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Mary Wollstonecraft would analyse the effect of dependence on women’s natures; it was now that she herself experienced a creeping indolence. In this state, she could almost wish to delude herself with foolish hopes that might enliven slow hours, but home had taught her that marriage would soon prove a disappointment.
    Her chief consolation was St George’s Chapel. AlthoughWollstonecraft has often been taken for an atheist, she remained all her life in the established faith. ‘I go constantly to the Cathedral,’ she reported from Windsor, ‘I am very fond of the Service.’ Later, when the cathedral was cleaned, she felt it lost something of its sombre grandeur. She would enter with ‘the measured pace of thought’. For her, principles could not be wholly imposed; they had to be affirmed from within by an expansive soul reaching out to the great questions: ‘Life, what art thou? Where goes this breath? This I , so much alive? In what element will it mix, giving or receiving fresh energy?’ Her faith looked to a benevolent deity suggested by the sublimities of nature, a deity of forgiveness, not hell.
    In the spring and summer of 1780 the King and royal family were in residence at Windsor Castle. Mary granted that George III was a family man, liking his children about him, but when he ‘killed three horses the other day riding in a hurry to pay a visit’, he too lost her respect.
    â€˜I cannot bear an unfeeling mortal,’ Mary observed of the King. ‘I think it murder to put an end to any living thing unless it be necessary for food, or hurtful to us.–If it has pleased the beneficent creator of all to call them into being, we ought to let them enjoy the common blessings of nature, and I declare no thing gives me so much pleasure as to contribute to the happiness of the most insignificant creature.’
    At the other end of the scale of significance was ‘the principal beau’ of Windsor, none other than the youthful Prince of Wales (the future Regent and, later, George IV) who wore makeup and drenched himself in scent. Born in 1762, he was Mary’s contemporary, one for whom she had no time, nor for local girls who hung on his smiles–‘forward things’ said older women, pecking away at the reputations of those the Prince deigned to notice. These dramas served to keep ‘envy & vanity alive’. Mary was decidedly not one of the Windsor women who dreamt of impossible romance. She planned a future with Fanny Blood. ‘This connexion must give colour to my future days,’ she told herself. She knew her resolve to put Fanny before all others would appear ‘a little extraordinary’, but was prepared to defend it as a reasonable alternative to marriage as well as ‘the bent of my inclination.’
    That spring she visited Fanny in Town. In the post coach she enjoyed the ‘entertaining and rational’ conversation of a physician and his well-travelled son.
    At the same time she was anxious over Fanny’s weak health and thankful to find her somewhat better. They ‘passed a comfortable week together, which knew no other alloy than what arose from the thoughts of parting so soon’. She clung to the prospect of another and longer reunion: ‘to that period I look as to the most important one of my life’.
    Her spirits returned whenever she was freed from being the paid companion. Once, when Mrs Dawson was away and she had ‘the whole house to range in’, her mood lifted as she supped on bread and grapes. She mused on Fanny, drank Jane’s health ‘in pure water’, and relished her solitude. Bent in the poor light of her candle she sits sideways at a chest of drawers, making pale characters on her page with ink so watered that she fears her writing is too faint to read–and so she fades from sight into the late shadows of a summer night.
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    That summer of 1780, the Wollstonecrafts