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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Although many prim Englishwomen would resist these changes when they crossed the Channel, Mary was delighted to jettison the crippling styles of the past. Without complicated and restrictive undergarments, it was easier to move. Dresses had raised waists, allowing the wearer to breathe and take long strides; skirts were slit, providing even greater freedom of movement. Light-colored cottons, painted gauze, and sheer India muslin had the added benefit of not weighing much—another liberating aspect. Women actually competed over whose dresses weighed the least; in some cases, a costume could weigh as little as eight ounces, including shoes and jewelry.

  Although it was true that the gauzy new gowns left little to the imagination, Mary did not think this was such a bad thing. She agreed with Fuseli that the human body was beautiful; her relationship with Gilbert had introduced her to the joys of sensuality. Besides, there was the added benefit that these diaphanous, flowing garments suited her statuesque figure. Count von Schlabrendorf, one of her old admirers, who had also returned to Paris, said that Mary “enthralled” him even more than she had before. He would have liked to pursue a romantic liaison, but Mary remained loyal to Imlay. “She was of an opinion that chastity consisted in fidelity,” the count complained. But her refusal did not stop him from paying her frequent visits; she was far more charming than his other acquaintances, and he valued her perceptive observations about Parisian politics.

  Mary had not earned any income for more than a year, as Johnson had paid her for The French Revolution in advance. Imlay had left instructions with an American friend to provide Mary with funds whenever she needed them, but Mary had refused this offer. She did not want to be Imlay’s mistress, and accepting his money seemed perilously close to that sort of arrangement. Now, without anyone to look after her little daughter, even the smallest errands turned into projects. What if Fanny needed to nurse, got sick, or had a tantrum? She had to carry the baby everywhere, to the marketplace, to visit friends, or just to buy the papers. Even though she was exhausted, she was too overwrought to sleep, falling into “reveries and trains of thinking, which agitate and fatigue me.” When she did at last manage to close her eyes, she was woken by Fanny, who cried until she was nursed back to sleep.

  To conserve what money she had, Mary decided to move to a less expensive apartment, as Imlay had not paid the rent past September. Her new lodgings were with a German family, and when she observed the husband helping his wife take care of their children, she was moved to tears. Again and again she wrote to the absent Gilbert, painting touching domestic scenes, hoping against hope that these vignettes would tempt him back:

  I have been playing and laughing with the little girl so long, that I cannot take up my pen to address you without emotion. Pressing her to my bosom she looked so like you…every nerve seemed to vibrate to the touch, and I began to think there was something in the assertion of man and wife being one—for you seemed to pervade my whole frame, quickening the beat of my heart, and lending me the sympathetic tears you excite.…I know that you will love her more and more.

  She ended one letter saying, “Take care of yourself, if you wish to be the protector of your child, and the comfort of her mother.”

  But in fact Fanny had no protector and Mary had no comforter. Gilbert’s letters had become infrequent and increasingly careless. Without any help, Mary had no time or energy to work. She could not even read. She received many invitations to parties and salons, but she could not go because she could not leave Fanny alone.

  At last, in desperation, she went to Imlay’s friend to ask for money. She hated having to do this and picked a fight by belittling Gilbert’s moneymaking schemes. The man taunted her for her lover’s absence: “He very unmanily exulted over me, on account of your determination to stay,” she complained to Imlay.

  But the humiliation was worth it, as her new funds enabled her to find a truly exceptional maid, Marguerite, a “vivac[ious]” young woman who was ripe for adventure and who would remain loyal for the rest of Mary’s life. For household chores, Mary hired another servant as well, and so she was at last free to work a little and attend soirees and teas. She studied her French and “employed and amused” herself, sallying forth to parties as Mrs. Imlay. Although many of her old friends were dead, or had fled the country—the Barlows were in Germany, Helen Maria Williams and the Christies were in Switzerland, and Thomas Paine still languished in jail, where it was too dangerous for his English friends to visit him—Mary met many new people. These included several male acquaintances, charmed by her liveliness and quick intelligence. “Her manners were interesting, and her conversation spirited,” wrote Archibald Rowan, an Irishman exiled from his own country, who often dropped by her lodgings to enjoy “a dish of tea and an hour’s rational conversation.” In one lighthearted moment, she teased Gilbert that if he did not come back soon, “I shall be half in love with the author of the Marseillaise [Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle], who is a handsome man…and plays sweetly on the violin.”

  In fact, Mary attracted so much attention that other women were jealous. The spiteful Madame Schweitzer muttered that Mary neglected her female friends to flirt with men. She told one vicious story about how she had beckoned Mary to come see a sunset—“Come, Mary—come, nature lover,—and enjoy this wonderful spectacle—this transition from colour to colour!”—but Mary ignored her in favor of a male companion “by whom she was at the moment captivated. I must confess that this erotic absorption made such a disagreeable impression on me, that all my pleasure vanished.” However, since Madame Schweitzer’s husband had recently confessed his attraction to Mary, Madame’s motives were likely malicious.

  As the days shortened, Mary’s money again began to run out. The winter of 1794–95 would be the coldest on record. Bread prices skyrocketed and meat became an unthinkable luxury. Wood grew so expensive that many Parisians resorted to burning their furniture. By the end of December, Mary’s letters to Gilbert had become sharply critical. She condemned his mercantile ambitions, using the clear, bold phrases she had employed in her Vindications:

  When you first entered into these plans, you bounded your views to the gaining of a thousand pounds. It was sufficient to have procured a farm in America, which would have been an independence. You find now that you did not know yourself, and that a certain situation in life is more necessary to you than you imagined—more necessary than an uncorrupted heart—

  Frustrated and abandoned though she felt, Mary had managed to formulate an ethical stance against Gilbert’s commercialism, her letters becoming as philosophical as they were personal, elaborating the ideas she had begun to develop the previous summer—the problems of a life devoted to commerce versus a life of the mind:

  Believe me, sage sir, you have not sufficient respect for the imagination—I could prove to you in a trice that it is the mother of sentiment, the great distinction of our nature, the only purifier of the passions.…The imagination is the true fire, stolen from heaven, to animate this cold creature of clay, producing all those fine sympathies that lead to rapture, fending men social by expanding their hearts, instead of leaving them leisure to calculate how many comforts society affords.

  Theirs was a battle between two ways of life, Mary felt, an idea that actually gave her strength as it meant that she was arguing not just for herself but for general principles: human connection over mercantile transactions, art and the imagination over the acquisition of wealth: “I know what I look for to found my happiness on.—It is not money,” she declared.

  If one reads these letters of Mary’s, her philosophical musings can sometimes be overshadowed by the poignancy of her laments. But Mary’s theoretical discussions were not, as some critics have said, merely a device to bring Imlay back. Wollstonecraft was an experienced writer, and a distinguished enough public figure to suspect that one day her letters might be published, as indeed they would be. Thus not only was she fighting with Imlay, she was also leaving a written record for the future. Despairing and heartbroken tho
ugh she was, she was also building the argument that she had begun in her Vindications and developed in French Revolution. What was important, she said, was not wealth and power, but the bonds between people; what mattered were the ties of domesticity, not material possessions or position in society. To spend one’s life trying to gain power over other people was ultimately an empty endeavor, one that would lead to regret and unhappiness.

  As a result, when the public did read these letters, they would encounter not just the lovers’ drama, but also Mary’s ethical position—the personal, the political, and the philosophical woven tightly together—and this would have important consequences for Wollstonecraft’s daughter and son-in-law. Wollstonecraft’s praise of the imagination sounds eerily like a synopsis of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound as well as passages from his Defense of Poetry. Her arguments on behalf of the life of the mind would help her daughter survive her own many losses and would inform the writing of her novels. For Mary and Shelley, then, Wollstonecraft’s letters were a kind of battle cry, one side of an essential conflict between two warring ideologies.

  Worn out by her struggle to get Imlay back, Mary caught a cold that deepened into a lung infection. Worried that she would die and leave Fanny alone in the world, she told Gilbert to let her landlords, the loving German family, raise their daughter. Although Gilbert did not rush to her rescue, her misery did at least goad him into inviting her to London. But the tone of his invitation was distant, and in reality Mary was not sure she wanted to return to England, even if it meant joining him there. Having read how the English press had pilloried Helen Maria Williams and Madame Roland, she knew she would face the same bitter disapprobation. She did not want Fanny to grow up in such a restrictive environment, and she told Imlay that their daughter would be freer if she stayed in France. To compound matters, if anyone found out she was not actually married to Imlay, she would face certain social exile. Besides, how reliable was Gilbert? “Am I only to return to a country, that has not merely lost all charms for me, but for which I feel a repugnance that almost amounts to horror, only to be left there a prey to it!”

  At this, Imlay relented, writing the most loving letter he had in months: “Business alone has kept me from you.—Come to any port, and I will fly down to my two dear girls with a heart all their own.” These were the words Mary had longed to hear. He did still love her. He did still want to be a father. Maybe his cruel behavior had truly been because of financial preoccupations. Granted, she disapproved of his focus on money, but wrongheadedness was different from infidelity. Far better to chastise the man she loved for thinking too much about business than for falling in love with someone else!

  In her rush to rejoin him, Mary entrusted “the good people” of Le Havre to find buyers for their furniture. She spent her final days in France weaning Fanny, since according to common wisdom, nursing mothers were not supposed to have sex with their husbands. This was a sad endeavor, as it meant letting the baby suffer without consolation. She tried to sleep in a separate room from the little girl, but she finally broke down after the third night and scooped her up. She knew too well what it felt like to be abandoned.

  On April 9, Mary, Fanny, and Marguerite sailed for London, though Mary still worried about what she would find when she got to England, writing to Gilbert:

  I have indeed been so unhappy this winter, I find it as difficult to acquire fresh hopes, as to regain tranquility.—Enough of this—lie still, foolish heart!—But for the little girl, I could almost wish that it should cease to beat, to be no more alive to the anguish of disappointment.

  Marguerite was incapacitated by seasickness, so Fanny held tightly to Mary, who tried to remain calm but failed miserably, dwelling on her memories of the two happy summers she had spent with Imlay. Before long, she had talked herself into believing that Gilbert would share her delight in Fanny’s growth, her sparks of humor and intelligence. No more would Mary have to be a proudly struggling single mother. She would be the loving partner of the man she adored. She would have someone to confide in, someone who would help her bear the burdens of parenthood. Together, she and Gilbert would create a cozy domestic life just like that of her German friends in Paris.

  BUT WHEN MARY, FANNY, and Marguerite disembarked in Dover on Saturday, April 11, 1795, there was no Gilbert waiting to greet them. Mary dashed off a note: “Here we are, my love, and mean to set out early in the morning; and, if I can find you, I hope to dine with you tomorrow.” She attached a postscript letting him know that she was available to him in every possible way: “I have weaned my [daughter], and she is now eating away at the white bread.” She booked passage on a coach to London, and Imlay met them when they arrived. But although she flushed with joy when she saw him, her happiness was short-lived. This polite stranger was not her Gilbert, the eager lover who used to pull her into his arms. He did not look longingly into her eyes. He did not give her a lingering kiss. Instead, he made the sober announcement that he would try to do his duty by her and his daughter. He had rented an elegantly furnished house at 26 Charlotte Street in Soho, a new neighborhood inhabited largely by artists and architects, and he would live with them. But he expected to retain his freedom in all ways.

  Mary was caught off guard by this lukewarm greeting, but was certain she could talk him into loving her again. She was a skilled arguer, a philosopher, after all. He used to adore that about her. She would show him where he was wrong and he would be grateful. In the meantime, though, she had to admit that he seemed like a stranger. This new Gilbert had little in common with the man she had been dreaming about, the man she had spent the last eight months talking to in her imagination and in her letters.

  Once they were settled into the new house, Mary taught Fanny how to say “Papa,” hoping this would touch Gilbert’s heart. But though Imlay was kind to his daughter, he was preoccupied with business concerns. He told Mary that the ship that had carried the Bourbon platters was missing. Mary understood the seriousness of this; their financial future had hinged on the sale of the silver. She commiserated with him, and then tried to talk about their future. She still clung to the dream of America. But Imlay refused to discuss their relationship. He was obsessed with how much money he would lose if they could not locate Ellefson and the precious cargo. She wanted him to want her—“to press me very tenderly to your heart”—but he rejected her overtures. At night he disappeared, and when she asked where he had been, he refused to say. She wondered where the man had gone who had told her he loved her and could be counted on to reassure her when she had one of her fits of gloom, but the more she pushed, the more he retreated. After a few weeks, he began to disappear for days at a time.

  Mary’s desolation grew. She had always experienced what she called her dark moods, but she had managed to fight off the paralysis that often accompanied them. When she had suffered as a child, she had taken care of her siblings and educated herself. When she was cast down by Fuseli’s rejection, she had headed straight to revolutionary Paris. She had borne the degradation and loneliness of being a hired worker, first as a lady’s companion and then as a governess. After Fanny Blood died, she had almost succumbed, but had instead written her first book. Even when she had faced bitter attacks for the publication of the Vindications, she did not break down. She continued to write, publishing reviews and The French Revolution. But the misery she felt now was different from any she had experienced before. It overwhelmed her rational faculties. She felt incapable of doing anything but weeping. She tried to fight her way back to life. But instead of fighting for a cause, she fought the man she loved.

  She accused him of greed and shallowness. He told her he needed “variety” and amusements. He asked her to stop making scenes. She made more. He begged her not to weep. She wept more. He urged her to stop hounding him for a commitment. She promised “to assume a cheerful face” and “avoid conversations, which only tend to harass your feelings,” but a few minutes later she would drive him out of the house with her angry words, then col
lapse into tears when he was gone.

  Gilbert was not a bad man, but he was not a strong man. And it would have taken a very strong man to support the weight of Mary’s suffering. The grief that she bore was a lifetime’s worth. Not that Gilbert could understand this. To him, she seemed like a woman possessed, as much a stranger as he seemed to her. The independent, resilient woman he had loved in France was gone. Now Mary seemed like one of the heroines in the gothic novels she despised, desperate and pleading for his love.

  WHAT NEITHER MARY NOR Gilbert could know was that Mary was in the grip of what would today be called a major episode of depression. It would last another six months, and it carried with it the full force of years of pain. Like so many others who have dared to fight against injustice, she had endured the wrath of her society. Although she had kept going, the sorrow and fear had accumulated. It was not easy to be called a whore and a hyena, to be mocked as insane and immoral. Moreover, there was the added trauma of childbirth, compounded by the challenge of being a single mother. Before Fanny was born, Mary might well have been able to shake off Imlay’s rejection and move forward, as she had with Fuseli. But as it was, Mary was exhausted, worried, and lonely, and there was no one to rescue her, the way she had rescued Eliza. She had depended on her own resources for most of her life, what she called “the elasticity” of her nature, and now these resources had run out. Her strength was gone.

  In this condition, Mary could not reach out to her old friends. She refused to contact Joseph Johnson. She did write to her sisters that she was back in London, but she told them she could not offer them a place to live, or any money—yet. Ashamed of her situation, she did not mention her difficulties with Gilbert, allowing them to think that they could not be with her because it would be disruptive rather than because she had been abandoned by her lover. “It is my opinion [that] the presence of a third person interrupts or destroys domestic happiness,” she wrote. She also told them how much she missed them and how much she would like to have them near, but these sentiments did nothing to mollify the “girls,” whose feelings were hurt. Eliza had even quit her job, assuming that Mary would offer her a home, and was now so offended that she maintained a stony, angry silence. Gilbert made things worse by vacillating. He could not love her now, he said, but he was not sure about the future. Maybe someday he would have feelings for her again. She begged him to tell her frankly whether he desired to live with her or part forever. But he continued to waver.