Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Could any but yourself have destroyed such engrossing & passionate love? … I have committed many faults – the remorse of love haunts me often & brings bitter tears to my eyes – but for four years I committed not one fault towards you – In larger, in minute things your pleasure and satisfaction were my objects, & I gave up every thing that is all the very little I could give up to them – I make no boast, heaven knows had you loved me you were worth all …18

  The friendship survived, but only because Mary insisted that it must. She made the conditions. The first of them was that Jane should never again try to pretend she had done nothing wrong or expect Mary to forget her past behaviour. Jane’s continuing attempts to lay the blame on Isabel’s shoulders were received with sorrow and disbelief. ‘It is painful to go over old grounds,’ Mary wearily told her on 28 June 1828: ‘I go only on what you have allowed; long you gave ear to every idle & evil tale against me – & repeated them – not glossed over.’ How, when they both knew that this was so, could Jane go on claiming her innocence? Insincerity, to a woman who had grown up in Godwin’s household, was among the worst of social sins. ‘Do not I earnestly pray you, allude to the past, or the changes which cannot be unchanged –’ Mary had sternly warned Jane on 5 June 1828, ‘let us begin again.’ It was to the credit of them both that their friendship, while never the same, was resumed. Jane would, in her way, make amends for her behaviour over the years. She became one of Mary’s staunchest supports.

  In 1828, however, much damage had been done and it could not easily be repaired. Isabel, although Mary did not yet know it, was busily spreading the same stories in Paris; in London, there were even rumours that Mary was having an improper relationship with Vincent Novello. Mary decided to do what must be done; she wrote him a little note in Italian enclosing a promised lock of Mary Wollstonecraft’s hair and regretting that they would, for some time, be separated by ‘circumstances’. Since the only obvious circumstance on the horizon was her plan to make a brief visit to Paris, Mary was plainly referring to the gossip that had been spread. ‘This gift … will remind you pleasantly of her who loves her friends forever,’ she told him, and begged him to ‘preserve at least your esteem for Mary Shelley’. She gave no further explanations. The intimacy, harmless though it had been, was at an end.19

  The spring of 1828 brought news from France that the Douglases were planning to travel to Hanover, where one of Fanny Wright’s friends, Miss Julia Garnett, had just begun a new married life, and where Mr Douglas hoped, with the help of Julia’s husband, to secure a diplomatic posting on the strength of his forged papers. Percy had now been safely settled at Mr Slater’s Academy for young gentlemen in Kensington, an expensive boarding-school recommended by Peacock. Writing to William Whitton, the lawyer, on 8 April, Mary informed him that she intended going to Paris as soon as the Easter holidays were over: ‘as I shall be exceedingly anxious to return to him [Percy], I shall not remain away more than three weeks.’ Terrified of incurring Sir Timothy’s anger, she assured Whitton again a line later that she would be back within the specified time. Both Mary and her son, as she was painfully aware, remained dependent on the goodwill of the lawyer and of the father-in-law she had still not met; if her letters to William Whitton sometimes used a grovelling tone, it was for good reason.

  Mary left for Paris in mid-April, taking Isabel’s little sister, Julia, for a companion; Julia Robinson was young and innocent enough to be deceived by the false history of her sister’s marriage and to accept ‘Mr Douglas’ for the man he seemed to be. Mary felt giddy and feverish on the crossing to Calais. By the time she had reached the rooms in which the Douglases lived, she was feeling a good deal worse. Meekly, she allowed herself to be taken to her room and put in a hip-bath filled with steaming water. When she tried to get to her feet again, she could hardly stand.20

  Notes

  1. Cyrus Redding, Memoirs of Thomas Campbell (1860), 2, pp. 175–6.

  2. Details of Mary Diana Dods’s life and her early relationship with Isabel Robinson largely follow Betty T. Bennett’s engrossing account in Mary Diana Dods, A Gentleman and a Scholar (William Morrow, New York, 1991).

  3. MWS–TG, 20.8.1827.

  4. MWS–William Whitton, 15.8.1827.

  5. MWS–TG, 20.8.1827.

  6. MWS–JHP, 30.8.1827.

  7. MWS–JWH, 23.9.1827.

  8. Frances Wright–Harriet Garnett, March 1828 (quoted in Bennett, Dods, p. 114).

  9. MWS–JHP, 25.9.1827.

  10. MWSJ, September 1827.

  11. Frances Wright–MWS, 9.11.1827 (S&M, 4, p. 1103).

  12. MWS–TG, 4–10.12.1827.

  13. Robert Dale Owen, ‘Frances Wright, Lafayette and Mary Shelley’, Atlantic Monthly, October 1873.

  14. MWS–Robert Dale Owen, 9.11.1827.

  15. Owen, quoted in Marshall, MWS, 2, p. 178.

  16. MWS and LH–EJT, 8.4.1827.

  17. EJT–MWS, 24.10.1827, in Letters of E.J. Trelawny, ed. H. Buxton Forman (Oxford University Press, 1910).

  18. MWS–JWH,?14.2.1828.

  19. MWS–Vincent Novello, 11.3.1828.

  20. MWS–JW, 27.4.1828.

  * Canning, who became Prime Minister in 1827, died within months of taking office, having in the years 1822–7 been one of Britain’s ablest foreign secretaries, in the Liverpool administration. A poet as well as a politician, he was the author of ‘The Knife-Grinder’, which had poked fun at republican ideals in the Anti-Jacobin Review, depicting the republican’s disappointment when the knife-grinder puts his troubles down to drink, not to the wicked squire, the tithe rent or the attorney. Shelley and Mary must also have loved him as the man who had once fought a duel with their hated Viscount Castlereagh over a military decision of which Canning disapproved.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  THE HIDEOUS PROGENY

  1828–1831

  ‘I am tempted to offer to write a brief outline of Mr Shelleys life if Galignani chose – but then my secret must be kept religiously – & no alterrations made – it would be very short & its chief merit the absence of incorrectness –’

  Mary Shelley to Cyrus Redding, ?3 September 1829

  THE DOUGLASES’ FLAT WAS ON THE RUE NEUVE DE BERRY, CLOSE TO the drab municipal park of the Champs Elysées. Here, dazed and feverish, Mary gratefully allowed herself to be put to bed and nursed. Not until the worst of her illness had passed was she told that she had been suffering from smallpox and allowed to look in a mirror. Mary’s identification with Frankenstein’s creature had never been physical; on the contrary, she knew herself to be a pretty woman, although, at thirty, the bloom had begun to fade. Now, studying a red, encrusted mask and lank, clipped hair, she knew what it was to be a monster. The doctors assured her that the disfigurement was unlikely to be permanent. Her hair would grow, although it never recovered its glorious colour and buoyancy; her delicate skin would not be marked, only robbed of its uncommon transparency and pallor.

  She could not hide away. It was bad enough that her illness had put the Douglases and Julia Robinson into quarantine for a fortnight. Isabel, overjoyed to have new company in the claustrophobic rooms she shared with Doddy and her little girl, rattled off a whole list of people who were hoping to meet her. Miss Wright’s kind friends, the Garnetts, were going to hold a soirée. Surely she would not miss an opportunity to talk to the great Lafayette? The novelist Benjamin Constant, now leader of the Liberal opposition, lived with his wife just around the corner. Mary Clarke, a fascinating young Irishwoman who had been taught the art of entertaining by the celebrated Madame Récamier, kept open house in her little rooms on the Left Bank, at rue des Petits Augustins. Doddy, Isabel whispered, bending lower, was a great trial, always watching her and complaining when she so much as looked at a man. The situation was so difficult. The Garnetts, suspecting nothing of the truth, often expressed their pity for her at having such a sullen, demanding husband.

  Mary had never been able to resist Isabel in her coaxing mood. She was unaware that her beautif
ul young friend had wasted no time in passing Jane Hogg’s malicious tales about Mary to her new acquaintances in Paris. ‘Mrs D[ouglas] has described her [Mary’s] character to me & I have seen her letters to her most intimate friends,’ Maria Garnett had written to her sister Julia in Hanover on 22 April; she added that she did ‘not expect to like her’.1 Knowing nothing of this, Mary was full of pity for Isabel’s situation. Doddy, her body now twisted by the muscular disease from which she suffered, had become demanding and possessive; the marriage which both Mary and Isabel had only seen as a strategy was all too real to her. She could not bear to see Isabel with ‘other’ men; she was consumed by jealousy and pain. ‘What D[oddy] now is, I will not describe in a letter,’ Mary wrote unhappily to Jane Hogg after her return to England; ‘– one only trusts that the diseased body acts on the diseased mind, & that both may be at rest ere long.’2 In another letter to Jane, she admitted that she now felt overcome with guilt for having helped to put ‘the poor child’ (Isabel) in this situation: ‘as I consider myself in some sort the cause, so I [shall] devote myself to extricate her.’3

  The Garnetts, prepared by Isabel’s accounts for a cold promiscuous woman, were disarmed by the good humour with which Mary displayed her marred looks. ‘It was rather droll to play the part of an ugly person for the first time in my life,’ Mary lightly wrote later to Isabella Baxter Booth. Her courage had been rewarded: she was ‘delighted’ by all the people she met, and by the city in which she felt, for the first time, like an inhabitant.4 The air, unlike that of smutty, smoke-stained London, was as clear as on Richmond Hill; the recently completed Bourse was generally acknowledged to be one of the most magnificent new buildings in Europe; the Palais Royal, lying to the rear of the rue Saint-Honoré, was irresistible to visitors, a shoppers’ paradise of hats, china, glass and prints, its arcades crowded from morning to dawn. This was the Paris of Balzac’s early novels, where each floor of the grand old buildings offered a different spectacle, from gambling dens in the cellars through the leisured elegance of cafés where nobody frowned at a lady who chose to dine alone, up through the great reception rooms of the bankers, the courtesans and the new aristocracy, into insanitary attics where families lived in crowded poverty.

  In Sussex, Mary had been convinced that she wanted nothing more than a country retreat, health-giving walks, a view of the sea. Now, she fell under the spell of Paris. ‘The weather is divine,’ she wrote dreamily to Jane: ‘we are in the open air almost all day, beneath the fresh green chesnuts of the Tuilleries.’5 The Garnetts, once they had decided to like her, made sure that she was welcomed by their friends in a way that was peculiarly sweet to a woman accustomed to seeing married ladies and young husbands turn their backs when she walked into a London drawing-room. It is possible that she met Stendhal, still smarting at having lost the charming Miss Julia Garnett to the keeper of the royal library at Hanover. More certainly, Mary offered her homage to General Lafayette and endeared herself to Benjamin Constant, ‘a venerable benevolent looking old man’ with a softly sentimental German wife.6 While Isabel Douglas, weary of Doddy’s possessiveness, flirted with the scholarly linguist Claude Fauriel and drew down on herself the wrath of his mistress, Mary Clarke, Mary found herself being courted by a man she described to Jane Hogg as ‘a poet – a creature whose nature is divine’.7

  The divinity was the twenty-five-year-old Prosper Mérimée. Clever, witty, ambitious but not yet rich, Mérimée lived in as much style as an impecunious writer could hope for in one of the warren of lodgings carved out of the grand old houses flanking the rue Saint-Honoré. A friend of Stendhal, admired by Goethe and Chauteaubriand for his romantic dramas and for the ‘translations’ of Illyrian ballads he had written himself, Mérimée was still unknown in England. Mary, struck by the resemblance of his new verse-drama, La Famille de Carvajal, to the subject of Shelley’s play, The Cenci, promised her support in promoting him. Shortly after her return to England, she wrote to John Bowring at the new Westminster Review and produced a long, commendatory piece for the issue of January 1829, following it up with another in 1830.8

  Mérimée had quite a way with women; when Mary met him he was still sporting a wounded arm from a duel with his last mistress’s husband. His indifference to her blighted looks was as pleasing as his respect for her intelligence. ‘What will you also say to the imagination of one of the cleverest men in France, young and a poet, who could be interested in me in spite of the mask I wore,’ she boasted to Isabella Booth on 15 June. Two days before she left Paris in the last week of May, Mérimée wrote her a letter declaring his love. But Mary, by this time, had seen enough of Parisian ways to distinguish between flirtation and passion. Returning his letter with a gracefully expressed wish that he might not live to regret such impetuousness, she offered her friendship: ‘vous trouverez en moi une amie simpati-sante – compatisante – vraie.’9

  Nevertheless, sipping tea at the farewell party they gave in her honour that night, the observant Garnetts noticed that the occasion had become ‘a flirting party’, two of the chief flirts being Mrs Shelley and Mérimée. As for Mrs Douglas, Harriet Garnett drily wrote to her married sister in Germany, she had made herself agreeable to all the other men in the room while poor Mr Douglas looked on, ‘sick and disconsolate’.10 The Garnetts were beginning to get the measure of Isabel, but Harriet’s letter is interesting for providing rare evidence of Mary’s ability to flirt; her recklessness makes it easier to understand why the stories told by Jane Hogg had so readily been accepted. What looked like flirtation was, in Mary’s own view, simply the behaviour of a sexual equal. She flirted to hide the intelligence which, as she was well aware, could make her seem rather intimidating, and because she liked the company of attentive, good-looking men. She did not, it seems, always consider how others might judge her caressing manner.

  The first news which greeted Mary on her return to England at the beginning of June was unusually pleasing: Sir Timothy, his wife and his daughters had all paid a call on Percy at Mr Slater’s Academy in Kensington: ‘I hope he was satisfied with the school and my boy,’ Mary anxiously wrote to the lawyer who had given her this information.11 Perhaps, now that Sir Timothy had seen his grandson again, he might consider raising her allowance, she suggested to Whitton, reminding him that an increase to £300 a year had been mentioned as a possibility. But seeing Percy had not softened Sir Timothy to that extent. If his daughter-in-law wanted more money, she would have to work for it.

  Facing strangers in Paris with her ‘mask’ and short, dull hair was easier than the prospect of being exclaimed at and pitied by her London acquaintances. Told by the doctors that nothing would speed her recovery faster than sea air, Mary rented a cottage for the summer for herself, Percy and Julia Robinson – ‘the most amiable little girl I ever knew’ – at quiet, unfashionable Hastings on the South Coast. Here, during a glorious summer, she revelled in the sea air and long inland walks. It was very good for Percy as well as herself, she told Jane. His character was beginning to develop: ‘without evil – & without sentiment … unsocial yet frank – without one ill fold’.12 As her son grew older, she would note his stubbornness; at eight, he was still as docile as a mother could wish: ‘not quite the virtue of his fathers family’, she could not resist informing William Whitton a year later.

  Mérimée sent long, lively letters from Paris, begging for news of her return and, on every possible opportunity, alerting her to the duplicity of Isabel Douglas. How could Mary, the most generous of friends, trust such a creature, he asked indignantly? All her precious Mrs Douglas cared for was turning the heads of foppish young men, an art in which she seemed well-practised.13 One can’t help wondering if Mérimée was writing out of pique; Isabel was an attractive woman, and nearer his own age than Mary herself.

  Perhaps his accounts had an effect. Mary’s replies have been lost, but she abandoned her idea of rescuing Isabel, while she remained close enough to ‘Doddy’ to continue offering her work to friendly editors in England. She
seems, however, to have lost contact by 1829, the year in which, still masquerading as a man, poor, sickly Miss Dods was sent to a debtors’ prison in Paris. The date of her death is not certain, but Isabel felt free to return to London with her daughter the following year. By this time, either from Mérimée or from one of her other Parisian contacts, Mary had been made aware of her true nature. ‘I saw Isabel yesterday,’ she noted in her journal on 1 December 1830. ‘– Good heavens – is this the being I adored – she was ever false yet enchanting – now she has lost her fascinations – probably, because I can no longer serve her she take[s] no more trouble to please me – but also she surely is not the being she once was.’ It seemed beyond belief that a girl for whom she had risked her own fragile social reputation and even braved the law should have proved as treacherous as Jane Hogg. She could forgive Jane, especially now that Hogg’s disgusted family had turned their backs on him, his unwedded wife and illegitimate child. Jane needed her, and the helpless were always sure of Mary’s loyalty. Isabel had become capable of making her own way in the world.

  Disillusion did not tempt Mary to betray the secret life of the Douglases, but it was not her secret alone. Lord Dillon had already asked her for Doddy’s ‘donation’ in Paris, indicating that he knew of a name change; Jane Hogg knew everything and had no reason to protect the reputation of the woman she hated for betraying her to Mary Shelley. Isabel was probably wise to stay out of England after 1830. Living quietly abroad, the ‘widowed’ Mrs Douglas became the unlikely wife of a retired clergyman, the Reverend William Falconer, at whose pleasant Italian villa she died, her reputation intact, in 1869. Long before then, the deception had been carried to new heights as Sir Henry Drummond Charles Wolff proudly recorded his marriage abroad to Adeline, daughter of Mr and Mrs Walter Sholto Douglas. The baby for whose sake Mary had embarked on her mission of concocting a false marriage, returned with Sir Henry to become, by the last odd twist in this curious tale, the next-door neighbour and close friend of Mary’s son and daughter-in-law on their country estate near Bournemouth. Neither couple were aware of the bizarre chain of circumstances which linked them.