishes in an abundance of first-rate talents: Richard Ellmann, George Painter, Leon Edel, Justin Kaplan, Quentin Bell, Wallace Stegner, Noel Annan, to name only some of the very best...

...It was to be expected that the Tory press would greet Godwin's memoir of his wife in 1798 with sniggering jokes about Mary the whore and Godwin the pimp...

...Self-pity made her intransigent and meddlesome, neurotically compelled to impose her will on sisters and friends...