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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Maybe Imlay truly was unsure, but he may also have worried about what would happen if he broke off their relationship. Mary had been threatening to harm herself for months. And so he went back and forth while Mary existed in a terrible kind of limbo, waiting to hear what he had decided. Finally, in desperation, she knocked on Fuseli’s door, hoping that he would understand her heartbreak and console her. But though so much time had passed, he still refused to see her. This was the last straw. Was she so unlovable? She felt that she must be. She worried about little Fanny but felt that the child might be better off without her.

  At the end of May, a month after her thirty-sixth birthday, Mary swallowed poison. Later, she described the experience in notes for her unfinished novel, Maria:

  She swallowed the laudanum; her soul was calm—the tempest had subsided—and nothing remained but an eager longing to forget herself—to fly from the anguish she endured[,] to escape from thought—from this hell of disappointment.…her head turned; a stupor ensued; a faintness—“have a little patience,” [she] said, holding her swimming head (she thought of her mother), “this cannot last long; and what is a little bodily pain to the pangs I have endured.”

  CHAPTER 23

  MARY SHELLEY: “OUR LITTLE WILL”

  [ 1818–1819 ]

  Mary, Shelley, and Claire arrived in Naples in December, they moved into one of the most beautiful houses in the city, No. 250 Riviera di Chiaia, which Shelley had rented with the hope of pleasing Mary. It was rumored that the ruins of Cicero’s villa were right under their window. To both Shelleys, the grand old senator stood for the freedom of the Roman republic and was an icon of hope. Nestled below the slopes of Vesuvius, which, as Shelley said, was “a smoke by day and a fire by night,” Naples had public gardens and boulevards lined with palm trees. Across the sea, they could see the outline of a mysterious island drifting in and out of the mist. This was the isle of Circe, as local lore had it, the beautiful temptress who lured Odysseus into her bed and kept him there for seven years. Another legend was that Virgil had composed his gentle, pastoral poems here, The Georgics. Mary delighted in “looking at almost the same scene that he did—reading about manners little changed since his days.” Together, she, Claire, and Shelley explored the famous sites: Pompeii, Herculaneum, Lake Avernus, and the Cumean Sybil’s cave.

  For once, there was peace between the sisters. Brought together by the loss of their daughters (although Alba was still alive, Claire suffered over their enforced separation), Mary and Claire were kind to each other. The trio climbed Vesuvius and gazed out over the city’s steeples and red roofs to the sea. “A poet could not have a more sacred burying place [than] in an olive grove on the shore of a beautiful bay,” Mary wrote in her journal that winter, looking out at the pale blue water. Gradually, she was able to take pleasure in the “orange trees in the public gardens next door…laden with blossoms.…The sky, the shore, all its forms and the sensations it inspires, appear formed and modulated by the Spirit of Good.” At least she still had Wilmouse, who was so beautiful their servants tiptoed into his room to watch him sleep.

  But the shadow of Clara’s death hung between the Shelleys. Mary retreated into her books, avoiding contact with Shelley. She read a history of the Paterins, medieval Italian heretics who believed there was a continual battle between good and evil in the universe, a theme that struck a chord with her: for every joy there was an equal and opposing sorrow. Translated into Mary’s terms, this meant that for every baby born, a baby died. For every love, there was the loss of love. So taken was she with this philosophy that she decided to make the Paterins the subject of her next novel, Valperga, researching medieval Italian history with true Godwinian meticulousness, plowing through enormous tomes and visiting historical sites.

  Shelley did not like how Mary retreated to the past. He wanted her to talk to him and listen to his ideas, to read his poems and discuss them, as she always had. He missed his wife and wanted her grief to end. But for Mary, talking to Shelley was too difficult. She blamed him as well as herself for Clara’s death, and she did her best to avoid him, although that was difficult. When they did meet, she was polite, always cordial, but distant. Rarely did she laugh. She rejected Shelley’s romantic overtures. She was certain that Clara’s death was a punishment of sorts, that their love affair had brought suffering to too many people. Shelley agreed that they were haunted by ghosts, but he did not believe that he was responsible for Clara’s death and was mystified by Mary’s coldness. Before, when “their two souls had vibrated as one,” Mary had seemed to understand everything about him. Now he felt alone, and it was in this spirit that he composed one of his most famous lyrics, Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples, a forty-five-line poem she would discover only after his death, like a lament straight from the grave:

  I could lie down like a tired child,

  And weep away the life of care

  Which I have born and yet must bear,

  Till death like sleep might steal on me,

  And I might feel in the warm air

  My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

  Breathe o’er my dying brain its last monotony.

  ON FEBRUARY 27, 1819, the day before they were supposed to leave for Rome, Shelley did something so peculiar that historians are still at a loss to determine what actually happened. With a cheesemonger and a hairdresser as witnesses, he registered a baby at the town hall in the Chiara district. He said the child was his, but to this day no one has been able to identify this baby or her real parents. The information Shelley entered into the official record is fascinating but contradictory. The child’s name was Elena Adelaide; she was two months old; she was (he claimed) the legitimate child of his wife, Maria Padurin. He put Maria Padurin’s age as twenty-seven when his own Mary was just twenty-one. The interesting part about this detail is that the only person in the Shelley entourage who had reached such an age was Elise.

  So, who was this baby? Who were her parents?

  Certainly, Elena Adelaide was not Mary’s. Mary had no reason to conceal a pregnancy, and even if she had, she would never have consented to leave her new baby in Naples with unfamiliar people, which is what the Shelleys ultimately did. One theory is that Elena was a foster child they had temporarily adopted to cheer Mary up. Shelley had often expressed an interest in adopting children. But then there would have been no reason to cover up the child’s parentage. Not only would Mary have been likely to record such an event in her journal, Shelley would have told his friends about it with pride. In fact, when they lived in Marlow and had taken in the little village girl, Polly Rose, they were both proud of their generosity. When they left for Italy, they did not abandon Polly Rose, but sent her to the Hunts’, where she worked as a maid.

  Shelley’s cousin, the notoriously inaccurate biographer Thomas Medwin, declared that Elena was the love child of a mysterious Englishwoman who had followed the Shelleys to Italy and had a brief affair with Shelley, but there is no evidence for such a claim. In fact, the records have been stripped almost bare. Clearly, the Shelleys were good secret keepers when they wanted to be, and their descendants were even better. The paper with little Elena’s registration was only discovered in the 1950s. There are no direct references to Elena in Shelley’s papers or Mary’s journal.

  Another rumor, started by the servant Elise to protect her own reputation, claimed that Claire was the mother. In Elise’s version of events, told to the Hoppners a few years later, Shelley fathered the child and the guilty couple hid the pregnancy and the birth from Mary, even though the baby was born in their lodgings. Mary defended Shelley against these charges when she got wind of Elise’s accusations, writing a long letter, listing the many absurdities of this claim. Certainly it does seem unlikely that Mary would have overlooked her sister’s pregnancy, or that she would have missed the labor and delivery. Furthermore, Mary and Shelley drew closer after this incident, an unlikely development if Mary thought that Shelley had fathered a child with Claire. Also, Cla
ire and Mary remained on good terms during this time, a direct contrast to the disastrous spring of 1815, when Claire might well have been pregnant with Shelley’s child, and the two sisters fought so bitterly that Claire was forced to retreat to the countryside.

  That Elise bothered to fabricate such a tale suggests that she was attempting to conceal something, possibly her own role in Elena’s birth. That January, Elise left the Shelleys’ service to marry their servant Paolo Foggi at the Shelleys’ insistence, according to one of Mary’s letters. Mary and Shelley had recently discovered that Paolo had been cheating them out of money and they had planned to fire him. Why, then, would the Shelleys have insisted on a marriage between their servants, especially as they were fond of Elise and regarded Paolo as a brigand? The best answer seems to be that they had discovered that Elise was pregnant in the fall of 1818. The Shelleys liked names that connected babies to their mothers; Elise and Elena are very similar, and Shelley had said the mother was Elise’s age. Moreover, the heretics Mary had read about and admired were called the Paterins, or Paderins, which may well have inspired “Maria’s” last name, Padurin. Quite possibly then, Shelley was using a code that only he and Mary, and maybe Claire, would understand. In fact, the name Maria Padurin seems far more likely to have been Mary’s invention than Shelley’s. The Paterins were on her mind, not Shelley’s. And in Mary’s private lexicon, the name Maria stood for her mother’s last book, The Wrongs of Woman, in which Wollstonecraft sought to show the many abuses women suffered at the hands of men. Jemima, one of the novel’s most important characters, is a working-class woman, like Elise, who is raped by her employer.

  But if Elise was the mother, Paolo could not have been the father, as Elise had first met him during the ill-fated trip to Venice in late August or early September, and she would have had to get pregnant sometime in April to give birth in December. That leaves Shelley, Byron, or perhaps someone Mary and Shelley did not know, someone whom Elise had met in Venice, as the father.

  When all these possibilities are examined, the evidence strongly suggests Byron. The child did not cause a breakdown in the Shelleys’ marriage, making it probable, as with the Claire story, that Shelley was not the father. Furthermore, if Byron was the father, that would help explain the urgency of Elise’s plea that August: she would have wanted to rescue herself, not Allegra, from his lordship, especially if she had realized she was pregnant and that Byron would refuse to acknowledge the baby as his own. This version is further supported by the fact that Shelley, who was deeply concerned about Allegra’s welfare, could not find anything amiss in the child’s life with Byron, though he did take Elise back with them to Naples. It is less clear why the Shelleys chose Paolo to marry Elise. Perhaps he was Elise’s choice. Perhaps he was the only man they could find to marry her for money and at short notice. Ultimately, it was an unfortunate decision, as Paolo would become difficult, demanding regular blackmail payments from Shelley long after they had left Naples.

  But if Byron was the father and Shelley was not, why would Shelley register Elena as his own? If one factors Mary into the story, then things fall into place. In later years Mary would demonstrate a steadfast commitment to protecting women who had broken society’s rules. She would go to enormous lengths to support single mothers with illegitimate children, making them her special cause. If she was concerned about Elise’s future, as well as the baby’s, she could easily have suggested to Shelley that he give his name to the baby for Elise’s sake. She would have reminded Shelley that it was precisely this sort of security that her sister Fanny had lacked.

  The idea that Mary played a significant, maybe even a leadership role in the Elena story overturns the arguments of most historians, who have assumed that Shelley was trying to conceal a secret love child. But once one accepts the principle that someone besides Shelley was the father, it is easier to see that Shelley had no reason to hide the child from Mary and that she could easily have helped him plan Elena’s future. This theory is reinforced by the fact that in later years Shelley did not conceal Paolo’s blackmail attempts from his wife. Far from being the helpless wife of a cheating husband, in this account of events Mary is actually a co-conspirator, helping carry out a plot to save another woman. Granted, there is no way to confirm that the child’s legitimization was a joint project, one that Mary may have even masterminded, but it is a hypothesis that must be taken seriously when considering the mystery of Elena.

  ON FEBRUARY 28, THE DAY after Shelley registered the baby’s birth, Mary, Shelley, William, and Claire left for Rome, leaving Elise behind with Paolo. They traveled in slow stages until they reached Gaeta, just south of the great city, on March 3 or 4. Over the previous few months, Mary had slowly warmed toward Shelley enough to smile at him and listen to his ideas and feelings. She still mourned Clara, but she also missed being close to her husband. Delighted by her return, Shelley made a point of shedding Claire to spend the day in Gaeta with Mary, admiring the ruins, walking the beach, and gazing at the Tyrrhenian Sea. They wandered through a lemon orchard, and Shelley remembered looking up “at an emerald sky of leaves starred with innumerable globes of ripening fruit.” It was a happy day for the couple, one that seemed to promise a new season of hope. In the evening they played chess on the terrace of their inn, thrilled to be on the site of one of Cicero’s summer villas perched high above the town. They spent the night in a romantic room overlooking the water, and it was here that Mary believed their fourth child was conceived.

  The next day, the party drove through the deserted landscape of Albano, Shelley marveling at the “arches after arches” of the ancient aqueducts rising “in unending lines” as they approached Rome. When at last they could see the dome of St. Peter’s rising up along the Tiber, both Mary and Shelley felt a surge of happiness. Byron’s words from Childe Harold seemed to fit this glorious moment:

  Oh Rome! My country! City of the soul!

  The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,

  .   .   .   .   .   .

  What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see

  The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way

  O’er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye!

  Whose agonies are evils of a day—

  A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.

  Rolling past the medieval castle of Sant’Angelo and across the bridge into the city, to the east they could see the magnificent columns of the Forum and the imposing walls of the Colosseum. Scattered about along the side of the road were piles of ancient rubble, broken pediments and pillars that had fallen over; the past was everywhere, not cordoned off into sightseeing areas. It was a sobering experience to imagine how grand the city had once been. As Byron said, the city’s fate made their personal sorrows seem small. To both Mary and Shelley, the air felt heavy with history.

  Once they had settled into the rooms Shelley had rented in the Palazzo Verospi on the Corso, the most fashionable street in Rome, they walked the streets in a daze of happiness. “Rome repays for every thing,” Mary declared. Even Claire was happy, taking singing lessons, exploring the city, and working on her Italian. Her favorite spot was the Temple of Aesculapius in the Borghese Gardens, where she would sit on the steps and read Wordsworth.

  Over the next few months, as the weather grew warmer, Mary and Shelley drew as close as they had been in their early years together. On short expeditions, three-year-old Wilmouse trotted along with them, holding his mother’s hand, exclaiming “O Dio che bella” at the wonders his parents pointed out. Doting parents, they were proud of how much their son loved Rome, its eccentric mix of ruins and livestock, peasants and cardinals, churches and food stalls: “Our little Will is delighted with the goats and the horses and…the ladies’ white marble feet,” Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne, giving us a glimpse of her lively three-year-old, just tall enough to enjoy the naked toes of the statues his parents exclaimed over. Since he had spent most of his life in Italy, William’s Italian was as
strong as his English, but although he was a good walker and eager to explore, he was still somewhat delicate, and Mary continued to be anxious about his health. They instituted a regime of cold baths for him, hoping this would ward off illness and keep him strong. No one was allowed to reprimand him too harshly; Mary did not condone spankings, believing that children could be reasoned with. Shelley agreed; the last thing he wanted was for Wilmouse to suffer what he had endured at the hands of Sir Timothy. From all accounts, their system worked; William had grown into a loving, gentle little boy, remarkably unspoiled despite his parents’ unstinting adoration.

  Although she did not like to be separated from her son, Mary worried about the consequences of exposing him to the notorious Roman sun. Fortunately, Claire enjoyed playing with her nephew, so when Mary and Shelley went on longer expeditions, they left him home with her. One of their favorite spots was the Baths of Caracalla, where they could gaze out over the city. Together they would ascend the “antique winding staircase” and emerge on top of the ruined walls, where they worked and talked and enjoyed a solitude that seemed profound to both young writers. “Never was any desolation more sublime and lovely,” Shelley exclaimed. The ruins were huge and stark, silent reminders of the once great empire, another example of the vision Shelley had sketched out in Ozymandias. The grass was scattered with violets, anemones, and wallflowers, and the wind smelled of salt and juniper. In April, Mary realized she was pregnant again, and for the first time since Clara had died, she looked forward to the future.