Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

by Charlotte Gordon

  During this time, Mary wrote home as little as possible to avoid the recriminations she knew she would face. Her mother had been angry when she left for Bath, accusing her of not having enough “regard” for her family. Her younger sisters felt abandoned. Mary had always managed the household, taking care of all of them and fending off the threats of their drunken father. Now, left to fill Mary’s shoes, they felt resentful and inadequate. How were they supposed to tend to their younger siblings and their ailing mother? Mary was the eldest daughter; running the home was her job, not theirs. Why had she left them behind? Did she think she was better than they were? How dare she try to strike out on her own? Her loyalty should have been to her family. The letters they exchanged were angry, with Mary defending herself against the worst accusation a woman of her time period could face: selfishness.

  But Mary drew courage from Locke’s theories, and from the works of Rousseau, who took Locke’s ideas one step further, arguing that freedom was what mattered most and that obedience and subordination were symptoms of societal oppression. Mankind must relish the inborn right to independence, Rousseau argued. And so must womankind, Mary reasoned, which meant she had the right to resist her family’s demands. She knew she was breaking convention; she felt sorry for her sisters and disliked her mother’s judgment of her; but she remembered how hopeless she had felt in Hoxton, how imprisoned and claustrophobic, and knew it would be dangerous to return. She might never have the strength to make another bid for freedom. It was better to be ordered around by Mrs. Dawson, ignored by Mrs. Dawson’s guests, despised by the rest of the staff, and forced to endure the frivolities of Bath society than to be trapped at home. At least Mrs. Dawson paid her, and with that came the promise of future independence, however distant. With her sisters and her mother, the future would seem blank, the days rolling monotonously past.

  IN THE FALL OF 1781, Elizabeth Wollstonecraft developed an illness so grave that Mary could no longer withstand her sisters’ calls for help and reluctantly returned home. Her mother was painfully swollen from an unspecified disorder. Mary termed it dropsy. Today, it is known as edema, the bodywide retention of fluid, probably caused by a liver or kidney dysfunction. With each month, Elizabeth’s skin tightened further from the pressure, making it more and more difficult for her to move her limbs. By the spring, she was no longer able to feed herself. Her daughters had to clothe her, bathe her, and try to soothe her pain. Ironically, it was Mary she leaned on the most, complaining bitterly if her eldest daughter left her bedside.

  Not surprisingly, the Wollstonecraft men felt no obligation to help. Edward had largely disappeared at the onset of his wife’s illness, although he did continue to help cover the family’s expenses, dropping in from time to time to pay the most pressing bills. Mary used her earnings to help cover the rest. Ned remained almost entirely out of the picture; Henry had vanished so completely that it was impossible to trace his whereabouts. James had been sent to sea, and Charles was still only twelve years old. However, if Mary had refused to go home, her family would never have forgiven her, and she might never have forgiven herself, so firmly implanted was the societal value of daughterly self-sacrifice.

  For the next two years, until she was almost twenty-three, Mary devoted her energy to caring for her mother. While Mary had lived with Mrs. Dawson, the family had moved several times, ending up in Enfield, about ten miles north of Charing Cross. Unable to afford one of the elegant houses in the fashionable part of town, they lived in cheap housing on the outskirts of the village, where Mary felt marooned, far away from her friend Fanny Blood and imprisoned with her sisters. On April 19, 1782, Elizabeth slipped into a final coma, but first she murmured words that Mary would remember for the rest of her life, in part because they were not at all what she wanted to hear: “A little patience and all will be over.” This passive acceptance of suffering was not the deathbed rapprochement Mary yearned for. In Mary, the novel she would write a few years later, the dying mother says, “Alas my daughter, I have not always treated you well.” But Elizabeth never apologized to her eldest daughter. She had never stopped favoring her eldest son, and had never overcome her dislike of Mary’s passionate nature and her disregard of proper feminine behavior.

  After her mother’s death, Mary wrote Jane Arden that she was “fatigued,” contrasting her misery to Jane’s cheerfulness: “You are a laugher still, but I am a stupid creature, and you would be tired to death of me, if you were to be with me a week.” Mary’s father arrived home with a new wife, Lydia, a few days after Elizabeth died. He had begun this affair while Elizabeth was alive, but no one knew how long they had been together. Taking Charles, they moved to Wales, leaving Mary to pack up and distribute her mother’s few possessions, find living quarters for herself and her sisters, and scrape money together for food and clothing. Mary tracked down Ned and talked him into hosting the two younger girls in his large house on St. Katherine Street, near the Tower, and then, at Fanny’s urging, she herself moved in with the Bloods in Walham Green, a pleasant village a few miles west of Chelsea, near Putney Bridge on the Thames. Here she did her best to shoulder some of the economic burden by helping Mrs. Blood with her sewing. Fanny’s health, never strong, declined during Mary’s year with the Bloods. She coughed up blood and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Although Fanny’s case was comparatively mild, Mary felt fiercely protective of her friend. She urged her to cut back her work hours, even though the dip in Fanny’s income meant their dream of a life together would grow more remote. But, to Mary, Fanny’s recovery was what mattered most.

  Despite these worries, Mary was living with a family she loved and who loved her. Eliza and Everina, on the other hand, were unwanted indigent sisters in the household of a domineering brother and grudging sister-in-law. They could have pursued positions as governesses or paid companions, but they lacked their eldest sister’s initiative. Instead, having watched Mary’s desperate struggle to build a life for herself without a husband, nineteen-year-old Eliza, who was vivacious and attractive, fell into the arms of a respectable bachelor, Meredith Bishop, a shipbuilder. She married him on October 20, only six months after Elizabeth died. Mary wrote Jane Arden that her sister had “done well, and married a worthy man, whose situation in life is truly eligible.” She did not condemn Eliza for taking this route to security and in fact felt some relief. Eliza was Bishop’s responsibility now; he could take care of her, leaving Mary with one less person to worry about and more time to focus on creating a life with Fanny.

  CHAPTER 5

  MARY GODWIN: SCOTLAND, AN “EYRY OF FREEDOM”

  [ 1810–1814 ]

  Mary Godwin was convinced that if her mother had lived she would have been much happier. For one thing, she would not have had to contend with her stepmother, a competitive stepsister, or a little brother who stole her father’s attention away from her. Most important, she would have had a mother who adored her, of this she was certain. She only had to read the books Wollstonecraft had written for Fanny to see how loving her mother had been.

  Although to outsiders Mary and her stepsiblings seemed to enjoy a happy family life, the enmity between Mary and her stepmother had only worsened over time. When Mary was thirteen, the tension manifested itself in an excruciating bout of eczema on her hands and arms. Mary-Jane did what she could to help, shuttling the girl back and forth to doctors and taking her on a trip to the seaside. But Mary continued to resist Mary-Jane’s authority. She did not throw tantrums like Jane, but instead resorted to stony silence and sly, sarcastic remarks, making it clear that she did not respect her stepmother.

  When the eczema failed to improve, the Godwins sent Mary to a boarding school in the popular seaside resort of Ramsgate, about eighty miles from central London, hoping that a prolonged stay in the fresh air would help her heal. But Mary was miserable among the holidaymakers and tourists who flocked there to take the waters, and after six months she left the school, her eczema uncured. When she returned home, she found that Mary-Jane had s
craped together enough money for Jane—and only Jane—to study French and have singing lessons. Mary-Jane urged her daughter to perform for guests, and although Jane enjoyed the attention and Fanny applauded her stepsister’s talent, Mary seethed at the fact that she and Fanny had been so intentionally overlooked.

  If Fanny shared Mary’s outrage, she never showed it. Worried that she was a burden to her stepparents, Fanny strove not to cause any trouble. She did not like to assert herself and was plagued by depression, a “torpor” that she could not shake. Although Mary felt sorry for Fanny, Jane was impatient with her, as was Godwin, who misread Fanny’s depression as “indolence.” Fanny never seemed to expect anything more than this. She preferred being invisible—a troubling tendency, although neither of the Godwins expressed any real concern about it. Her silence was far easier to cope with than Jane’s histrionics or what Godwin called Mary’s “bold” ways.

  But though he considered her “imperious,” as Mary grew older, Godwin expected more of her, taking time out of his busy work day to supervise her intellectual development. Later, Mary recalled what these sessions were like:

  Godwin…extended his utmost care to the task of education; but many things rendered him unfit for it. His severity was confined to words, but they were pointed and humiliating. His strictness was undeviating.…He was too minute in his censures, too grave and severe in his instruction.

  Even Godwin admitted that he had a tendency to be too critical, but he could not help himself. He wanted Mary to exert herself more vigorously. She had such potential; why would she not apply herself? Faced with such pressure, it was difficult for Mary not to feel rebellious, although she was always deferential to Godwin. He made no allowances for her age: Mary had to be superior to other children. Worse, he always supported Mary-Jane when conflict arose. To Mary, this was a betrayal. He put his wife first—his second wife—while she, his own daughter, was somehow always in the wrong.

  Mary’s loneliness and rage mounted until at last, when she was fourteen, Godwin decided to send his unhappy daughter to Scotland. This unusual decision was prompted by an invitation from William Baxter, a radical Scotsman who had read Political Justice years earlier and struck up a correspondence with Godwin, touting the glories of life in his remote Scottish village. When Baxter, a recent widower, heard about Mary’s troubles, he told Godwin to send her to him. Unlike Godwin and Mary-Jane, Mr. Baxter, the father of four daughters, was used to a household of girls. She would fit right in, he declared, and the fresh air of Scotland would cure her ills.

  Although he had never actually met Baxter, Godwin agreed to the plan. To prepare his friend for Mary’s arrival, Godwin wrote a rather schoolmasterly description of his daughter: “I believe she has nothing of what is commonly called vices, and that she has considerable talent. I am anxious that she should be brought up…like a philosopher.…I do not desire that she should be treated with extraordinary attention. I wish, too, that she should be excited to industry. She has occasionally great perseverance, but occasionally, too she shows great need to be roused.” He wanted the Baxters to take her seriously as a young intellectual, but he did not want them to coddle her.

  On June 7, 1812, Mary boarded the Osnaburgh, bound for Scotland. Godwin and her two sisters, Fanny and Jane, came to see her off; Mary-Jane made no pretense of being sad and stayed home, relishing her victory. Mary was prone to seasickness, and in an unguarded moment Godwin admitted to Baxter that he felt “a thousand anxieties” about sending his fourteen-year-old on a weeklong voyage by herself. He searched the decks for a trustworthy older woman to look after his daughter, but the woman he found abandoned Mary the instant the ship set sail. Inexperienced Mary, who was miserably ill for the entire voyage, had her money stolen while on board and arrived in Dundee penniless and weak from seasickness.

  But she did not complain. This difficult journey marked the start of a new chapter in her life. At last she would be free from her stepmother. She would miss her father, but it was a relief to be away from his scrutiny and harsh reprimands. Boarding school had given her a taste of what it felt like to live away from home. But there she had been hemmed in by rules, and Mary-Jane and her father had been close enough to keep their eye on her. Ultimately, it had been the worst of both worlds: none of the comforts of London and even more restrictions than Mary-Jane had enforced in their home on Skinner Street.

  Besides, Scotland was no Ramsgate. One of the most civilized cities in Europe lay in the southeast: Edinburgh, home to a great university as well as the Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith. The Highlands, on the other hand, were among the wildest, most dangerous places in the world, the stage for countless rebellions against English rule.

  To the nineteenth-century English tourist, Scotland was an extraordinary place. Mary was following the footsteps of earlier Romantic travelers who had gone there to escape civilization and written ecstatic accounts of their experiences. William and Dorothy Wordsworth had hiked through the open countryside with Coleridge in 1803 and been delighted with its empty reaches and solitary cottages, its green hills and wide stretches of heath. The streams in Scotland did not need bridges, Dorothy Wordsworth said, because, unlike the English, who wore shoes, the Scots did not mind getting their bare feet wet. The inns were dirty, but Romantics like the Wordsworths did not mind suffering a little discomfort to travel this land of rugged countryside and old stone churches, tranquil lanes and military garrisons. After their visit, Dorothy declared what Mary would soon discover for herself: “Scotland is the country above all others that I have seen, in which a man of imagination may carve out his own pleasures.”

  By the time Mary Godwin arrived in June 1812, the Highlanders had surrendered to the Crown, but they were still brandishing their swords, waiting for a chance to overthrow King William IV. Rebels staged guerrilla attacks, sabotaging English troops if they ventured too deep into clan territory; the English commanders responded by torturing, jailing, and executing anyone suspected of fomenting revolt. Owning a bagpipe or even playing one could land a Highlander in prison. Tartans had been illegal for most of the century; only recently had the ban been lifted. For a teenage girl, these dangers seemed thrillingly romantic. Sir Walter Scott had published his dramatic poem The Lady of the Lake in 1810, and throngs of English tourists rushed to the Highlands, reciting Scott’s words as they hiked down gorges and gazed at plunging waterfalls. To Mary, Scott’s noble heroine Ellen Douglas embodied all she hoped to become: beloved, brave, and tragic.

  The Baxter family lived a few miles east of Dundee, in the village of Broughty Ferry on the north bank of the Firth of Tay, not far from the North Sea and the southern Highlands. If Mary had not been a nature lover before, she became one now. In Broughty Ferry, the wind seemed to blow all the time. Clouds sailed across a sky that renewed itself continually, so much cleaner and wider than the grimy haze that hung over London’s city streets. At sunset and sunrise, canopies of orange and pink stretched overhead, with shocking explosions of red, like the Turner paintings Mary’s father had taken her to see in the artist’s gallery on Harley Street. Behind the city, the hills sloped up to the Highlands, and to the south, the firth rippled moodily, shining and darkening with the wind.

  Mr. Baxter was honored to welcome Godwin’s daughter to his grand old house, “The Cottage,” and Mary was delighted by the warmth of his reception. Old radical that he was, Baxter still embraced the tenets of the French Revolution, and he gave his daughters far more independence than Mary had dreamed possible. Later, she would say that while other people might experience this part of Scotland as “blank and dreary,” she had found Dundee an “eyry of freedom.”

  Sixteen-year-old Isabella, the Baxter daughter closest to Mary in age, had spirals of black curls, dark eyes, and a sensitive, intelligent face. Vivacious and warm, she was everything Mary wanted to be; she chattered and laughed and was generally at the center of things, while Mary tended to remain silent, an observer rather than a leading lady. To Isabel
la, Mary’s heritage made her seem glamorous; she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of Isabella’s heroines, and her quiet manner rendered her mysterious, as though she had secrets she would not share unless you earned her favor. It did not cross Isabella’s mind that she might simply be shy.

  Isabella shared her father’s enthusiasm for the French Revolution. She studied its events, large and small, and read biographies of its leaders. She revered Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland, two famed revolutionaries, and talked about them as though she had known them personally. Madame Roland’s words before she died on the guillotine—“O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”—seemed almost unbearably poignant, and Charlotte Corday’s brave assassination of Jean-Paul Marat was the sort of self-sacrifice Isabella yearned to make for her country. This passionate relationship with history was a revelation for Mary. Her father had always praised historical scholarship, but Isabella scoured the past for clues about the present, for ideas about how to live a Romantic life, a far more appealing prospect than scholarship for scholarship’s sake.

  Although Broughty Ferry was on the edge of the wilderness, no one worried when Isabella and Mary disappeared for hours, sometimes even entire days. Occasionally, Mary left Isabella behind and spent long hours by herself in the fields along the sea. It was here, she said later, that she first began to dream about writing “fantastic” stories, relying on her imagination to “people the hours with creations.”

  Near the Baxters’ house, a fifteenth-century fortress guarded the mouth of the Tay, its sides bare and straight. From the top of its tower one could look across the river to the village of Newburgh, where Isabella’s eldest sister, Margaret, lived with her eccentric husband, David Booth. When the weather was clear, the two girls crossed the firth to stay with the couple in their gray-shingled cottage clinging to the hillside overlooking the water. Margaret was an invalid and could not entertain the girls. While she napped and rocked in her chair, her forty-seven-year-old husband, who was called “the devil” by his neighbors because of his radical politics and his prodigious store of arcane knowledge, discussed the evils of tyranny and the glories of liberty with Mary and Isabella. Mary was thrilled to be treated like an adult by this man, who Godwin said was the only radical he knew who was smarter than himself. Booth was eager to exchange ideas with the daughter of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, talking to Mary as though she were extraordinary, a genius just like her parents.