We all seemed to arrive straight from our writing desks, heads hot with our own words, parrying for a match if not a duel. I didn’t like Godwin on first sight. He was slight, pale, with a high forehead and thinning hair, a long, Roman nose. Whatever mild handsomeness he conveyed was diminished by a mouth that seemed in a perpetual pout. He bristled whenever I opened mine, which I did often, trying to draw out the quiet guest of honor we had all imagined as “fiery Tom Paine,” who spoke so little we hardly noticed him.

“Mr. Paine,” I said. “I found your ‘Occasional Letter on the Female Sex’ so to my own thinking, I wished I’d written it myself.”

“But you didn’t, did you?” said Godwin, irritated, while Paine finished chewing his bite.

Fuseli jumped into the fray. “Have you read her new Vindication?” he asked Godwin.

“Oh,” said Godwin. “Was another necessary?”

“Only for the half of all human creatures who’ve been denied their God-given rights by the other half,” I said.

“God-given? I am more or less an atheist, Miss Wollstonecraft,” said Godwin.

“We just call her ‘Wollstonecraft,’” said Johnson, trying to create some amity between us.

“You cannot be ‘more or less’ an atheist, Mr. Godwin,” I said. “And don’t blame me for taking refuge in a deity, when I despair of finding sincerity or equality here on earth. I’ve seen enough to know that civilization, run by men, has utterly failed us.”

“All of us? Or just you?”

“All women. All men.” I was incensed. “But don’t worry, my aim is to redeem us both.”

“I do hope marriage is not in the bargain. It is a tyranny for all parties,” said Godwin.

“Finally something we agree on! ‘Except tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered,’” I said, quoting Paine to the room but aiming daggers at your future father.

“She explodes a whole system of gallantry!” said Johnson.

“That oppresses women!” I said. “That makes them nothing more than the object of male sexual desire.”

“I’m afraid Godwin still believes the ideal female is a delicate bird that warbles unmolested in its native groves,” said Darwin.

“That’s it exactly!” I said. “The problem isn’t women, but how men want women to be.”

“Then how are we to know what to do?” Godwin asked.

“You mean, with a woman interested neither in sex nor in men?”

Godwin pulled at his collar and blushed. I felt Fuseli’s eyes on us both. As always, he drew strength from disagreement, energy from enmity.

“Our Wollstonecraft is in the business of denying desire, which is the business I am in.”

“We all know your business, Fuseli,” said Godwin, dropping his knife and fork with a clank.

“Desire is delusion, leading to disappointment, leading to misery,” I said.

“You see?” said Fuseli. “A hopeless case.”