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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Shelley’s active role in editing the book has since led to accusations that Mary was not the real author of Frankenstein. However, scholars who have studied the final draft that the couple worked on together estimate that Shelley contributed, at most, about four thousand original words to Mary’s 72,000-word novel—a contribution that demonstrates the substantial role he played in shaping the book but which also illustrates that it was mostly written by Mary. Furthermore, fifteen years later, long after Shelley had died, Mary would make extensive revisions, producing the version read by most students today.

  But unfortunately, there are still those who claim that Frankenstein was essentially Shelley’s creation, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Great male authors have rarely faced such attacks, even though other works of literature, such as The Waste Land and The Great Gatsby, were edited far more extensively than Frankenstein. There is a particular irony to these accusations since Shelley’s emendations did not always improve Mary’s story. In fact, sometimes his suggestions made passages wordier and more difficult to understand. Moreover, both Mary and Shelley prized their ability to collaborate. Their shared passion for literature was one of the reasons they had fallen in love in the first place. Indeed, Frankenstein is doomed because he seals himself off from others—his family and friends as well as his creature.

  At any rate, for Mary, there was no reason to steal from Shelley’s trove of ideas when she had so many of her own. The creature’s suffering was meant to reflect her situation, not Shelley’s. Unmarried mothers and illegitimate children were hated by society, just like Frankenstein’s creature. Wollstonecraft became an outcast the moment she had Fanny. Fanny became an outcast the moment she was born. This was profoundly unfair, Mary believed, the result of blind prejudice. Fanny was an innocent child. Her mother had done nothing wrong. She should not have been ostracized. Neither, for that matter, should she. Her crime was nothing more than loving Shelley. Claire, too, was about to give birth to an illegitimate child. For all that Claire and Mary competed with one another, Mary did not think that Claire deserved condemnation for loving Byron, and neither did her unborn baby.

  Ten days before Christmas, more bad news arrived in a letter from Shelley’s friend and bookseller Thomas Hookham. The abandoned Harriet, who had been silent that autumn, neither responding to Shelley’s letters nor initiating any contact herself, had jumped off a bridge into the River Thames. According to the newspaper report, she was “far advanced in pregnancy.” Harriet had joined the pantheon of those who, hated by the world, chose death over the pain of rejection. But in Harriet’s case, Mary had participated in the ruin by running away with Shelley. She knew that Harriet had blamed her for stealing her husband, and she wept over her complicity in Harriet’s suffering. If Shelley were ever to abandon her, Mary worried that she would follow in the footsteps of Harriet and her sister. She wrote to Shelley that winter, “Ah! My best love to you do I owe every joy every perfection that I may enjoy or boast of—Love me, sweet, for ever—”

  These two tragic deaths marked a turning point in Mary and Shelley’s life together. Mary was plagued with depression and guilt, and Harriet’s death spurred Shelley into a burst of frenetic activity. Having evinced little interest in three-year-old Ianthe or two-year-old Charles while their mother was alive, he raced up to London to demand sole custody from Harriet’s grieving parents, the Westbrooks, who were horrified. How could this wild-eyed lunatic who had ruined their daughter’s life think he had any right to children he hardly knew? But opposition such as theirs generally inspired Shelley to rise to new antagonistic heights. And so when it was clear the Westbrooks were going to refuse his demands, Shelley launched a campaign, just as he had when he had tried to foment revolution in Ireland or when he had persuaded Mary to run away with him. He wrote letter after letter to influential friends and members of Harriet’s family and plotted various plans of action, many of which included kidnapping.

  To build his case, Shelley decided that he and Mary should get married immediately, and so Mary left William behind with Claire, traveled to London, and vowed to love and honor Shelley in St. Mildred’s Church on Bread Street. Afterward, Shelley wrote to Byron, “I need not inform you that this is simply with us a measure of convenience, and that our opinions as to the importance of this pretended sanction, and all the prejudices connected with it, remain the same.” Worried that Claire would feel betrayed, Shelley wrote her a consoling note, revealing his tangled loyalties; he commiserated with her about her loneliness and reassured her that the marriage was only to keep “them” quiet, though whether he meant the Godwins or Harriet’s family is unclear: “Dearest Claire…Thank you too, my kind girl, for not expressing much of what you must feel—the loneliness and the low spirits which arise from being entirely left.”

  Mary’s casual attitude toward the event is reflected in the fact that she recorded the wrong date, December 29, in her journal. The union had taken place on December 30. Certainly, a less romantic wedding for this pair of young Romantics can hardly be imagined. But Mary would have seen it as a betrayal of her mother to harbor dreams of herself as a conventional bride. In her experience, marriage was a double-edged sword: it provided women with the stamp of societal approval, but it also took away the few rights they possessed.

  And yet while she did not embrace the idea, Mary understood that she needed to take this next step if she wanted to be able to move more freely in the world. She also suspected that a wedding would regain her father’s approval, and sure enough, once he heard that his daughter was to be married, Godwin consented to see her, visiting her two days before the event, and eagerly attending the wedding.

  As Shelley complained to Claire, “Mrs G. and G. were both present, and appeared to feel no little satisfaction.” Shelley’s observation was all too apt. Godwin was proud of Mary’s union, bragging to his relatives that his daughter had made a “good marriage” to the eldest son of a baronet.

  IN THE TWO AND a half years since father and daughter had seen each other, the sixty-year-old Godwin had grown grayer and more stooped. Money troubles, scandal, and health problems had taken their toll. Mary, too, had changed; no longer the rebellious teenager Godwin remembered from the summer of 1814, she had become a mother, had adventures he could not imagine, and been to countries he had never seen. Godwin did not marvel at her growth, though, nor did he ask her about little William or her travels. Not once did he apologize for his silence. Instead, he brought up his financial situation. Now that his daughter was actually marrying Shelley, he demanded a transfusion of funds from his soon-to-be son-in-law. Over the last two years, he had never stopped asking for money from Shelley, but now he wanted an even larger sum that they could not possibly afford. Mary tried to overlook her father’s behavior, but it was difficult to avoid acknowledging his hypocrisy. The philosopher of truth and freedom, the man who had once argued against marriage, was finally willing to talk to her again because she was getting married. And all that he seemed to want was money.

  She poured her disillusionment into the last pages of Frankenstein. When she had run away with Shelley, everyone, even her own father, had acted as though associating with her was dangerous. No one had taken her true character into account, just as everyone failed to see past the monster’s appearance to his inner nature. Mary had learned a painful lesson about the cruelty of human nature. She could not retaliate by going on a murderous rampage, like her creature, but she could imagine such a rampage and describe it in vivid, visceral detail. The creature would take revenge on her behalf.

  After they were married, Shelley redoubled his efforts to claim his children, spending the spring in London for the court proceedings, battling charges leveled by Harriet’s family that he was immoral and an atheist to boot—difficult accusations to fight, since in the eyes of English society he was both. As for Mary, although some women might have winced at the prospect of adopting another woman’s children, for her, a lifelong motherless child, it never occurred to
her to reject them. “Those darling treasures,” she called them. She admitted that she worried about William, who would turn one year old that January, losing his status as the eldest son—his aunt Claire had teased him about how he would “lose his pre-eminence and be helped third at table”—but she remained eager to take in both children.

  Mary spent January in Bath and was present for the birth of Claire’s baby, Clara Allegra Byron, on January 12. Afterward, when she was not helping Claire or taking care of William, or Wilmouse, as they now called him, Mary worked on Frankenstein and continued her rigorous course of literary self-education, studying Latin and reading Milton’s Comus, Smollett’s Roderick Ransom, Sidney’s Arcadia, and Robert Southey’s translation of Amadis of Gaul. But knowing her husband as she did, she also took the time to write to Marianne Hunt, the wife of Leigh Hunt, Shelley’s host in London, to ask small favors, such as to send his dirty clothing to the laundry, all while apologizing for Shelley’s thoughtlessness in such matters.

  After a few weeks of being apart from Shelley, Mary, who had been feeling tired and depressed, discovered she was pregnant once again. She wrote Shelley anxious letters, reminding him that he was all that kept her from Fanny’s fate (and, implicitly, Harriet’s, though she never mentioned her). Most of all, she was tired of living with her stepsister. She had not fled Skinner Street simply to end up housemates with Claire. Alarmed at how low she sounded, Shelley told her to come to London, and on January 25, Mary joined him at the Hunts’ rented cottage in Hampstead.

  Leigh Hunt was a glamorous figure, a writer, editor, and political activist eight years older than Shelley. The two men had met the preceding fall, when Shelley, who admired Hunt’s radical politics, sent him some poems to publish in Hunt’s new journal, The Indicator, as well as some money to keep the cash-strapped publication on its feet. Although the disorganized Hunt had lost Shelley’s work, he had read the poems and been impressed by them. He was also interested in courting a young man who apparently had cash to spare. And so, when Shelley arrived in London, Hunt gave the poet a warm welcome.

  The son of a wealthy West Indian plantation owner, Hunt was considered something of an outsider by conventional society. His skin was dark, his lips full. He looked exotic—a polite way of saying that he did not look entirely British or entirely white. A founding editor of the liberal newspaper The Examiner, Hunt had become the darling of radicals—most famously Byron—for an attack on the Prince Regent. The prince’s outrageous lifestyle and exorbitant spending made him an easy and frequent target of liberals, but Hunt’s editorial was so vehement that it earned him a two-year prison sentence. He endured his time in jail with equanimity, decorating his rooms with floral wall hangings, planting a perennial garden outside his window, playing games with visiting friends, and continuing to excoriate the government in masterful articles.

  Leigh Hunt, one of the founding editors of The Examiner. (illustration ill.22)

  After prison, Hunt developed a reputation for eccentricity, wearing silk dressing gowns all day long and putting on clothes only if he went out, which he rarely did since he had become agoraphobic after his two years’ imprisonment. If his friends wanted to hear about his most current ideas, they had to go see him—a significant undertaking as his cottage was not easy to reach. Hampstead was a rural village in those days, and Hunt’s home was a ten-minute walk from its center.

  However, for those visitors who did make the trek, the rewards were immediate. Hunt would whisk them off to his study for private tête-à-têtes. This tiny room was the hub of his universe, and therefore of the literary universe—or at least the liberal literary universe—as he was the acknowledged leader of the reform movement. Here he made and broke careers, discovering new writers and eviscerating old ones. Yet his office had none of the trappings of power; if anything, the decorations were oddly effeminate. There was no huge desk. No dark colors. No solemn wood paneling. Instead, the walls were painted green and dotted with white flowers. The furniture was green and white to match. The chamber was so small that it could contain only two chairs, which forced Hunt and his visitors to huddle together, an intimacy that some did not like but that Shelley enjoyed.

  When Mary and Shelley stayed with Hunt and his family that winter, Hunt was intent on advancing the career of a young, previously undiscovered poet, John Keats. No other critic was ready to take up Keats’s cause. The Quarterly Review had recently called him “unintelligible,” “tiresome,” and “absurd.” Other critics, who disliked him for his association with Hunt’s liberal politics, ridiculed his “Cockney” background and his humble beginnings as an apothecary’s apprentice.

  But Keats was precisely the sort of writer who would become Hunt’s trademark. When it came to literary talent, Hunt was like a bloodhound. That fall, he had written an essay called “The Young Poets,” in which he named Shelley and Keats as two stars on the rise. Always short of money, he was happy to accept donations from Shelley, and he was sometimes accused of using his charm to fleece people. But the more Hunt came to know Shelley, the more he was struck by the younger man’s talent, and just as with Keats, he decided to promote his career. He introduced the two poets, and though Shelley was interested in the younger man, Keats was suspicious of Shelley’s aristocratic background. He thought Shelley was being patronizing when he advised him to wait to publish, although in actuality Shelley was trying to protect Keats from the cruel treatment he had received from critics with his own Queen Mab and Alastor.

  More worldly-wise than Hunt’s other protégés, Shelley did not need Hunt to guide him through society’s treacherous waters, whereas the younger, poorer Keats was in frequent need of advice and money. Despite their age difference, Shelley was more of an equal to Hunt, who found him tremendously amusing. In fact, it is thanks to Hunt’s reminiscences that Shelley’s eccentric sense of humor has been preserved for history—a pleasant surprise, given the humorless, saintlike image Mary would help promulgate after her husband died. In Hunt’s version of the man, Shelley is a young mischief maker who enjoyed shocking people and had a predilection for shouting out literary quotes if he thought it might make a stir. One day, the two men were riding in a stagecoach with another passenger, an elderly lady, when, according to Hunt, Shelley, who “had been moved…by something objectionable which he thought he saw in the face of our companion,” burst out with a favorite passage from Shakespeare’s Richard II in which the king says mournfully:

  For Heaven’s sake! Let us sit upon the ground,

  And tell sad stories of the death of kings.

  The poor old lady was “startled into a look of the most ludicrous astonishment and looked on the coach-floor, as if expecting to see us take our seats accordingly.”

  In the years to come, this friendship would become a touchstone for both men. Hunt’s opinions mattered to Shelley; he was inspired by Hunt’s political engagement and took confidence from Hunt’s belief in his work, especially when it seemed no one cared if he wrote another word. As for Hunt, who was also a poet, Shelley’s commitment to his art represented the sort of writing life he had once imagined for himself. Hunt would do his best to bring his friend’s poetry to the attention of the public, and after Shelley’s death, Hunt would become one of the most important promoters of Shelley’s literary legacy.

  For Mary, the Hunts’ busy home was a refreshing change after her isolated life in Bath. The Hunt children clattered up and down the stairs, made faces at Wilmouse, and begged Shelley to play with them, which he did, chasing them down the hallways and tramping with them through the countryside. The Hunts’ eldest son, Thornton, remembered a game Shelley invented called “frightful creatures,” in which Shelley would terrify Thornton by “ ‘do[ing] the horn,’ which was a way that Shelley had of screwing up his hair in front, to imitate a weapon of that sort.” When the wind was high, Shelley sailed his paper boats on Hampstead’s ponds, often accompanied by one or two Hunt children.

  Hunt’s shelves were crowded with books and figu
res of Greek and Roman gods made by his artist wife, Marianne. Mary and Marianne spent much of their time together, taking long walks, organizing the meals and activities for the children, and working—Mary on her book and Marianne on her art. A sculptor and painter—her silhouette of Keats is one of the few images of the poet—Marianne shared many of Mary’s challenges: a complicated marriage to an exceptionally talented husband, the difficulties of having her own artistic career, motherhood, tight finances, and, strangely enough, the problem of having an attractive unmarried sister in love with her husband.

  Elizabeth Kent, or Bess, was five years younger than Marianne. Like Hunt, Bess was a writer and an intellectual; over the course of her life she wrote books on natural history as well as a children’s book. She had met Leigh Hunt when he was courting her older sister and had been devoted to him ever since, listening eagerly to his rants about the government’s treachery, contributing her own opinions to many of his articles, and even transacting many of his business deals with publishers and bankers while Marianne was busy with the children or her own work. When Hunt was in his two-room cell, although it was the custom for wives to join their husbands in prison, Marianne asked Bess to take her place. She was worried that the jail was too damp and unhealthy for their new son, Thornton. Bess jumped at this opportunity, making Hunt’s meals, proofreading his work, helping him entertain visitors and colleagues, and generally serving as a kind of auxiliary wife while Marianne was home with the baby.