'Be sure I feel it,' he declared to a friend. 'Be sure I am not the fool to look for that happiness in any future vicissitude of life, that I was beginning to enjoy, when I was thus dreadfully deprived of it. My understanding was enlarged, my heart was improved, as well as the most invaluable sensations of admiration & delight produced in me by her society.'
William Godwin on recent death of wife Mary Wollstonecraft as a result of giving birth to their child, the future Mary Shelley
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Godwin did eventually re-marry, not that long after Wollstonecraft's death, a lady pretty insipid and who it seems evident he may have married only to have someone to help him with Mary Godwin (later Shelley, upon her marriage to the noted poet Percy Bysshe Shelley) and Wollstonecraft's child Fanny from a previous liaison.
When Godwin died many years later (in 1836) at the age of 80 he requested he be buried with Mary Wollstonecraft. Mary Shelley would be buried between them.
Love, like life, is fleeting.
"sooner or later in life the things you love you lose." -- Florence and the Machine, "You've got the Love"
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5 comments:
Dont judge him too harshly--a gentleman of his class and station, in his time period, would have been utterly useless at being the sole care-provider to an infant. Tragic, of course.
oh, I don't, at all. I understand completely. In fact, I'm rather glad he re-married. He wasn't exactly the nurturing type. He was rather against marriage and only married Mary Wollstonecraft because she became pregnant with his child. I do believe he loved her as well as a man can love a woman; he was very unselfish by doing the right thing by marrying her (to salvage whatever good reputation she had left by that point), but he was very much a late 18th century gentlemen. Children was not his bag -- baby.
What I meant by "love is fleeting" is that she died a year or so after they got together. However, for all we know, if she hadn't died, they would probably have gotten sick of each other after a while or something would have happened to make them hate each other. Although I rather like to think it would have been otherwise.
I am just this moment reading 'Caleb Williams' by Godwin.
Hmm. I thought I commented earlier. I'll try again. :)
Godwin is a curious character, to say the least!
Ecstasy is fleeting, but love dies on the unwatered vine.
If only we had selective amnesia, so lovers could meet and bang freshly all over again every year or so. :)
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