Sherry Chandler

The End of Imlay

The…plot to wrest Louisiana from Spain, initiated by Imlay in December 1792, did eventually transpire, though not in an undercover Imlay way. France did regain the territory, and then, in 1803, Napoleon allowed President Jefferson to make the Louisiana Purchase. Imlay’s old associate General Wilkinson, who had once dreamed of a separatist empire in the West, now took possession of these lands — home to several nations of native Americans — in his capacity as commander of the Western Army. He reigned supreme as governor in St. Louis, the new capital of the vast territory of Louisiana.

Imlay continued to buy up frontier land. On 19 November 1810 he was granted a deed for 3400 acres in Kentucky. Unlike others in the old records, he gives no place of residence. The burial of one Gilbert Imlay aged seventy-four in 1828 is recorded in the parish register at St. Brelade’s on the isle of Jersey. As he grew old, did he recall Mary Wollstonecraft’s warnings that commerce would wither his heart? “In the solitude of declining life, I shall be remembered with regret,” she had said. After he gave up his child to Godwin, Imlay disappears from sight. An edge fading from sight is where he had his habitations: the Kentucky frontier; the borders of neutral territory during the European war; and last, the border world of an island lying between France and England, a smugglers’ haven. It was a dodging risky life in which home, wife and child had no place…

— from Lyndall Gordon, Vindication, pages 381-382.

Fanny Imlay, who had been Mary Wollstonecraft’s darling, was raised as an unrescued Cinderella, the only true orphan in the yours, mine, and ours ménage of William Godwin and Mary Jane Clairmont. She never knew about her rich American relatives. Godwin loved her but was distracted by financial worries. Her stepmother dispised her. Shelley came to court her when she was 18 but he passed over her for Mary Wollstonecraft’s livelier daughter, Mary Godwin. When she was 22 she was to be packed off to take care of Wollstonecraft’s two aging and unmarried sisters. En route, she took an overdose of laudanam, leaving this note (quoted in Vindication):

I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as

Her final act, apparently was to tear away her signature to avoid embarassing her “family.”

Related posts:

Gilbert Imlay

Vindication Revisited

Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

The Emigrants

Journal of Kentucky Studies

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