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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Œconomy & Self-Denial Are Necessary, one of William Blake’s six woodcuts for Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life. (illustration ill.13)

  In fact, poverty was a nagging concern for Mary, despite the steady wage she was now earning from Johnson. The financial insecurity of her childhood haunted her, as did the precariousness of her writing life. The threat of running out of money drove her to write, study, and publish at a feverish pace. That summer, despite her shaky language skills, she tackled two translations: a treatise by the French finance minister, Jacques Necker, The Significance of Religious Theories, and a German educational book, Christian Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children. Both books stretched Mary’s capacities to the breaking point, but she managed to complete them.

  For the modern reader, these volumes are noteworthy because Mary made many dramatic departures from the original texts, not because of her poor grasp of the languages but for purely philosophical reasons. This was particularly true of the Salzmann work. When she disagreed with his theories or felt he was neglecting an important point, she felt no compunction about altering his words. For instance, she loathed his celebration of aristocrats and his sentimental effusions about family life, especially his belief that the wife must be completely subordinate to the husband. Sometimes she even omitted entire passages, inserting in their place her own treatises on the evils of female fashion and the importance of a good education for girls—insertions that anticipate some of the most important themes in her future work. She changed the name of Salzmann’s heroine to Mary and invented a scene in which Mary begs her mother to let her get dressed up for a wedding the family has been invited to attend. Her mother cautions against this, but Mary persists, and on the morning of the wedding, she puts on stays for the first time and discovers they are like “fetters.” Things get even worse when the hairdresser arrives:

  [He] put her hair in papers, which used to flow in natural locks on her neck and shoulders; he twisted them very hard, and pinched them with hot irons. Poor Mary trembled, because she expected every moment that the hot irons would touch her forehead or cheeks, and asked every moment if he would not soon be done. But he begged her to have patience, and, after curling and frizzling her hair above half an hour, he bid her look in the glass, where she saw a little face peeping out of a curled wig. She had then a silk slip laced tight to her body, and over it a long gauze dress so stuck out with trimmings and artificial flowers, that she could scarcely move, being so incumbered with finery.

  Mary eventually pleads with her mother to leave the wedding early and go home. When her mother asks, “Why do you wish to go, when you see such good company and amusement here?” Mary replies:

  Of what use are they to me…when I cannot enjoy any thing? If I had on my cotton jacket and straw hat, then I should be merry, and run and skip; but in this dress I am bound like a prisoner. Sometimes my hair tickles me, my feathers and flowers keep my head stiff, my stays hurt me, and when I begin to play, my flounces, flowers, or frock, catch every tree. Nay, the boys tread on my train on purpose to see me look silly.

  Of course, “Mary’s” lament is the translator’s, not the author’s, but because Wollstonecraft’s name was not attached to Elements of Morality, the reader was led to believe that this vivid description of the restrictive nature of women’s clothing was composed by the German scholar, a brilliant strategic maneuver on Wollstonecraft’s part; she could air a controversial view and save herself from public castigation. What better way to enter the debate over the limitations placed on women than under the cover of a foreign male author’s identity? Salzmann himself never found out. The irony is that her disguise proved so effective that for more than two hundred years her ideas on this subject remained buried in this little-read tome and were only recently unearthed by literary scholars.

  In 1787, however, Mary was encouraged by the fact that no one greeted the Salzmann translation with outrage. She felt increasingly confident about her abilities to express her opinions in print. And so when Johnson and his friend Thomas Christie asked Mary to serve as one of the primary book reviewers for a new literary magazine that would feature the writing of their intellectual circle and defend the cause of reform against conservatives, Mary was elated to accept their offer. This new challenge would allow her to develop her ideas and sharpen her skills as a member of a stable of writers, rather than have to forge a literary career entirely on her own.

  CHAPTER 11

  MARY GODWIN: LONDON AND BISHOPSGATE

  [ 1814–1815 ]

  , Jane, and Shelley sailed back to England in the middle of a September storm. Mary “was sick as death & was obliged to go to bed,” Jane wrote, happily recording that this left her alone with Shelley on the deck while “the waves which had become terribly high broke over us.” They did not have enough money to pay the captain for their passage, but Shelley reassured the worried girls that he would find the funds once they docked. However, when they arrived ashore and went straight to Shelley’s London bank for the cash, they discovered that Harriet had emptied his account. Shelley wanted to go to her and demand his money back, but Mary urged him to avoid a confrontation. She suggested that they approach her childhood friends, the Voyseys, a family with two daughters around the same age as Jane and Mary, for a loan and a place to stay. But when they arrived at the Voyseys’ house, Mrs. Voysey refused to see them.

  This was their first taste of the rejections, rebuffs, and snubs that lay ahead. Despite its rapid growth, middle-class London was still a small town. Everyone had heard about the girls’ escapade and few people wanted to befriend them. Scandal was contagious, particularly sexual peccadilloes. If any young woman admitted that she even knew Mary Godwin, she endangered not only her reputation, but that of her entire family. Social survival depended on shunning those who had gone beyond the pale; few had the imagination or the courage to break this code.

  Left with no other option, Shelley hired a hackney to take them to the Westbrooks’ stately home on quiet Chapel Street near Grosvenor Square where Harriet, in her last trimester of pregnancy, was living with her parents. This well-to-do neighborhood was very different from any Mary and Jane had ever inhabited, and the squalid inns they had endured in Europe had reinforced the girls’ sense of their own poverty. They had tried to view their privations as the price of freedom, but rats, dirt, and dry crusts of bread are not the stuff of romance, and it seemed unfair that stolid, bourgeois Harriet had Shelley’s money and they did not.

  The captain had not trusted Shelley to return and so had sent one of his boatmen to travel with them until they came up with the payment. When Shelley disappeared into the Westbrooks’ house, the sailor and the girls were forced to wait outside for more than two hours, an awkward arrangement that no amount of banter or good cheer could rescue. The girls worried that Shelley would change his mind, that Harriet would talk him into giving their marriage another try, or, worse, that she would decide to join their trio. Neither Mary nor Jane was at all keen on this last idea, but Shelley still nursed the notion of creating a commune of free-minded, loving young people.

  At last Shelley emerged, smiling, with the funds they needed, and after a night in an inn on Oxford Street, he found them a simple house on Margaret Street, near Chapel Street so he could continue his negotiations with Harriet. Mary, meanwhile, tried to think of any friends or acquaintances who might sympathize with her. She made overtures to an old governess, Maria Smith, but the Godwins had already turned Smith against her. One afternoon, Mary-Jane and Fanny paid an awkward visit to Margaret Street, ringing the bell but refusing to come inside when Shelley invited them. They only wanted to see Jane, they said, leaving Mary to watch from the window while they talked to her stepsister on the front steps. Furious at the pain they had caused Mary, Shelley wrote Godwin a letter that afternoon demanding a reason for their cruel treatment. He and Mary had done nothing wrong, he said; they had only attempted to abide by Godwin’s own philosophy of freedom
and free love. A week later Godwin’s reply came: He wanted nothing more to do with Mary and had ordered his family and friends to shut her out of their lives.

  Shelley was all Mary had left. In tears, she told him that he would have to be everything to her now: father, lover, and friend. Jane was there, too, of course, but her presence had become increasingly troubling. In the early stages of pregnancy, Mary went to sleep early, and instead of keeping her company in bed, Shelley stayed up late talking to her stepsister. Mary had no illusions about the situation, knowing that Jane was relishing her time alone with Shelley. As the fall wore on, the two of them drew closer, and instead of regarding Jane as a charming nuisance, as he had in France, Shelley now sought her out, confiding in her and taking her on jaunts around the city while Mary rested.

  One night early in October, Shelley, who liked frightening people—particularly young girls, a habit left over from the days when he had terrorized his little sisters—regaled Jane with a lurid description of how disobedient soldiers were punished by having strips of skin peeled from their backs with a sharp knife. Jane squirmed in delicious horror. When the candles had burned low, Shelley could not resist topping off the night by saying it was now “the witching hour,” the time when evil spirits roamed the earth and ghosts took possession of human bodies. Jane screamed and fled upstairs to her room. Happy with his night’s work, Shelley repaired to the bedroom he shared with Mary, only to be interrupted by an excited Jane. Shelley recorded what happened next:

  Just as the dawn was struggling with moon light Jane remarked in me that unutterable expression which had affected her with so much horror before. She described it as expressing a mixture of deep sadness & conscious power over her…her horror & agony increased even to the most dreadful convulsions. She shr[i]eked & writhed on the floor.

  Shelley relished the effect he had on Jane, whose volatility was so different from the silence of his self-contained lover. Theatrical and imaginative, Jane was the perfect audience. She gasped at his tales. She wanted him to comfort her afterward. True, Jane was far less mature than Mary: she could not talk to him about his artistic soul, reassure him of his own genius, steady him by discussing Tacitus, or help him understand Byron’s poetry as Mary did, but Jane was exhilarating precisely because she loved surprises. If there was nothing exciting happening, she was instantly bored.

  One might think that there was enough real-life excitement in their lives to satisfy Jane’s cravings. However, Jane was finding social ostracism more tedious than she had expected. Instead of being lionized as disciples of Mary Wollstonecraft, they were completely ignored. No one came to call. No one seemed to admire them. She and Mary napped, sewed, and read while Shelley drummed the streets of London looking for money. With his customary flourish, Shelley assured them he could take care of things. But when it became clear to Harriet that her erstwhile husband was not going to return she refused to hand over the rest of the funds she had taken from his bank. After all, she, too, was pregnant, and her baby was due soon. Shelley’s father was no help either. Shocked at his son’s behavior, Sir Timothy would not advance any money, and so, unable to pay their bills, Shelley became an expert at avoiding creditors, sleeping away from the house and spending time in remote spots to avoid being thrown into a debtors’ prison.

  This level of deprivation was new to both girls. Although they had grown up in a house perennially short on cash, they had always had new dresses, wholesome meals—Mary-Jane was a good cook—and vacations away from the city in the summer. They had not known how difficult it was to be poor, truly poor, nor how lonely life in a big city could be. To help Shelley, they spent hours in the offices of banks, appeasing and avoiding creditors, writing pleading letters to acquaintances who might help them, and, worst of all, packing their things and moving, constantly moving. They changed lodgings four times that first year to escape from angry merchants and to avoid paying rents they could not afford. It was neither fun nor dramatic to live in small apartments in unsafe parts of town and scrimp on everything, even food. The pregnant Mary was unable to do much, and so most of the heavy work fell to Jane and one hired servant. It is no wonder, then, that Jane and Shelley relished their nights of excitement. Under cover of darkness, Jane could be a beautiful damsel, helpless and passionate, desirable and interestingly vulnerable. For the first time, she could also feel superior to Mary. As for Shelley, with Jane, he could escape his growing sensation of helplessness by being both knave and rescuer, torturer and comforter—all of which were better than being a debt-ridden, cast-off son, an irresponsible husband to Harriet, and a disappointing lover to Mary.

  The weather was beautiful that fall, and in the afternoons, when they were not fending off creditors, the trio would stroll to a pond near Primrose Hill, where Shelley would launch small paper boats he had spent hours creating in their drawing room. Sometimes they would return to the pond in the evening, light the boats on fire, and watch them flash and sizzle out on the water, the charred skeletons floating for a moment before they sank. Many years later, Mary would remember the eagerness with which he sailed his tiny craft, remarking that this was how he “sheltered himself from the storms and disappointments, the pain and sorrow, that beset his life.”

  MARY-JANE HAD NOT GIVENane had not given up hope that her daughter might return home to Skinner Street. She argued that the family could repair the damage done to Jane’s reputation by blaming the entire situation on the two lovers and that Jane could settle back into her old life without too much difficulty.

  Jane, however, did not relish the idea of being an ordinary girl again. She liked being out from under her mother’s thumb and decided to act on her feeling that she was one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “true” daughters by adopting Wollstonecraft’s birthday (April 27) as her own. What better way to demonstrate her rebirth and assert her independence from Mary-Jane? In this spirit, she also decided to change her name. No longer would she be known as Jane, with its echo of her mother, but by the more romantic-sounding name of Claire. Mary did not record her feelings about Jane’s metamorphosis, but her irritation at her sister was steadily mounting. Not only did Jane/Claire want to steal Shelley, she wanted Mary’s legacy, too. The sisters squabbled and fought. But Jane persisted, undeterred by Mary’s disapproval.

  For Jane, one of the most appealing parts of her name change was its symbolism. In French, claire means clear or transparent, as Jane well knew, but during the Revolution it had also come to mean authentic, sincere, and truthful. Even better, Clara (the anglicized version of Claire) was the name of a famous literary character in the English translation of Rousseau’s bestseller La Nouvelle Héloïse. In this romantic love triangle, Julie, the heroine, and Clara, her best friend and cousin, are both in love with St. Preux, their tutor. St. Preux loves Julie but confides in Clara, paradoxically drawing closer and closer to Clara, until, one day, Julie tragically dies. With Julie out of the picture, St. Preux realizes that he loved Clara all along. He pursues her, but Clara rejects him.

  This was a gratifying plot from the newly minted Claire’s point of view. Rousseau glorified the position she found herself in with Mary and Shelley. Instead of simply being the third wheel, she could see herself as a heroine in her own right, the closest confidante of both the hero and his beloved. The best part for Claire, of course, was how Clara eventually wins the day, taking center stage at the end of the story. In his Confessions, Rousseau said that he had designed two heroines with “analogous characters”:

  I made one dark, the other fair; one lively, the other gentle; one prudent, the other weak, but with so touching a weakness, that virtue seemed to gain by it. I gave to one a lover, whose tender friend the other was, and even something more; but I admitted no rivalry, no quarrelling, no jealousy, because it is difficult for me to imagine painful feelings.

  These parallels were not lost on Claire, having steeped herself in Rousseau at the end of the summer. She was dark, like Clara. Mary was fair, like Julie. She was lively; Mary was ge
ntle. She was not particularly prudent, but Mary was most certainly weak. In fact, Mary, like Julie, might well die prematurely—a sad thought, but an enticing one for Claire, since then the way would be clear.

  Portrait of Claire Clairmont by Amelia Curran, 1819. (illustration ill.14)

  Imagining herself as a literary heroine elevated the ordinary moments of Claire’s day, adding glamour to the many privations of her life. Inspired by Shelley, she even began talking about forming a “community of women.” She dreamed of writing a novel whose heroine would bravely flout anything that stood in the way of her desires; the most important thing, she believed, was to live authentically. Shelley had urged her to read one of his favorite books, James Lawrence’s Empire of the Nairs; or, The Rights of Women. Mary had read it, too, but had not been enthusiastic about Lawrence’s unorthodox pronouncements on love. “Let every female,” he declared, “live perfectly uncontrolled by any man and enjoying every freedom, which the males only have hitherto enjoyed; let her choose and change her lover as she please.” Although Mary appreciated the idea of independence for women—after all, this was the central tenet of her mother’s work—she was less keen on the idea of having many different lovers. To Mary, an ideal relationship was a permanent connection. To please Shelley, she said she supported Lawrence’s vision, but in her heart she clung to her belief in commitment. But Claire, like Shelley, was inspired by Lawrence’s philosophy. In the years to come, she would hold to these principles, refusing all offers of marriage.