Free Vindication by Lyndall Gordon Page B

from 1784 to 1788, may be now more significant than any other fact about the Burghs.
    It’s unlikely that the Revd Mr Burgh would have approved as his successor an untrained young woman of twenty-five, pursuing intuitions instead of tried methods, opinionated and disinclined to curb her eloquence. And yet Mrs Burgh more than approved Mary Wollstonecraft; she came to treat her, Mary felt, ‘as if I had been her daughter’. All this suggests that Mary Wollstonecraft spoke to some part of Hannah Burgh that the schoolmaster had silenced. We might speculate further that Mrs Burgh’s feeling for Mary as ‘daughter’ found an answer in Mary’s maternal deprivation. At seventeen she had taken to Mrs Clare; she had loved ‘our mother’, Mrs Blood; and now a third ‘mother’, richer and well connected, became her benefactress.
    The school in Newington Green put Mary in a position to provide for her sisters and house Fanny–an asset to the school with her graceful manners and expertise in botany. This was the independence Mary had hoped for: Everina rescued from dependence on Ned; Bess freed from a husband who threatened her sanity; Fanny released from the exhausting demands of her family. In planning for others Mary exercised theemotional and practical responsibilities of an eldest sister, stretching those skills beyond the circumscribed role of the daughter at home. For the following eight years, she accustomed her sisters and the Bloods to her exertions on their behalf. ‘I love most people best when they are in adversity,’ she remarked to George Blood, ‘–for pity is one of my prevailing passions…’ Benevolence was the top virtue in eighteenth-century England; in Mary it shed the tone of patron, and took on the warmth of affection.
    As it happened, Jane Arden became a teacher so much in the same style that both may well have looked back to the encouraging schoolroom of John Arden, with its blend of benevolence and enquiry. In 1784, the same year that Mary’s school opened in Newington Green, Jane opened her own boarding-school in her home town of Beverley, and went on to publish grammars as well as a travel book filled with botanical observation and reflections on the lives of purposeful women. Jane said: ‘When I think that happiness…depends in a great degree on education, I most deeply feel the importance of the duties which I have to fulfil.’
    Mary too knew teaching as a passion, and even better, as a relationship. ‘With children she was the mirror of patience,’ Godwin testifies. ‘Perhaps, in all her extensive experience upon the subject of education, she never betrayed one symptom of irascibility…In all her intercourse with children, it was kindness and sympathy alone that prompted her conduct…I have heard her say, that she never was concerned in the education of one child, who was not personally attached to her, and earnestly concerned not to incur her displeasure.’
    It was different with her sisters. Sometimes they exasperated her, when Bess moped with her nose in the air or Everina seemed too light and casual to make an effort. Though Mary could make equals and superiors feel small, she never took advantage of those in subordinate positions as pupils or servants. She passed on to pupils the quality that prompted her from the age of fourteen: to have the courage to say what you know. ‘Indeed,’ she said, ‘it is of the utmost consequence to make a child artless, or to speak with more propriety, not to teach them to be otherwise.’ If she was ignorant in certain areas, she knew what not to teach. Her pupils were not taughtto feign raptures they had not felt. They were not taught ‘pompous diction’. They were not taught ‘artificial’ manners or ‘exterior’ accomplishments. They were not to read in order to quote, nor were they to choose books on the basis of