This fleshly happiness, in other words, was all she thought him capable of. Wollstonecraft was telling Imlay to satiate himself physically, implying that he had no depth of feeling. Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary defined it as ‘felicity’ or ‘blissfulness’ or the ‘state in which the desires are satisfied’. Wollstonecraft’s use of ‘happiness’ was not idiosyncratic. Wollstonecraft knew Imlay’s new mistress was ‘the only thing sacred’ in his eyes, and that her death would not quell his ‘enjoyment’. Why, then, wish him to be happy? Was this forgiveness? Hardly. Imlay’s philandering was the source of her ills, and she told him as much. Here too she was thwarted, ‘inhumanly brought back to life and misery’. Scorned, shamed and diminished in her view of herself in the world, Wollstonecraft had chosen death. What did she mean? It had been only days since she had been fished from the Thames, having failed in a bid to drown herself. ‘Be happy!’ Mary Wollstonecraft exhorted her estranged lover and tormentor, Gilbert Imlay, in late 1795.
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