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

by Charlotte Gordon

  When she heard this news, Mary was deeply concerned. Childbirth was a risky enough business for healthy women, but for those who were already weakened by chronic illness, it was a very dangerous and potentially fatal undertaking. She wanted to go straight to Fanny but was reluctant to leave the school in her sisters’ hands. During the long summer break, she was torn, haunted by the possibility of losing her dearest friend but unwilling to jeopardize the school’s future. Eliza and Everina were impossible to rely on and difficult to love: “I could as soon fly as open my heart to them,” Mary wrote to Fanny’s brother, George.

  In June, Newington Green played host to two celebrities from across the ocean, John and Abigail Adams. At age fifty, Adams had come to London in 1785 as the first American ambassador. Rather than attend an elegant West End congregation, he and Abigail had chosen Dr. Price’s church. Londoners sneered at them for preferring the old dissenter’s sermons to the preaching of a more fashionable minister. However, to the Adamses, there was no question about which parish would be theirs. Price had been, and still was, one of the most notable advocates for the American cause. Price’s ideas, said Adams, represented “the whole scope of my life.” Besides, the Adamses fit in there. To the radicals of Newington Green, Abigail’s homemade bonnets and John’s awkward manners, both of which occasioned hilarity among fashionable West Enders, were reassuring evidence that this couple cared more about the principles of liberty than the latest London trends. Law was essential, Adams wrote, to protect the weak from the strong and to safeguard the liberty of each citizen. Not only did Abigail agree, she also championed legal protections for women as well, having written to her husband when he and his fellow colonials were on the brink of declaring independence,

  in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies, we are determined to foment a Rebellion and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

  Although there is no record of Mary and the Adamses actually meeting that summer, it seems likely that in this small community their paths would have crossed. Certainly, Mary knew who the Adamses were, even if they were not yet aware of her. And soon enough the tables would turn—only a few years later, Abigail would become such a fan of Mary’s work that John would call her a “disciple of Wollstonecraft.” He himself would read Wollstonecraft’s book on the French Revolution, writing in the margin when she praised the American Revolution, “I thank you Miss W. May we long enjoy your esteem.”

  By the fall of 1785, Mary could no longer assuage her worries about Fanny’s health. She persuaded Mrs. Burgh to lend her money to book her passage to Lisbon. Though parents threatened to withdraw their children from the school if Mary was no longer at the helm, she brushed their concerns aside and set sail, arriving, after a thirteen-day voyage, just as Fanny’s labor began. Four hours after Mary walked in the door, Fanny gave birth to a baby boy. But neither Hugh nor Mary could rejoice, because Fanny was severely weakened by the travail. Over the next few days, she slowly faded away, brightening only when she held her child or saw Mary. By the end of the week, both she and the baby had died.

  For Mary, the loss was devastating. She tried to turn to faith, but she wrote to Fanny’s brother that “life seems a burden almost too heavy to be endured.…My head is stupid, and my heart sick and exhausted.…I can only anticipate misery.…I hope I shan’t live long.”

  CHAPTER 7

  MARY GODWIN: “THE SUBLIME AND RAPTUROUS MOMENT”

  [ 1814 ]

  April 1814, shortly after sixteen-year-old Mary returned from Scotland, Godwin warned his family to brace for the worst. His savings were all but depleted and he could be facing debtors’ prison, humiliation, and ruin. As a last hope, he invited Shelley to dinner to urge the young man to make good on his promises of a loan.

  When the fateful evening arrived, everyone was on edge, including Shelley. Thrown off course by his failed marriage, he felt demoralized and purposeless. But when he entered the drawing room at 41 Skinner Street, he knew instantly that something was about to change. A few nights earlier, on a long evening walk, he had seen “manifestations” that told him he would soon meet “the female who was destined to be mine,” as he later wrote his college friend, Thomas Hogg. He had even begun to “compose a letter to Harriet on the subject of my passion for another.” When the door of the drawing room opened and a pale girl with a blaze of red hair appeared, Shelley knew that his vision had just come true; this was the young woman of his dreams. She was Wollstonecraft’s daughter, the one Godwin daughter he had yet to meet. Transfixed, he stared, while she, newly aware of her power over men after David Booth’s attentions, allowed herself a flirtatious sidelong glance.

  Shelley seemed the very essence of a Romantic poet, with his disheveled hair, muddy boots, and passionate eyes. He had a general air of disarray and bewilderment, as though the world were too extraordinary for him to fathom. He wore his shirt open, exposing a pale chest. A few months before, Hogg had described him as “wild, intellectual, unearthly; like a spirit that has just descended from the sky; like a demon risen at that moment out of the ground.” For Godwin and Mary-Jane, Hogg’s portrait would prove to be eerily predictive. At first, Shelley seemed angelic, but before long he would harm every one of the Godwin girls, whether he meant to or not.

  Portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley by Amelia Curran, 1819. (illustration ill.9)

  When they took their places at the table, Jane was her usual talkative self, while Mary remained silent. Their sister Fanny was absent. Earlier that spring, she had become so depressed that Mary-Jane had packed her off to visit her Wollstonecraft aunts; later, Mary-Jane would claim that Fanny’s troubles were a result of her unrequited love for Shelley.

  To Shelley, Mary seemed remote, as pale and distant as the moon—the image he would come to use for her in his poetry. She had “thoughtful” greenish-gray eyes, an oval face, a small mouth, and a “gentle” voice. Her most notable attribute, though, was her hair. According to Jane, it was “of sunny and burnished brightness like the autumnal foliage when played upon by the rays of the setting sun; it sets in round her face and falls upon her shoulders in gauzy wavings and is so fine it looks as if the wind had tangled it together into a golden network…it was so fine one feared to disturb the beauty.” Though she was mostly silent, when she did talk, her frequent allusions and quotations revealed her erudition. Shelley was confounded. He had never met anyone like Mary Godwin. This is what her mother must have been like: an intellectual woman, a beautiful philosopher. His excitement grew as the dinner progressed. Here was the answer he had been seeking. Mary Godwin would spark his genius.

  In many ways it seems inevitable that Percy Shelley would fall in love with Mary Godwin. He was already half in love before they met, fascinated by the idea that Godwin and Wollstonecraft, the two standard-bearers of political liberty whom he admired with an almost religious fervor, had a daughter. With such parents, Mary had to be exceptional. Even when he was still happily married to Harriet and had first met Godwin, he had gazed appreciatively at the large portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft in Godwin’s study, intrigued to hear that young Mary was “very much like her mother.” Two years later, he would immortalize her heritage:

  They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,

  Of glorious parents, thou aspiring Child.

  I wonder not—for One then left this earth

  Whose life was like a setting planet mild,

  Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled

  Of its departing glory; still her fame

  Shines on thee, through the tempests dark and wild

  Which shake these latter days; and thou canst claim

  The shelter, from thy Sire, of an immo
rtal name.

  As for Mary, she was watching Percy as carefully as he was watching her. Like him, she was already half in love. From time to time that first night, he looked at her as though he were drinking her in, staring straight into her eyes as no one else ever had. Later he would say that he could see her soul glowing like “a lamp of vestal fire.”

  By the end of dinner it seemed to Mary that Shelley was the most fascinating man on earth. She also suspected that there was no better way to win her father’s heart than to befriend the young man. Godwin nodded after every word Shelley spoke, sending a signal to the family to defer to the young man’s opinions. Mary was happy to oblige, though disappointed that Shelley was already married. She consoled herself that Harriet was nowhere to be seen and that Shelley had already hinted at tragedies unseen in their marriage, misunderstandings cruel and heartbreaking. In fact, to her, he seemed lost and uncertain, a child who needed love.

  In the days that followed, Shelley and Mary saw each other when he came to dinner or when she worked behind the counter in the family’s store. The more time they spent together, the more attracted they became. To Mary, Shelley seemed both glamorous and profound, the most appealing man she had ever met. However, she was well aware that if they had a love affair, she, like Isabella, would have to brave a hostile world; there were few greater taboos at the time than a liaison with a married man. But Mary felt certain her father would support her just as Isabella’s father had given his blessing to his daughter. She knew her mother’s story, that Wollstonecraft had had Fanny out of wedlock, and that Godwin had still married her. He was the great philosopher of freedom. He had loved Mary Wollstonecraft, who had scorned the rules of society. Surely he would endorse a love affair with Shelley, especially since he had recommended the young man so enthusiastically.

  By June, Mary and Shelley wanted to meet privately, although still as “friends,” and they enlisted Jane to help them steal away. Jane agreed, though she was jealous that Shelley had chosen Mary and not her. Little had changed between the sisters; Jane both envied and admired Mary and still followed her brilliant half sister’s lead. Now Jane threw herself into helping the two young people arrange meetings and exchange messages, playing the role that Mary had with Isabella, enjoying the secrecy and the drama, but secretly hoping that Shelley might change his mind and pick her instead.

  In the afternoon, the girls set out together from Skinner Street. Fanny had returned from her visit to the Wollstonecraft aunts, but Mary and Jane left her behind, not trusting her to keep Mary’s secret. Once they were a safe distance from the house, Shelley appeared and Jane discreetly dropped back.

  The London streets were lovely at this time of year. Shop owners planted tubs of geraniums; ladies strolled past in their colorful muslin frocks; the mercers flung their doors open, hoping to tempt shoppers with their silks and satins. There were gardens scattered throughout the city if you knew where to find them, which Shelley did. Later, a nosy gardener told Mrs. Godwin that Jane had walked alone up and down the paths of Charterhouse Square “while the fair young lady and the young gentleman always retired to sit in the arbour.”

  As their relationship intensified, it became increasingly difficult to hide their feelings from inquiring eyes. Thomas Hogg came to visit Shelley and accompanied him on the brief walk from Shelley’s lodgings in Hatton Garden to Godwin’s bookshop, where Hogg thought they were going to meet the famous philosopher. But when they got there, “the door was partially and softly opened,” not by Godwin, Hogg recalled, but by a small figure who was “fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look.” She was wearing a tartan, he remembered, and in “a thrilling voice called, ‘Shelley!’ A thrilling voice answered, ‘Mary!’ ” She beckoned to Shelley and the young couple darted out of the room, leaving Hogg alone in the shop.

  Matters grew more serious when Mary took Shelley to her sacred spot, her mother’s grave in St. Pancras churchyard, and this soon became their favorite place to be alone. Here, they read aloud from books they carried with them, often Mary’s mother’s volumes, and discussed their favorite topics: Mary-Jane’s boorishness, Harriet’s lack of compassion, the sins of Shelley’s father, freedom, literature, the imagination, and the potential for a true and equal love between a man and a woman. They were both intrigued by dreams, visions, and the question of what happened after death. Was there rebirth? Was there an afterlife? Did Mary’s mother linger somewhere as a spirit, invisible to them, but alive all the same? Mary was sure she did; often, she could feel her “pale ghost” nearby. Difficult though it must have been for her, Jane maintained a discreet distance, giving them the opportunity to talk without being overheard.

  The Lovers’ Seat (1877): Victorian image of Shelley and Mary Godwin in old St. Pancras churchyard, painted long after both were dead. (illustration ill.10)

  For the first six weeks of their relationship, they maintained a strict physical distance during these meetings. For them, language was a passionate medium, and conversation an essential component of an intimate union. Later, Shelley would explain to Hogg that he fell in love with Mary not because of her beauty or the delicacy of her manners, which were self-evident and which any man might admire, but because of her originality, which he felt surpassed his own “in genuine elevation and magnificence.” He was also drawn to the “wildness and sublimity of her feelings” and her capacity for “ardent indignation and hatred” toward society’s injustices. Mary was moved when Shelley, a man whose friendship her father valued and needed, who had boldly published his own ideas though he was persecuted for his beliefs, told her how miserable he had been before he met her, how his marriage to Harriet was a sham, and how, during the past winter, he had “resigned all prospects of utility or happiness,” exhausted, trapped in a union that was “a gross & despicable superstition.”

  In mid-June, Shelley dined at the Godwins’ ten nights in a row. Oddly, Mary-Jane and Godwin did not appear to notice the growing attraction between the two young lovers, even though each evening they disappeared from the house for hours, ostensibly to take long walks. Perhaps this is because they always left with Jane in tow, or maybe it was because the Godwins were preoccupied with their money troubles. At any rate, without Fanny to act as informer, they remained entirely in the dark.

  Finally, on June 27, Mary took matters into her own hands. She stood in front of her mother’s gravestone, looked straight into Shelley’s eyes, and did what no young woman was supposed to do: she declared she loved him and threw herself into his arms. As Shelley remembered it, Mary was inspired “by a spirit that sees into the truth of things.…The sublime and rapturous moment when she confessed herself mine, who had so long been hers in secret cannot be painted to mortal imaginations.”

  They lay on the grass and touched each other with the “full ardour of love,” as Mary later reported. What exactly she meant by these words is not clear. It seems unlikely that they fully consummated their relationship on Wollstonecraft’s grave, given all the difficulties involved—Mary’s inexperience and the public setting, not to mention the complicated undergarments worn by Englishwomen. Nevertheless, both of them marked this day as the start of their sexual relationship.

  Both Mary and Shelley would have been startled to know that this intensely private moment would become famous, that their kisses would be discussed in literary conferences and college classrooms, their affair the subject of speculation and a focal point for literary critics. But the union of Shelley and Mary is a literary moment like no other. Their love would beget some of the greatest works of the entire Romantic movement. Shelley would immortalize his feelings for Mary in the dedication of his poem The Revolt of Islam:

  How beautiful and calm and free thou wert

  In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain

  Of Custom thou didst burst and rend in twain.

  For Mary, this was her first moment of unrestrained self-expression, her chance to assert her own radical ideas about relationships. It was also a way to le
ave Skinner Street, a way to break free from Mary-Jane. Always her mother’s daughter, she believed she and Percy could make their own rules. Later, Shelley would capture her words in his poem Rosalind and Helen, in which Mary’s alter ego, Helen, tells her lover, “But our church shall be the starry night, / Our altar the grassy earth outspread, / And our priest the muttering wind.”

  Afterward, they referred to this date as Shelley’s birthday, the day he was truly born, but it would have been more accurately described as Mary’s birthday, since it was her life that would take the more decisive turn. Shelley was already a social outcast; he had been expelled from college for atheism, broken ties with his father, and eloped with Harriet. An affair with Mary could not do his reputation much more harm. But by kissing Shelley, Mary had committed a far graver offense than Shelley ever could; the conventions that governed women’s behavior were far stricter than those that governed men’s. In Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park—which was being readied for publication even as Mary was lying down in the grass with Shelley—the doom that came to young women who stray was laid out with the exactitude of a Greek tragedy. Pretty Maria, who runs away with a handsome scoundrel, is ruined, condemned to spend the rest of her life in exile.

  These were the rules and Mary knew them—all genteel young women did—and yet, although she suspected there would be trouble, she did not dread the future. Just the opposite. This is what she had been dreaming of, a grand romance! She felt as though she had been led into a sacred precinct where few had traveled, and she listened raptly to Shelley’s stories of suffering, never suspecting that many of them were false. Shelley claimed untruly that his father had once banished him to a mental asylum. He also hinted that his wife Harriet had been unfaithful and that he was not sure if the baby she was expecting was really his—another fabrication.