• DOI:10.1086/TWC24044969
• Corpus ID: 150518429

Godwin, Women, and "The Collision of Mind with Mind"

@article{Clemit2004GodwinWA,
  title={Godwin, Women, and "The Collision of Mind with Mind"},
  author={Pamela Clemit},
  journal={The Wordsworth Circle},
  year={2004},
  volume={35},
  pages={72 - 76}
}

• P. Clemit
• Published 1 March 2004
• History
• The Wordsworth Circle

William Godwin held to a lifelong ideal of unreserved social communication. "If there be such a thing as truth," he declared in An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), "it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind" (3:15). As well as according a central role to private conversation in his own development, he argued that colloquial discussion, "whether written or oral" (3: 14), was the chief means by which social and political improvement could be achieved. As he wrote in a chapter called "Mode of Effecting Revolutions": "If we would ... improve the social institutions of men, we must write, we must argue, we must converse" (3: 115). Moreover, Godwin argued that "equal and liberal intercourse" (4: 371) between the sexes afforded special opportunities for moral and intellectual enlightenment. Throughout his long career, he sought to put this belief into practice by cultivating the acquaintance of gifted women authors. Yet Godwin's progressive views concerning women have been virtually unnoticed by commentators. Biographers and historians of feminism, such as such as Tomalin (294-95), Caine (40-43), and Shattock (14-15), have focused instead on his apparent error of judgement in publishing Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). This work, intended as tribute to the revolutionary life and thought of Mary Wollstonecraft, inadvertently damaged the cause of women's emancipation by provoking widespread critical hostility (Clemit and Walker 11-36). Godwin's creative interactions with other women intellectuals, as documented in his unpublished diaries and correspondence, are still to be explored. Such interactions were at their most intense in the decade following the French Revolution, when Godwin, then at the height of his fame among educated radicals, acted as literary adviser to several women writers who were also sympathetic to the cause of reform. These women sought to overcome the barrier of traditional notions of femininity, which impeded their public ambitions, by forming alliances with helpful men. In addition to Wollstonecraft, they included Amelia Alderson (later, Opie), Mary Hays, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Mary Robinson, all of whom sought Godwin's guidance in their complex negotiations with the public sphere. A study of this entire network of literary and social relations would be the subject of another essay. In this short piece I concentrate on one example of Godwin's "equal and liberal intercourse" with women, his literary dialogue with Elizabeth Inchbald. Godwin's interaction with Inchbald is of special interest for three main reasons. First, Inchbald, unlike most of Godwin's other women acquaintances, did not share his background and education in English Protestant Dissent--though, as a Roman Catholic, she shared his experience of belonging to a marginalized social and religious community. (1) Second, their association far outlasted its origins in the early 1790s. Although their personal contact ended in 1797, when they exchanged harsh words after Wollstonecraft's death (Paul 1: 276-79, Manvell 99-105), they continued to correspond on literary matters for the next twenty-five years or so. Third, their relationship was based on a mutually beneficial exchange of information and advice. An examination of this creative interaction not only adds to our understanding of the individual careers of Godwin and Inchbald, but also contributes to the broader critical debate concerning the extent, vitality, and significance of the dialogue between male and female authors in the Romantic era. Godwin's education in the traditions of the Rational Dissenters, a group distinguished by their religious heterodoxy, their interest in progressive education, and their belief in the possibility of moral regeneration, led him to espouse advanced ideas concerning women's role in society. (2) Though the Rational Dissenters did not hold to a unified doctrinal position, they shared an emphasis on private judgement as the foundation of true religion, which led to a belief in the intellectual and moral perfectibility of all. …