Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Life was not being kind to Mary. Jane was often as much of an invalid as herself and as impossible to diagnose. One month, the doctors would announce that she was cured; the next, Mary would hear that Jane was on the verge of death. Longing for some of her son’s calmness, or lack of imagination, she resigned herself to the fact that the damp at Field Place would always be dangerous to her daughter-in-law, that expensive journeys abroad would become a regular feature of her beloved children’s life, and that her substitutes for the longed-for grandchildren were to be a pack of amiable house-dogs and Charles or ‘Carlo’ St John, the loutish young ward who paid them occasional visits when he was home from a career in the navy. (Reluctant to own up to the fact that Jane’s first husband had fathered an illegitimate son, even though the boy had been born in Corfu in 1832, long before Jane’s first marriage, Mary preferred to disguise him as a ‘near relative’ of the late Mr St John.)

  Jane’s illness is intriguing. Mary had seen no hint of it before the marriage; is it too far-fetched to wonder if, childless in her first and second marriages, Jane used illness as a way of keeping Percy out of her bedroom? Such situations have occurred; Mary, not Percy, was the great love of Lady Shelley’s life. Marrying the son, she had chosen the mother.

  Shelley’s tongue had been in his cheek when he nicknamed his hot-tempered Mary ‘Pecksie’ after a singularly obliging and docile little bird in a children’s book. Percy was equally wry in giving Jane the name ‘Wren’ or ‘Wrennie’. Jane’s cocked head and rotund shape did give her a slight physical resemblance to this shy bird; not so, her nature. As Mary, worn out by life, became an increasingly shadowy figure in their triangular relationship, Jane, despite her mysterious ailment, became increasingly formidable. ‘To live with Mary Shelley was indeed like entertaining an angel. Perfect unselfishness, selflessness indeed, characterized her at all times,’ she informed Mary’s biographer.10 But Mary’s submission, when allied to Percy’s biddability, underlines the degree to which her daughter-in-law had taken the reins into her own capable hands. Mary wanted always to be with her beloved ‘children’; Jane, allowed full authority, was happy to give her that pleasure.

  To Claire, watchful, excluded and poor, it was apparent that her own tenuous role as confidante and near-relation had been usurped. The new Lady Shelley now ruled the roost at Field Place; Mary had been swallowed up by her and what Claire scornfully called their super-fine set. Occasionally, she showed her claws. How lucky that Lady Shelley was so economical! she exclaimed to Mary in one letter: ‘for she told me she did not care for the luxuries of Life, and wanted only Bread and Cheese.’11 The jeer is impossible to miss. A storm, where two such characters were concerned, was bound to brew. Nobody could have anticipated its ferocity.

  *

  In the spring of 1849, Charles Clairmont’s young son Wilhelm was joined in England by his pretty sister Clara; Claire, full of goodwill, made plans to settle her niece as a teacher in a select ladies’ school, perhaps at Brighton, an hour’s journey on the new railway from the lodgings which she had taken for them all in a village near Maidstone in Kent. The trouble, as she candidly owned in an appeal to Mary for help that April, was that she was so poor. ‘I suffer so much in all ways from want of money’ There were times, Claire wrote, when she simply sat down and cried. ‘I must say that I think –’ she went on ominously, but Mary or perhaps her daughter-in-law destroyed the rest of the letter;12 all we know is that Mary was ‘grieved & even shocked’ by Claire’s observations.13

  Answering in what she hoped was a soothing way, Mary apologized for being unable to send any money when they were struggling to pay bills for repairs and for Jane’s doctors. The bad harvest of 1848 had resulted in unpaid rents. It was all they could do, she explained, to keep up the interest on their mortgage on the estate. Of course, she wished to help little ‘Clairkin’ and Willy. If Claire would only consider settling near them, Willy could be taught agriculture by their bailiff: ‘but you have objections to his seeing much of us – as unsettling him’. Afraid of triggering one of Claire’s outbursts, she scribbled an anxious afterthought inside the envelope, a hope that she had not, in her haste, written anything which might seem ‘vain & presuming’.

  ‘I fear so much to offend you,’ Mary wrote to Claire a month later, embarrassed by the fact that a pre-arranged visit by Percy’s Shelley aunts could not be undone and that all the bedrooms would be occupied when Claire visited. Would she, perhaps, be willing to stay in a local inn? She would not, but a compromise was reached. Wilhelm would not visit. Clara (‘Clari’) would come alone, after the aunts, ‘les tantes’, had left. Claire, who had expressed a strong wish not to be in the house at the same time as Jane Shelley, promised to join them later.

  Clari’s visit to Field Place, lasting several weeks, overlapped with one by Alexander Knox, recovering from an unhappy romance the previous year. Clari was young, gentle and apprehensive of her future as a teacher in a country she had only known for a month. Knox, lonely and sorry for her, fell in love. Lady Shelley gave the couple her enthusiastic support. Mary, despite mild anxiety at letting her dear Knox ally himself to a member of the hot-blooded Clairmont family, sent off a cheerful account of Clari’s engagement to Charles in Vienna. Nobody, it seems, had thought to tell Claire of these developments before her own arrival at Field Place was announced.

  Relating a bare outline of the drama to Florence Marshall, Jane Shelley remembered that, having disliked Claire from the first time they met, she was preparing to leave Field Place for London when Mary ‘burst out in a vehement manner, not usual to her: “Don’t go, dear; don’t leave me alone with her. She has been the bane of my life since I was two!” I gladly stayed.’14

  The next part of the story demonstrates Jane Shelley’s forceful nature. She had, she later recalled, already decided that the engagement was an excellent thing for both young people. But Claire, when she arrived, ‘began in a half-mad way to say all kinds of horrid things’, probably concerning her belief that Knox was Mary’s lover. Confronted by a weeping Clari, a hysterical Claire and a distraught Mary, Jane took prompt action. Mary was escorted to her bedroom and left there behind a locked door. A groom was then summoned and told ‘in a loud voice … to go instantly for the doctor, and to tell him that Miss Clairmont was very ill and excited and that he must bring some drug to cure her’.15 The effect of this sinister threat was gratifyingly prompt; Claire left for Maidstone as soon as a carriage could be called to take her to the station. Shortly afterwards, she learned that Clari had gone quietly to London with Knox on 16 June and married him at the church where Percy had wedded Jane. The Shelleys, crowning arrogance with impudence, had given a ball to celebrate the occasion. Clari, seemingly unaware that she had done anything outrageous, sent her aunt a charming note to thank her for the gift of a cap and to report having received ‘a most kind and affectionate letter’ from her parents.16 In the year when Jane Eyre offered a grim warning against the horrors of girls’ schools and when the best recommendation Mary Shelley had been able to offer was for a teaching job in distant Liverpool, Clari must have felt that marriage, and to a loving, clever man, offered a happy alternative.

  Claire’s response to her niece’s behaviour was strange indeed. Charles, questioning the terms of abuse she now applied to his daughter, was grimly informed that Clari had married a monster of infamy. Accepting that Claire must have sound evidence for her allegations, he was astonished when, a month after the wedding, she suggested that this villain might be the ideal person to find a good husband for Clari’s sister, Pauline. It amazed him still more that Claire thought Willy should ask Knox for financial help. Living with the Knoxes in the autumn of 1849, Willy did receive support for his agricultural training, and when he visited Vienna after his father’s death there of a stroke in February 1850, Knox paid his fare for the round trip.

  Jane and Percy, it became increasingly clear, were the prime targets of Claire’s hatred. In March 1850, Claire wrote a letter of furious reproac
h to Willy for his ingratitude to friends of hers with whom he lodged after his return. So he thought them dull? Perhaps he would prefer Field Place, where ‘the new married wife feels far deeper interest in her husband’s male friend than in her husband himself; [where] the young men who frequent the House, run a muck with the young women; if they are married, they dance rigadoon with them; if they are unmarried they fetch a Bull and carry off the young lady on its back …’17 Ordered to write to Sir Percy and accuse him of having been an unappreciative grandson to Mrs Godwin, a subject on which he was ill-equipped to form an opinion, Willy refused to obey his aunt. His sister Pauline, however, after being shown the letters which Claire had hoarded as precious evidence of Mary’s love-affair with Knox, was persuaded to write a reproach in the summer of 1850, an act which won her aunt’s approval.18 Antonia Clairmont, Charles’s widow, was lambasted for having dared to send Mary a polite little note that July. An ultimatum was promptly issued from Claire’s new London lodgings: communication with the Knoxes was – just – permissible, but there could be none with the Shelleys:

  Until they have made reparation for their insolence to us, it stamps with dishonour any member of our family, who holds any intercourse but a hostile one with them, and my resolution is taken and I will part from any of my relations who do. I have not words to express the shame I feel at your conduct.19

  Words were not something Claire had ever been short of when she was enraged and her unfortunate sister-in-law continued to be deluged with reminders of the Shelleys’ wickedness. As far as Mary was concerned, however, Claire kept her vow: all communication was terminated. Two years after Mary’s death, Claire started to rewrite history again. In 1850, she had been ready to tell Antonia that ‘Mrs Shelley, a mother herself, instigated Clary to outrage every law of natural tenderness, every filial duty, every family tie.’ Now, it seemed that she had been innocent; it was all Clari’s fault. Clari, poisoned by Lady Shelley’s evil stories of her aunt Claire, had ‘torn the old friend of my youth from me after five and forty years that we had stood together, sent that poor friend to a too early grave, and done all she could to make me insane with grief’.20 Only a threat by Antonia Clairmont to send all of Claire’s letters on to Alexander Knox put an end to her crazy diatribes in 1854. She expressed no grief when her twenty-nine-year-old niece died of pulmonary consumption in 1855. Years later, Claire had the gall to suggest that Knox, who had married again, should ask the Shelleys to send her some money; not even she had the nerve to make a direct appeal to the family she had slandered with such viciousness.21

  Mary’s own letters disclose nothing of this. Perhaps, as her health grew steadily weaker, she was relieved to be estranged from Claire. Grateful though she had been to her stepsister during the period of the Gatteschi fiasco, admiring though she was of the courage with which Claire had survived her long hard years as a governess, there had never been much love lost between them. As a child, she had usurped Mary’s place; as an unwelcome third in her life with Shelley, she had been a trial and an embarrassment; as a voluble espouser of Mary Wollstonecraft’s beliefs, she had become a living reproach to Mary Shelley, her daughter and perceived heir. Bitterest of all, however, to a woman who had always done everything she could to shield Claire’s reputation, was to find herself accused of keeping a lover young enough to be her son. No evidence has ever been found for believing that Mary had an affair with Knox; Claire’s consisted only of the affectionate terms in which Mary often alluded to him in her letters, a single misread phrase – ‘my Knox’ where Mary had actually written ‘beg Knox’ – and the fact that he had once written her a note on the inside of one of Mary’s envelopes.

  *

  The furore and its repercussions destroyed what should have been a pleasant summer for Mary at Field Place, but there was comfort in watching Shelley’s reputation continue to flourish. A new publication, the Stage Manager, praised him in a series of essays published in the spring and summer of 1849. One reviewer of contemporary poetry respectfully noted his mounting influence, while another called his poems the most musical in the language. Exonerated and even apologized to from the pulpit of Eton College Chapel by the Conduct (the senior chaplain) in the same year, Shelley was discovered to have been a truly Christian poet, solaced in his darkest days by the gentlest and most understanding of wives. Mary herself was made the subject of a poem, honouring the love and compassion which she had shown.22 Lady Shelley, hearing her mother-in-law ‘constantly refer to what he [Shelley] might think, or do, or approve of, almost as if he had been in the next room’, was easily persuaded of the poet’s virtue and benevolence, and that his second marriage had been one of unusual compatibility.23

  In September 1849, Percy and Jane left England for a climate more beneficial to Jane’s health. Joining them at the end of the month, Mary made her first visit to the south of France, where she dutifully followed Jane in taking ‘little sips’ as a homoeopathic cure, having found no help in conventional medicine. Occasionally, she felt well enough to be taken out on a donkey to admire the sea from the hills behind Nice; for the most part, she lay on a sofa, conserving her energy to write an occasional letter. Peacock’s daughter, widowed in 1844 when her husband, like Shelley, was drowned, was congratulated on her forthcoming marriage to young George Meredith. Augusta Trelawny was reminded that Mary wished to reclaim the little Curran portrait which Trelawny had kindly collected on her behalf and, less kindly, kept.† She felt a little uncomfortable when Augusta meaningfully asked how Mrs Paul had felt about returning to spend her last years with a husband she no longer loved; Mary, who had strongly urged Augusta to follow the same course, was forced to admit that the reconciliation had not been a great success. It seemed to her now that the long estrangement from Augusta had been against her own wishes: ‘I had always, so to speak, a natural inclination for you,’ she told her.25

  Home again after nine months abroad, Mary felt well enough to make a little visit to the Knoxes and another to Shelley’s sisters at Elcott, their Berkshire home. The vicar of Elcott had been both ‘amiable & agreable’, she wrote to John Hastings Touchet, a pious country gentleman who often visited Field Place. Reassured that Jane was now ‘quite herself again – as plump as a partridge & as gay as a lark, no headaches & no pains’, Mr Touchet was also treated to an account of a ‘sad piece of domestic history’, the unlooked-for pregnancy of Brenda, one of the house-dogs at Field Place. Wishing that Brenda would be a little less fecund, Mary longed for Jane to produce a child: ‘we have our dogs & our doves & our birds –’ she wrote to Isabella Booth, a proud grandmother, ‘& wish that we had our babies – but we must wait till Jane is yet better than she is now.’26 Grandchildren would, she felt, help to compensate for all those children of her own that she had buried; they would love her uncritically, undo the sense of superfluousness which sometimes overcame her as Jane’s friends and relations filled the house.

  Her hopes were not rewarded. ‘Jane’s health is our only real evil,’ Mary wrote sadly to Augusta Trelawny on 12 August. ‘When she is well all is bright & gay … I wish they had a family – & as her health improves & she becomes strong, we hope it will arrive.’ But the only thing which appeared to strengthen Jane was absence from Field Place, and even this did not have the desired result.

  While Mary worried about grandchildren, Jane and Percy were becoming increasingly concerned about her own state of health. The dampness of Field Place was, they were convinced, as deleterious to her as to her daughter-in-law. Plans for a move to England’s Riviera, the sunny south coast, were already in progress.

  It is unclear whether Mary was told that Jane, in 1849, had decided to purchase ‘the admired seat of Boscombe Lodge’, a pleasant if unremarkable white house standing on the cliffs a mile east of Bournemouth’s unspoilt village.27 This was the home which the Shelleys planned for Mary’s last years as it became increasingly evident that full recovery was unlikely. Perhaps, knowing her love for the ‘cascine’, the beautiful pine forest which sep
arated Pisa from the sea, they thought that Boscombe’s woods and sea breezes would bring back happy memories.

  The house stood ready, but Mary, by the autumn of 1850, was no longer well enough to be subjected to any radical changes in her life. Instead, Jane and Percy took her back to Chester Square, where she could be attended by the doctors of their choice. Sitting up in bed on 15 November, she made a last appeal to the Royal Literary Fund to help her old friend Isabella Booth. Mrs Booth’s poverty was most ‘bitter & pressing’, Mary wrote weakly; her sacrifice in looking after her husband had been great. ‘His Malady demanded a care & courage in nursing, which for a woman to undertake & go through with alone, demanded heroic exertion – She persevered to the last, at the sacrifise of her own health.’28 Her letter reveals how strongly, even now, Mary Shelley felt for women to whom society offered no help or support. The description could as well have been applied to herself.

  The Royal Literary Fund declined to help Mrs Booth again, however unfortunate her circumstances might be. Mary’s response to their apparent indifference was to take matters into her own hands. Percy was asked to guarantee Isabella an allowance of £50 a year for the rest of her life, a promise which was dutifully kept.29

  Mary’s last letter was a tender little note to Peacock’s daughter, begging her and her father to try to find time for the visit they had failed to pay to Field Place that summer. She looked forward to being introduced to Ellen’s fiancé, Mr Meredith, and to reading the poems he hoped to publish.30

  Years had passed since Mary had enjoyed more than a few weeks of continuous good health. Operations, homoeopathy, long periods of rest; all remedies had failed to cure a mysterious and painful illness which she imagined must be connected to her nervous and melancholy temperament. In the last cold weeks of 1850, confined to her bed at Chester Square and attended by a homoeopathic doctor who, Percy irritably observed, ‘did not do her the least good’, she felt her left leg turning numb. Partial paralysis followed but, by 3 January, her son felt hopeful enough to inform a worried Isabella Booth that their new doctors looked on the patient’s chances of recovery ‘very favourably’. A week later, he wrote again to thank Mrs Booth for offering to come and nurse his mother, and to refuse, since ‘there is no danger now’.