Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Mary had made up her mind not to refer to Isabel’s revelations, yet she could not resist one bitter hint to Jane, ‘the prettiest, most graceful blue-eyed Bride the world ever saw – For everybody’s sake love yourself tenderly – & think with gentle kindness of her who for years has been your devoted Mary S.’ She ended her letter with a reminder that her guest was now known as ‘Mrs Douglas’, and should be so addressed on the outside of letters.

  The weather was glorious, the walks sublime, although Isabel was often too weak for more than a short stroll. Every evening, they climbed the upland behind their cottage to gaze out at the sunlit sea and a landscape of villages half hidden among the cornfields. Isabel fretted about the lack of news from Doddy; Mary grieved over the death of the Prime Minister.* George Canning had become one of the most widely loved and respected politicians of his time, both in England and abroad – the one redeeming feature, in Mary’s view, of the stagnant Tory government led by Lord Liverpool for too many years. Canning had mentioned her novel in Parliament; she did not forget that mark of esteem, but he was also the only minister to have a sympathetic and intelligent foreign policy. To Jane, she wrote sadly on 15 August of their loss of ‘the Worlds Splendour’; Canning, she told Teresa Guiccioli that month, was a loss not only to England, but to Italy: ‘e per voi’.3

  Even Sir Timothy, Mary imagined, might share her feelings. Always looking for a way to earn his goodwill, she sent, via the lawyer, her commiseration, at the same time expressing the hope that her allowance would not be delayed. Sir Timothy had deigned to see his grandson for the first time that spring; she imagined he would like to know that Percy was now glowing with health from the sea air. A little wanly, she asked Whitton to thank his employer for all his kindness ‘to my poor boy and … towards myself’.4 She had still never seen or received a word from Sir Timothy Shelley; all was effected through the lawyer’s offices.

  News had come at last from Scotland. It was not cheerful. Despite the fact that Lord Morton had no son, his entire estate, one of princely size, was left to the male cousin who also inherited the title. His two illegitimate daughters were left a pitiful annuity of £100 each. ‘Small indeed is the thing done,’ Mary told Jane on 15 August, but ‘Doddy’ was still grateful not to have been entirely overlooked. Isabel remained frail, but was said to be very excited about their plans for her.

  A grasping landlady relet their rooms in Sompting to guests who were prepared to pay her more money. They had been obliged to remove suddenly and ‘without milk’ – without funds for new lodgings – Mary wailed to Jane on 26 August, begging a loan of £10. It reached her two days later, at their new lodgings in the village of Arundel where, with the castle above them, a view from their windows of the river Arun and beguiling walks to be taken through woods and rolling parkland, she felt almost grateful for their sudden eviction.

  Jane’s loan arrived with an intriguing hint which Mary was quick to pick up. ‘I am glad for pretty Isabel’s sake that D now seriously thinks of les culottes,’ she wrote back on 28 August and added, meaningfully, ‘– I do not expect this person – as Isa names D – for two or three weeks.’ Perhaps, writing this, she was struck by how naturally Jane seemed to thrive in an atmosphere of conspiracy. Bitter recollections began to surface. ‘I am glad the vision of Kentish Town has past,’ she wrote, ‘… I could not return to the like again.’

  Mary could brood with the best of them when she chose; fortunately, her time was too occupied for her to indulge in self-pity. Now that Doddy had made her intentions plain to Mary, and her anxiously awaited allowance had arrived from Whitton, it was time to begin creating the web of deception which would protect their dear Isabel. Mary told her first lie of the summer to Teresa Guiccioli, casually announcing that her beloved friend’s husband was soon coming to take her to Paris while she herself went ‘sorrowfully’ back to London.5 Asking John Howard Payne to share her pleasure at Louisa Holcroft’s marriage to John Badams, an eminent chemist, she told her second fib. What a coincidence! Why, her friend at Arundel, ‘a sweet little girl’, was also married!6 The stage was being set.

  *

  The disappointment of being left almost penniless by her father’s will initially paralysed Miss Dods. By the last week of August 1827, she had taken a bold decision. Physically and emotionally, she had always felt more of a man than a woman; now, humiliatingly passed over in favour of a male cousin, she decided to reshape her destiny, to become the man who should have inherited, whose place had been usurped. She had initially only planned to go abroad as Isabel’s companion and protector. Now, she resolved to transform herself: Isabel would leave England as the wife of Walter Sholto Douglas, father of Adeline. With a false passport to establish her new persona (Mary Shelley was willing to help her obtain one), she could start life again. ‘Doddy’ had, in a sense, been forced to live in disguise all her life; ‘Mr Douglas’ seemed closer both to her nature and her noble background than poor, obscure Miss Dods. As Mr Douglas, she could start life afresh.

  By 23 September, the transformation was complete. A white-faced and tightly corseted young man knocked at the door of the lodgings in Tarrant Street which Mary Shelley had taken a month earlier. His appearance was unnervingly authentic. Nobody who did not know Miss Dods well would have guessed the truth. ‘Nothing can be better than the arrangements here. Our friend is absolutely fascinating,’ Mary reported excitedly to Jane. ‘Mary Hunt is quite delighted – & Percy entertains great respect & great wish to please his new friend. All this is good.’7

  It was by pure chance that a new player, the emancipated and courageous philanthropist Fanny Wright, wandered into the drama at this moment, knowing nothing of Mary’s intrigues, but hoping to carry her off to America as a desirable female companion and helpmate. Fanny, a Dundee girl by birth, had been led by her reverence for Mary Wollstonecraft to expect great things of Mrs Shelley; her young companion, Robert Dale Owen, recently returned from the experimental socialist village of New Harmony which his father had founded in Indiana, had an equally awestruck view of Mary from the older Owen’s recollections of visits to the Godwin household. It was inconceivable that the daughter of such a couple should be anything short of remarkable. Encouraged by Dale, Fanny Wright sent off a letter – probably via Skinner Street – inviting Mary to join them.

  ‘You confer on me a very high honour by forgetting for a moment your high & noble views to interest yrself in me,’ Mary wrote back on 12 September; she could not hide the pleasure it gave her to be acknowledged as Mary Wollstonecraft’s heroic heir, particularly at a time, although she could not say it, when she was acting with a recklessness which might have given even her intrepid mother pause. ‘The memory of my Mother has always been the pride & delight of my life,’ Mary assured Miss Wright – and hesitated. Her mother might well have embraced the idea of crossing the ocean to live in Fanny’s bravely conceived community at Nashoba in Tennessee, where slaves were allowed to earn their freedom through work. She could not imagine herself in America; what, besides, would become of Percy, and of her allowance? Whom would she know there, other than Fanny herself? Admiring the project, she avoided making promises. It was Fanny herself, she flatteringly confessed, who really interested her. Did philanthropic work bring her content? She, for her part, preferred to work for the happiness of a chosen few, ‘a narrow circle’. Fanny Wright, at the end of a long and unsatisfactory relationship with the sixty-year-old Marquis de Lafayette, hero of two revolutions, was staying with her friends the Garnetts in Paris before her return to America. ‘Why cannot you come to England?’ Mary pleaded. ‘I am near the coast – & if you crossed to Brighton, I cd see you. At least I pray you write again.’

  Mary’s letter, while disappointingly negative about the Tennessee community, was frank and intriguing enough to persuade Fanny that they should meet. In early October, this tall and imposing woman stepped out of her carriage at Arundel and strode through the village to the address given by Mrs Shelley. Here, she was greeted by littl
e Mary Hunt, Shelley’s six-year-old son and a smiling, dark-haired couple. They were introduced as Isabel and Walter Douglas, proud parents of a baby girl. Nervousness made Mary hard-edged and inattentive to Fanny’s attempts to conduct discussions about the injustices done to their sex. Mildly disappointed, Fanny concluded that Mrs Shelley was somewhat deficient in sensibility and reported as much to her friends in France.8 Oblivious to the deception being practised on her and hearing that the Douglases planned to settle in France, she obligingly provided them with letters of introduction to the lively Garnett family in Paris.

  Fanny’s visit was brief, but it had told Mary all she needed to know. The masquerade was entirely convincing; not for a moment had their visitor shown a sign of suspecting the truth about her fellow guests. Writing to John Howard Payne on 13 October, just after Fanny’s departure, Mary described her as ‘the most wonderful & interesting woman I ever saw’. She had, almost, been tempted to accompany her to America after all, won over by the sheer force of Fanny’s personality.

  Mary had a reason for keeping up a friendly correspondence with the ever-obliging Payne. A passport was crucial if ‘Mr Douglas’ was to gain employment in France; not even the intrepid Miss Dods felt ready to present herself for official inspection. Mary had begun her plot to obtain the necessary documents almost as soon as ‘Mr Douglas’ arrived at Arundel. On 23 September, she wrote off to Payne, who was in London. ‘To shew you that I believe you like to serve me, I am about to send you another commission,’ she told him. Her next letter explained that her friends, ‘the sweet little girl’ and her husband, needed passports; unfortunately, they were too ill to come to London to obtain them. Did Payne think he could possibly find two actors ready to impersonate the Douglases, of whom she provided minute descriptions, and to forge the signatures which he would find at the end of the letter? At the bottom of the page, Mary Diana Dods carefully inscribed her own new name, ‘Sholto Douglas’, beside that of her ‘wife’.9 Payne had never yet let Mary down; a couple of obliging friends were found to masquerade as the Douglases. By 1 October the passports were at Arundel.

  A mercury compound she was taking, or perhaps relief at seeing their plans advancing so well, had worked a miraculous improvement on Isabel by October; little Percy, however, became distressingly ill, forcing Mary to revise her plan to travel with the Douglases to France when they left in mid-October. As soon as the child had recovered, she went back with him to London. Mary Hunt, having demonstrated rather too much of the bad temper of which her mother had complained, was returned to her parents.

  Alone again with her son, Mary felt tired, triumphant, and a little anxious. Had she done the right thing? Would Isabel be happy in her new life? Would they be safe from discovery? She started making arrangements to visit Paris in the New Year; in the meantime, she stilled her conscience. ‘Why may I not hover a good genius round my lovely friend’s path?’ she asked her journal and decided that the question was rhetorical.10

  At the end of October, after spending a few days with Fanny Wright at the Harrow home of Frances Trollope (her son Anthony was still only a boy), Mary toyed once more with the idea of sailing to a new life in America, and rejected it. Mrs Trollope – desperate to escape a bullying husband, to make money for the family and to continue her affair with Auguste Hervieu, a French artist whom she smuggled into the party of emigrants at the last moment – couldn’t wait to leave. Mary went down to the docks at Gravesend to see them on their way. Fanny Wright squeezed her hand affectionately, full of hopes that they would meet again. ‘Dear love,’ she wrote fondly as she sat on her berth, ‘how your figure lives in my mind’s eye, as I saw you borne away from me till I lost sight of your little back among the shipping.’11

  Only two people remained to remind Mary of the strangeness of the past few months. One was her son, now growing encouragingly tall and strong: ‘è bello, grande – forte – buono,’ she told Teresa Guiccioli with pride.12 The other was Robert Dale Owen, who had arranged to follow the two Franceses to Nashoba at the end of the year. Young, sensitive and high-principled, Dale became Mary’s regular companion in the days before she and Percy moved to new lodgings near Portman Square. Dale Owen had fallen a little in love with Mary. She was ‘gentle, genial, sympathetic, thoughtful and matured beyond her years’, he wrote over twenty years later. Animated though she was in conversation, he had noticed how sad she looked when nobody was watching her. Fanny Wright thought she lacked sensibility; Dale feared she might have too much of it to be happy. Encouragement was what she needed, the support of ‘a guiding and sustaining hand’.13

  Mary, writing to Jane Hogg on 23 September, mused on the fact that she was now thirty years old and declared that she would travel a hundred miles for ‘one look of true love & sympathy’, and almost die for ‘that sweet conjunction’, by which she meant lovemaking. She craved affection and twenty-six-year-old Dale Owen was ready to offer it. He dropped hints that he would stay, if she wished; he admitted that he sometimes found Fanny Wright a little intimidating.

  Owen was a handsome man and a good one; Mary, however, was unable to imagine herself in love with him. Her first loyalty was, she felt, due to Fanny, the woman who had sought her out and who had compared her, so gratifyingly, to her mother. Gently, she encouraged Owen to view Fanny more reasonably; even she, so apparently superhuman, might sometimes need comfort. She could have been writing of herself, and was perhaps aware of it:

  Study to please Fanny in all minutia – divine her uneasinesses, & be ever ready at her side with brotherly protection. Do not imagine that she is capable always of taking care of herself: – she is certainly more than any woman, but we have all in us – & she is too sensitive & feminine not largely to partake in this inherent part of us – a desire to find a manly spirit where on {to} lean – a manly arm to protect & shelter us –14

  ‘Soeur preçheuse thus finishes her sermon,’ Mary concluded playfully, worried that she sounded too solemn. Owen did not forget her words, or her nature. Shelley might have become truly great, he mused in his autobiography, Threading My Way, given more time and ‘cherished and piloted by his noble wife’.15 This sense of Mary’s benevolent influence was sadly untypical of the general view.

  The friendship was affectionately, if sporadically, maintained. ‘The Atlantic divides us,’ Mary wrote wistfully to Fanny three years later, on 30 December 1830. She wished that their connection was closer. ‘Will Fanny never come over? Talk to her of me sometimes Remember me yourself,’ she wrote to Dale Owen on the same date. This tells us how slight their contact had become; Owen and Miss Wright had parted ways six months earlier, when she left him to resettle herself in France, where she married and lived for the next five years. Fanny had visited England on her way to France; she found no time to make her presence known to Mary Shelley.

  Owen left for America early in November 1827 and Mary’s life grew disagreeably empty again. Payne, now meekly returned to his old role of ticket agent, was obliging and kind; her father was glad to have her back in London and living close enough for regular meetings. She remained, nevertheless, conscious of the limited circle of her friendships. Jane Hogg was in the last stages of her difficult pregnancy and continued unwell; the Hunts were grieving over the loss of a child, their little Swinburne. In the spring of 1827, Mary had written to Trelawny in Greece, wondering if he might ever care to return: ‘you would not make one of us – you will leave us quickly again … Will you not come?’16 His answer came in the autumn. He had ended his brief marriage to a maid of Greece who had spurned native attire for fashionable French dresses; he was plagued by a ‘villainous lawsuit’; yes, he was planning to make his way back to England at last, when she would find him ‘the same unconnected, lone and wandering vagabond you first knew’. He spoke of his unaltered affection, just as he always did to desolate, faraway Claire; the letter reeked of discontent and lost illusions.17

  Talking to Tom Moore at this time during one of their many meetings about his biography of Byron
, Mary admitted that she was thoroughly miserable. The cause, she told him, was the discovery of Jane Hogg’s treacherous tale-telling; she was finding it increasingly difficult to write long, loving letters, as though nothing had happened. The conversation with Moore took place in February 1828; she had kept the knowledge of Jane’s betrayal to herself for over half a year. Moore, an outspoken man, pointed out that her excuse – Jane’s pregnancy – was now out of date. The baby – sadly short-lived – had been born and baptized. He scolded her: she was doing no favour to herself by this pretence of ignorance. ‘By his advice I disclosed my discoveries to Jane,’ Mary wrote in her journal on 12 February 1828. The experience had been excruciating; Jane burst into tears, demanded to know who had spread this hateful tale and what it was that she was supposed to have said. She then turned the tables on Mary by accusing her of being cold and unloving.

  We know all this because Mary set it down in the agonized letter she wrote to Jane Hogg on 14 February, two days after confronting her. Now, for the first time, she disclosed Isabel as the source of her information; if Jane really needed to be reminded of all the dreadful stories she had told, she had only to write to Paris. She wrote, with dignity and pain, of the damage Jane had done to her reputation by reporting her to have been a cold wife who had driven Shelley almost to seek his own death; but the letter did not conceal the fact that what really hurt was the way Jane had abandoned her for Hogg. ‘Often leaving you at Kentish Town I have wept from the overflow of affection – Often thanked God who has given you to me,’ Mary wrote.