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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Having tackled this contradiction in her writing life, she wanted to liberate herself from the restrictions that governed sexuality—a more dangerous enterprise than any she had embarked on before. Although the details are missing from the historical record, by early fall her relationship with Fuseli was sufficiently charged to make Fuseli’s wife uneasy. The two translated revolutionary pamphlets together and talked of taking a trip to France. Mary relished her life and their relationship. She wrote Everina, “My die is cast!—I could not now resign intellectual pursuits for domestic comforts.”

  Although to the modern ear, the phrase “intellectual pursuits” might sound rather tame, it was code for a remarkable proclamation. Mary was declaring her right to live the kind of public life most people believed was impossible for women. Granted, she had been living as an intellectual for the last three years and had already declared that she was the first of “a new genus,” but she had never before stated her position with such force to herself or to her sisters. Now she was fiercely asserting her right to break the rules that governed women, even though she knew that a truly public life devoted to politics and ideas, rather than a private life of domesticity, would expose her to bitter criticism.

  The first test of her mettle came that November, when the sixty-year-old Edmund Burke, the greatest Whig orator and writer of the era, condemned the French Revolution, publishing an angry response to Dr. Price’s book of the previous year, Reflections on the Revolution in France, which Mary had praised in a review for Johnson. Mary read Burke’s attack with outrage. Tradition should be respected, Burke intoned, government revered. Above all, change should be regarded with suspicion and liberty treated with caution.

  To Mary, this was anathema. Just twenty years earlier, Burke had supported the American Revolution, staking his reputation on the just cause of liberty for the United States. She was indignant that this champion of freedom was now arguing against the greatest revolution of all time. But Burke had actually always been far more conservative than his supporters realized. He represented the interests of the landed gentry and only viewed American independence as the proper course because the colonies were costing the British government more than they were worth. In addition, he felt they had displayed a talent for self-government since the seventeenth century. When it came to the French, Burke deplored what he viewed as the Revolution’s irrational and apocalyptic leap into a future that dispensed with the traditions he believed were crucial to preserving civilization.

  Burke’s call to arms was an instant success. He had tapped into the age-old English distrust of their French neighbors, stirring up fear that revolutionary fever might spread across the Channel, launching a wave of conservatism that swept across London, crushing liberal politics and politicians with its force. Mary hated how readers swallowed Burke’s propaganda. He attacked all that she valued, placing “precedent, authority, and example” ahead of the claims of liberty. In addition, he had insulted her mentor, Dr. Price.

  It was time to act, Mary decided: she would write a rebuttal to Burke’s Reflections. When she proposed this idea to Johnson, he immediately saw its merits, ethically and financially. He promised to print her response to Burke as fast as she could write it, but would do so without revealing her identity.

  Mary set to work. Her refutation would be direct and truthful, she decided, as though she were at Johnson’s dinner table, bringing up topics as they occurred to her instead of preaching from a pulpit. She would also allow herself to make use of emotion to charge the piece with Romantic fervor. She wanted to differentiate herself from Burke’s carefully constructed imagery and “turgid bombast,” criticizing his “flowers of rhetoric,” which, ironically, she characterized as feminine. A veteran columnist, Mary knew that her best strategy would be to reveal him as the self-aggrandizing politician she believed him to be.

  Her well-reasoned, often witty rebuttals show how carefully she crafted the paragraphs she claimed were spontaneous. When Burke wrote, “[The poor] must respect that property of which they cannot partake.…They must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice,” Mary returned, “It is, Sir, possible to render the poor happier in this world, without depriving them of the consolation which you gratuitously grant them in the next.” Her opponent’s reverence for tradition, she said, led him to endorse all sorts of evils simply because they existed in the past. Slavery was a case in point. Should we cling to this hideous trade simply because it is “old”?

  She also took issue with Burke’s praise of the English aristocracy for its paternalistic attitude toward the poor. “Charity is not a condescending distribution of alms but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits, founded on respect for humanity,” she wrote. No aristocrat had ever taken care of her debts, or supported her endeavors, whereas Johnson, her dear middle-class friend, had supported her and paid her generously for her work. She responded to Burke’s gilded overview of English history by accusing the statesman of being a “champion of property” rather than a “friend of liberty.” It is the future, she said, that holds promise. Reformation, not nostalgia, will save humanity. If men like Burke would step aside and make room for the new era, the utopian visions of the revolutionaries had a chance of becoming reality.

  Halfway through writing, Mary broke down. It hit her, quite suddenly, that she was going head to head with one of the most powerful men in England, debating principles the majority of Englishmen regarded as cornerstones: the sanctity of property, the preservation of inheritance, and the essential value of the aristocracy. In despair, she trailed over to Johnson’s house, tail down, and told him she was going to quit. Johnson, who by now knew how to handle her moods, let her make her excuses—her ill health, her poor endurance, her lack of a formal education—and then said he would destroy the pages she had already sent him and that she did not need to finish, especially if she did not think she was up to it. No approach could have been more effective. She later admitted he had “piqued her pride.”

  Reignited, she went back to work, finishing so quickly that only twenty-eight days after Burke’s Reflections was published, A Vindication of the Rights of Men appeared in the bookstores, the first response to Burke in what would soon become a frenzied debate. Despite her hesitation, Mary had written faster than any of Burke’s other opponents, and within three weeks Rights of Men had sold out. As her readers well knew, Mary’s title was a direct reference to the French revolutionaries’ Déclaration des droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen of the previous year, and was a trumpet call, announcing her support of the French revolutionaries.

  At 150 pages, or about 45,000 words, Rights of Men was a substantial piece of work, and it received positive reviews. Even opponents acknowledged that the anonymous author had written a strong argument infused with passion. After such a warm reception, Johnson and Mary decided to reveal her name in the second edition, a radical step. But their optimism proved to be misplaced. With the revelation of Mary’s identity, reviewers condemned her as a female upstart rather than addressing the ideas she had put forth. Critics who had originally praised the work now complained about its faults. The book was suddenly incoherent and absurd. Horace Walpole, the archconservative writer and art historian, called Mary a “hyena in petticoats.” Other critics contented themselves with ridicule:

  The rights of men asserted by a fair lady! The age of chivalry cannot be over, or the sexes have changed their ground.…We should be sorry to raise a horse-laugh against a fair lady; but we were always taught to suppose that the rights of women were the proper theme of the female sex.

  Mary was prepared for these attacks. She knew that she was venturing into taboo territory. But after the positive response to the first anonymous edition, her courage had grown. She was ready to stand behind her ideas. Eliza’s example had shown her the crippling consequences of the basic precepts of English common law—that wives could not own their own property, enter into business contracts, or control their own money. In 178
2, there had been an attempt to reform the misogynistic legal code, but the best that lawmakers could do was to declare it illegal to beat one’s wife with a stick that was thicker than a thumb. In the intellectual world, these beliefs translated into the assumption that women were incapable of independent thought. To Mary, the best way to fight back was to prove what a woman could do, and that meant acknowledging her role as the author of Rights of Men.

  Fortunately, her fellow radicals gave her enthusiastic support. Thomas Paine, deep into the composition of his own Rights of Man, told Mary that he regarded her as a comrade in arms, and when Mary sent her Vindication to the frail Dr. Price, he said he was “happy in having such an advocate.” Many new supporters also came flooding in, liberals who believed that the author of Rights of Men had taken on a tyrant—Burke—and come out the victor. They clamored to meet Mary, buying her book in droves. As a result, the book sold about three thousand copies, a significant number for the time.

  Flush with her earnings, the most she had ever made, Mary bought new furniture, adopted a cat, and moved to a house on Store Street in Bloomsbury, which was larger and far more gracious than her rooms in Southwark. Visitors flocked to her doorstep, wanting to meet this outspoken woman. When she was not working or receiving admirers, she strolled with friends through the nearby gardens that stretched behind the British Museum, now the site of University College London.

  One of Mary’s admirers, William Roscoe, commissioned her portrait, and the famous artist John Opie also asked to paint her. Sitting for these portraits forced Mary to think more carefully about how she appeared in public. She still refused to twist her hair into ringlets, paint her cheeks with rouge, or wear a frilly gown. But she did pin up her hair and buy expensive new dresses made of rich fabrics. For the Roscoe portrait, she wore black (no lace, no pink) with a plain white fichu tucked into her bodice, which made her look more like a prime minister than a young female radical.

  Engraving by Ridley, based on a painting by Opie. (illustration ill.16)

  In the Opie portrait, she looks slightly more approachable, but she still wore a dark dress and again refused any of the standard feminine props of the era.

  The overall impression created by both pictures is one of gravitas. She does not smile. She does not try to charm her audience. Her stern, steady gaze says she is a woman capable of reasoned and essential argument, a philosopher as well as a person of deep feeling, possessing both passion and conviction, idealism and empathy. The portraits capture her right at the moment when she was on the brink of becoming the Mary Wollstonecraft readers recognize today, author of one of the most important works in the history of political philosophy.

  CHAPTER 13

  MARY GODWIN: “MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW”

  [ 1816 ]

  the winter of 1816, London was transfixed by the scandalous doings of the twenty-eight-year-old Lord Byron, one of the most famous men in Europe. His poems had brought him fame, and his shocking love affairs had given him notorious superstardom. Having left Mary behind in Bishopsgate, her stepsister Claire had decided to stay in the city, sometimes with Shelley, sometimes with the Godwins, and before long she, too, was gripped by Byron fever.

  To Claire, as to many young ladies of the era, Byron’s name served as both cautionary tale and aphrodisiac. She had read many of his poems, which were famous for their frank descriptions of illicit love affairs and their exotic settings. In 1814, he had published The Corsair, set in a Turkish harem, which sold ten thousand copies on the day of publication—a feat no other author had ever accomplished. Proper English ladies warned their daughters to beware of his wiles, but how could they resist? Byron was wickedly handsome and his poems too thrilling to ignore. He was “mad, bad and dangerous to know,” said Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his spurned lovers. A world traveler, a man pursued by legions of women, a radical who spoke on behalf of the working people, and a bestselling poet: in Claire’s eyes, he was just what she needed.

  Claire was excited to hear that Byron had recently returned to London and had been spotted attending plays at Drury Lane, the city’s premier theater. If she could get him to take an interest in her, in her singing or perhaps her acting, then she could begin to make inroads in her competition with Mary. If she could do more—get him to befriend her, or, best (and most impossible) of all, fall in love with her—she would for once have the upper hand. No one had yet heard of Shelley, but everyone had heard of Byron. With him at her side, Claire would at last be the victor in her struggle with her stepsister.

  She began her campaign by peppering Byron with letters, introducing herself as a sophisticated radical who believed that marriage was one of the great evils of modern society: “I can never resist the temptation of throwing a pebble at it as I pass by,” she declared. She also made sure to reveal her connection to Godwin, as well as to Shelley and Mary, telling Byron the story of their escapades in France and Switzerland and the ostracism Shelley and Mary now faced. Byron was already interested in the younger poet, who had sent him a copy of Queen Mab, a work Byron deemed promising. A veteran of scandals and gossip, he felt sympathy for Shelley’s situation. In addition, he was intrigued by his liaison with Mary. He admired Wollstonecraft as well as Godwin. Like most radicals, he was fascinated by the thought of their daughter and was curious to meet her.

  Portrait of Lord Byron by Thomas Phillips, 1814: “Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” (illustration ill.17)

  At another time in his life, Byron might have ignored Claire, but that winter he was in a miserable state of self-doubt and loneliness. He was not writing any poetry. The public had gone from worshipping him to viewing his escapades with fascinated horror. His yearlong marriage to Anne Isabella Milbanke, which he had imagined would give him stability, respectability, and companionship, had erupted into recrimination, slander, and threats of prosecution. Anne had fled back to her parents and told everyone that her husband had abused her and was having an affair with his half sister Augusta—claims that were mostly true. Augusta, who was pregnant (the paternity of this baby is still uncertain), had lived with Byron in his stately home at 13 Piccadilly Terrace, opposite Green Park, but had moved out that spring in a vain attempt to quiet the gossip. Although Byron supported this decision, her departure had left him feeling abandoned. He was not invited anywhere. Old friends turned their backs on him. Yet crowds of curious fans still flocked to Piccadilly Terrace trying to peer in his windows or climb over the garden walls. When he was not drinking, or riding his Flemish mare, he was immersed in legal negotiations with Anne’s family for the couple’s separation. Claire’s letters, with their rushes of compliments and airy references to literature and philosophy, were a welcome balm. Here was a young woman who still admired him despite, or maybe even because of, the scandals he had caused.

  He wrote back to her and proposed an assignation. Claire, delighted at her success and hoping to lure him closer, revealed that she had no guardian, parent, or brother to cause any difficulties. This suited Byron very well; he was tired of fending off the angry husbands and fathers of his lovers. He told her to meet him in his private box at the theater and then again, secretly, at Piccadilly Terrace, where they made love almost immediately. Claire was exhilarated: she had only dared to hope for a few conversations; now, she was the great man’s lover. Maybe she would even become his permanent mistress. After all, if Mary could live with Shelley, she could live with Byron. It would be good for Shelley’s career; Byron would help him. And good for hers as well, although what her career was going to be was as yet unclear. All she knew was that she was a freethinker and that she intended to carry the lamp of Enlightenment forward in the spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft.

  For a few weeks, Byron was intrigued. He read Claire’s story “The Idiot” and praised it; unfortunately, no copy of this story still exists. When he heard her sing, which was Claire’s special talent, her voice became the inspiration for one of his most beautiful love poems:

  There be none of Beauty�
�s daughters

  With a magic like thee;

  And like music on the waters

  Is thy sweet voice to me.

  But his enthusiasm soon ebbed. When Byron told her that he did not want a mistress and was not in love with her, Claire, desperate to retain her hold, upped the ante. Mary had come up to London that spring to join Shelley while he fought his legal battles. Realizing that Byron would be intrigued, Claire offered Mary to Byron as a kind of prize, telling him her stepsister admired his work and would like to meet him. It was true that Mary did love Byron’s poetry. Long before she had met Shelley, Byron had been her image of the ideal poet. She and her sisters had read accounts of his adventures in the newspapers and, like other girls their age, had hoped to catch sight of him at society functions. She had memorized long passages from Childe Harold; To Thyrza, which she also knew by heart, had buoyed her during the terrible weeks before she ran away with Shelley. She had inscribed four of its most famous lines in the copy of Queen Mab that Shelley had given her, starting off with her own solemn vow of love—“But I am exclusively thine—by the kiss of love”—and then adding Byron’s words:

  The glance that none saw beside

  The smile none else might understand

  The whispered thought of hearts allied

  The pressure of the thrilling hand

  After which she concluded with her own dramatic flourish: “I have pledged myself to thee and sacred is the gift,” words that sound strikingly similar to a marriage vow, a substitute for the ceremony they had not yet undertaken.