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

by Charlotte Gordon

  THAT WINTER, SHELLEY HAD begun work on another long poem, Prometheus Unbound, which stemmed from the ideas the group had first discussed during the Frankenstein summer. Rome seemed the perfect place to finish it, so he devoted himself to writing while Mary sketched, made notes in her journal, and savored the air. “It is a scene of perpetual enchantment to live in this thrice holy city,” she reflected. “Rome…has such an effect on me that my past life before I saw it appears a blank; and now I begin to live.” Lured outside by the beautiful spring evenings, they took a carriage to view the Pantheon by moonlight, where Mary soaked in the “spirit of beauty.” “Never before had I so felt the universal graspings of my own mind,” she reflected later.

  Shelley’s status as a baronet enabled them to meet the seventy-seven-year-old pope, who liked to welcome artists and noble foreigners to his city but who made Mary feel “dreadfully tired” because of his own evident weariness; he would die less than four years after their visit. As always, the Shelleys avoided the other English visitors. “The manners of the rich English are wholly unsupportable, and they assume pretensions which they would not venture upon in their own country,” Shelley wrote to Peacock. Mary agreed: “The place is full of English, rich, noble—important and foolish. I am sick of it.…”

  But in early May they were, for once, glad to bump into someone English, an old family friend, the artist Amelia Curran. They at once commissioned her to paint portraits of everyone in the family. A longtime resident of Rome, Amelia took one look at the slender, small-framed William and warned them against Roman fever, advising them to move out of the city immediately now that the summer was coming. But it was difficult to think about leaving when they were all so contented. As a compromise, they moved north to the Via Sestina, just above the Spanish Steps, which, Amelia said, was a healthier location than the Corso.

  On May 14, Amelia began to paint William’s portrait. Mary did not want him in an artificial pose, so instead of buttoning him into dress clothes, she allowed him to wear his nightshirt. Amelia put a rose in his hand and William let the shirt slide down his shoulder, chattering happily in both Italian and English while Amelia worked at her easel. During the first few days, she made good progress. She captured the little boy’s pointed chin and delicate features. A wisp of hair brushes his forehead. His arms are plump and dimpled. He looks past the painter, intent, as though he is listening to someone—his mother, his aunt Claire, or his father, perhaps.

  But a few days into the project, the little boy began to feel sick. His stomach hurt. He was tired. This was so unlike her lively Wilmouse that Mary at once called the doctor, who diagnosed worms, assuring her that he should recover; it was a common enough ailment. However, a week later, William was still unwell. “He is so very delicate,” Mary wrote to Maria. “We must take the greatest possible care of him this summer.”

  Amelia Curran’s portrait of Wilmouse, age three years. (illustration ill.25)

  But there was to be no summer for William. On June 2, Mary called the doctor three times. Two days later, she watched helplessly as Wilmouse fought to stay alive. She recognized the “convulsions of death” that Ca had endured nine months earlier, and her heart froze in terror. Shelley did not move from William’s side, spending the next three days sitting on his bed. “The hopes of my life are bound up in him,” Mary wrote. But at noon on June 7, William died. Mary’s third child was gone. Malaria, or Roman fever, had taken hold while he was weakened from his stomach ailment. Shelley wept. Mary became obsessed with everything they might have done differently. If only they had left the city a month earlier. If only they had never come to Italy. What if they had stayed in England? Was this yet more retribution for their sins of the past? Perhaps Harriet’s angry soul, not content with taking Clara, had insisted on taking their boy as well—to match the boy and girl she had had with Shelley.

  They did not have a ceremony for their little boy. Shelley arranged to have him buried in the Protestant cemetery, but they did not mark the grave. They talked about erecting a white marble pyramid, but apparently nothing ever came of the idea, since years later, when Mary returned to Rome, she could not find William’s grave. “I never know one moment’s ease from the wretchedness & despair that possess me,” Mary wrote to Marianne Hunt three weeks after her son’s death. To Leigh Hunt she wrote, “the world will never be to me again as it was—there was a life & freshness in it that is lost to me.…”

  Each day, Mary relived the short span of Wilmouse’s life, replaying his words, his expressions, his love for her. “William was so good so beautiful so entirely attached to me.” It was the closeness of their relationship that hurt her most. William had depended on her to take care of him and to protect him. She had failed him. She had failed Ca. She had failed as a mother. She was a curse, a living curse, or so it seemed during this dark time. Not only had she caused her mother’s death, she had allowed her own babies to die.

  Shelley, meanwhile, mourned in poetry:

  My lost William, thou in whom

  Some bright spirit lived, and did

  That decaying robe consume

  Which its luster faintly hid,—

  Here its ashes find a tomb,

  But beneath this pyramid

  Thou art not—if a thing divine

  Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine

  Is thy mother’s grief and mine.

  Where are thou, my gentle child?

  Let me think thy spirit feeds,

  With its life intense and mild,

  The love of living leaves and weeds

  Among these tombs and ruins wild;—

  Let me think that through low seeds

  Of sweet flowers and sunny grass

  Into their hues and scents may pass

  A portion—

  He broke off there, and though he tried again twice more, was never able to finish a poem to commemorate his son.

  If Mary had retreated after Ca died, she now vanished completely. Like one of the statues they had admired in Rome, she was silent and impenetrable. “My dearest Mary,” Shelley pleaded in a poem he did not show her, “wherefore hast thou gone, / And left me in this dreary world alone? / Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one— / But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road, / That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode.” He hesitated, then finished his thought, but in a much weaker hand: “For thine own sake I cannot follow thee / Do thou return for mine.”

  Too late, they moved north to a villa just outside Livorno, near the Gisbornes. The wide stone house was cool that summer. At night the fireflies flashed, reminding everyone of the previous year when Wilmouse had chased them across the lawn. It was so quiet that when there was a breeze they could hear the corn rustle in the nearby fields and the calls of the grape pickers working in the vineyards. From the top floor they watched the different moods of the water—flat and calm, white-tipped, dark before a storm—and learned the names of the islands that dotted the sea: Gorgona, Capraja, Elba, Corsica.

  Mary shut herself indoors or walked alone in the lanes that led to the fields. She stared at the portrait of William, writing to Amelia to express her despair. “I shall never recover [from] that blow—I feel it more now than at Rome—the thought never leaves me for a single moment—Everything has lost its interest to me.” On a nearby hillside, she could see a rose-colored sanctuary called Montenero, built to commemorate a shepherd’s vision of the Madonna in the fourteenth century. Its warm pink dome beckoned visitors, especially those, like Mary, who were looking for solace. Hanging inside was a gold-framed painting of the Virgin with her Son, who looked about William’s age. Jesus’ eyes were dark like William’s, his hair a similar golden brown, although it was shorter. Mother and child gazed out at the world with solemnity, even suspicion, as if anticipating the great tragedy to come. It was impossible for Mary to miss the parallels. Two Marys. Two sons. Two deaths. But Wilmouse would never return.

  NEITHER CLAIRE NOR SHELLEY gave way to this deep mourning, and both wer
e afraid that Mary might not come back to them. Claire even canceled her trip to visit Allegra, writing to Byron that she could not leave Mary alone; she was too melancholy. For all their conflicts, there was still a tight bond of loyalty between the sisters.

  Nonetheless, Mary paid little attention to how Claire and Shelley spent their days. Claire slept until noon, sang for an hour or so, and walked with Shelley in the afternoons. Shelley got up around seven, read in bed for half an hour, ate breakfast by himself, then “ascend[ed]” to a glassed-in balcony on the roof, a common feature of houses in Livorno, where he wrote until two, baking in the sun. Later, Mary would describe this room as “his airy cell,” explaining that “the dazzling sunlight and heat made it almost intolerable to every other; but Shelley basked in both, and his health and spirits revived under their influence.” Occasionally he took energetic walks to the beach or to the home of the Gisbornes, either alone or with Claire, while Mary stayed behind, wrung out with grief, but also tired from pregnancy. The baby was due in November, but it was impossible now for Mary to look forward to its arrival. In her darkened world, all she could anticipate was loss; soon she would have another child, but for how long?

  In the afternoon, she and Shelley came together for a few hours to work on their Italian, translating verses of Dante’s Purgatorio, a fitting choice given Mary’s state of mind. Otherwise she spent her time alone. “I ought to have died on the 7th of June last,” she wrote to the Hunts. She listened to the field workers “sing not very melodiously but very loud—Rossini’s music Mi revedrai, ti revedro,” but what she really wanted was to hear William’s voice. If only she could hold him in her lap once again, show him the bright globes of lemons hanging on the trees, brush his hair off his forehead, listen to him prattle about the birds and the flowers, go for walks near the cornfields, laugh at his pranks. She wanted to see him run down the lane. She wanted to hear him call her name. She wanted to feel his hand in hers.

  There were times when Mary felt she could not bear to go on living, and the worst part was that no one seemed to understand her sorrow. Her father’s reaction was particularly disappointing. When Godwin heard about William, his letter outlined his pecuniary needs first and only then turned to Mary’s grief—with love, yes, but Godwinian love, which always contained an element of the Calvinist preacher. She must not indulge herself by grieving too much, he said. Above all, she must guard against the Wollstonecraft tendency to despair. He ended by giving voice to Mary’s worst fears:

  Though at first your nearest connections may pity you in this state, yet…when they see you fixed in selfishness and ill humour, and regardless of the happiness of every one else, they will finally cease to love you, and scarcely learn to endure you.

  Godwin was a shrewd judge of human nature—or at least of Shelley’s and Mary’s. He knew that if his daughter did not return to her loving ways, if she could not focus on Shelley, the quicksilver poet would move on, seeking admiration in other quarters and leaving Mary alone. He warned her of this danger, harsh though it seemed, because he did not know if his daughter could survive such a blow.

  CHAPTER 24

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “SURELY YOU WILL NOT FORGET ME”

  [ 1795 ]

  was not unconscious for very long before Imlay found her. After reading her last despondent note, he had suspected that she might try to kill herself and hurried over on a beautiful May afternoon to find her slumped on her bed, her eyes closed, well on her way to a coma. He sent for a doctor and, as Mary described the experience in her novel Maria, “A…vision swam before her…she tried to listen, to speak, to look!” The doctor induced “violent vomiting” and she was soon out of danger, but her desolation had reached such a pitch that even the insensitive Imlay realized she was desperate enough to try again.

  Instead of taking Mary in his arms and consoling her, Imlay came up with a plan to remove her from London. Perhaps he still loved her, but he did not want to give up his freedom, and her suicide attempt had not made him any more willing to bow to her wishes. It also seems likely that he felt guilty or dreaded the embarrassment of having his famous “wife” commit suicide. He gave Mary a few days to recover, then he made a proposition: Would she go to Scandinavia to find out what had happened to the Bourbon silver and his missing ship? This was an astonishing proposal to make to a woman who had just tried to end her life, but Mary, who did not want to give up her belief in Imlay, nor her ideals about the possibilities of a love between equals, saw it as a promising development. He still wanted her in his life as a dear friend and a helper. She would be able to demonstrate her resourcefulness and competence and he would be grateful and impressed, which could easily lead him back to the tenderness he once felt—or so she hoped. Maybe it was true that Gilbert had been neglecting her because of financial worries, and if she could find the missing ship, he would be a rich man, they could move to America, and he could cease the quest for wealth that frustrated her. He also said that he would meet her for a holiday in Basel after her investigation. He did not pretend that he wanted a settled, domestic life with her, and yet Mary allowed herself to hope that he might change his mind.

  She took only a few days to pack and organize her affairs. Then she set forth for Scandinavia. In the 1790s, few Englishmen had traveled to northern Europe, and even fewer Englishwomen. Accompanied by Fanny, now just over a year old, and the intrepid Marguerite, who only a few months ago had never been outside of Paris, Mary took a coach north to Hull, the port of departure for Gothenburg. Fanny was fretful during the overnight ride, keeping Mary awake. When at last they arrived at the port, they had to stay in a “tomb-like house” until they could find a ship headed for Sweden. This took a few days, and when Mary did find a vessel, they were forced to wait until the winds were blowing in the right direction. The days rolled slowly by, and one afternoon, Mary made a trip back to Beverley, the town she had once thought so sophisticated. Now it seemed “diminutive,” and the people she had once thought cosmopolitan and well-educated seemed closed-minded and parochial. She was struck by the contrast between her own life and theirs: “I could not help wondering how they could thus have vegetated, whilst I was running over a world of sorrow, snatching at pleasure, and throwing off prejudices.” Even though she had suffered—or perhaps because she had suffered—she felt herself “greatly improved” by her experiences. These people who had lived in the same place all of their days did not know how strange and curious the world could be. She saw how suspicious they were of outsiders and how fearful of change. How limited their lives seemed!

  Exhausted and still enduring the aftershocks of her suicide attempt, each morning Mary was seized by a fit of trembling, as though she had a fever. Fanny had learned her lessons too well, continually calling for “Papa” to “come, come.” Sometimes Mary wished she had died, but at other times she felt surprisingly tranquil. What was most difficult was how her moods changed so quickly. One minute, she could not wait for the voyage to begin, the next she dreaded leaving England just as much as she had feared coming back. It occurred to her that Imlay was sending her away so he could be free of her demands. “Surely you will not forget me,” she wrote to him plaintively.

  On June 16, after almost a week, the little group were finally able to board the ship, but before they could set sail, the wind shifted again and they were stuck for another week in foggy weather, riding the waves, waiting for the right breeze. Marguerite was seasick the moment she set foot on deck, so she stayed below, leaving Mary alone with Fanny. At first Fanny “play[ed] with the cabin boy” and was “gay as a lark,” but then she began to teethe and refused to nap, whining and holding tightly to her mother. Mary developed a violent headache but could not lie down since she had to look after both her maid and her toddler. As the boat “tossed about without going forward,” Mary did find the energy to write to Gilbert, listing her sufferings and placing the blame at his door. She could not sleep, and when she did she had nightmares about him. She had endured “anguish of min
d” and “the sinking of a broken heart.” She was hurt that he had not written to her more frequently and with more depth of feeling. Like the ship, she felt flung back and forth on the waves but tethered to the same miserable place.

  At last the wind turned and they set sail, arriving in Gothenburg on June 27. The weather there was gloomy; sheets of rain drenched the passengers as they disembarked. When Mary hurried across the slippery rocks to the waiting carriage, she fell and cut her head, frightening the already anxious Marguerite by losing consciousness and lying “in a stupour for a quarter of an hour.” She recovered in time to make the twenty-mile journey to town, but the rain poured down without pause, and when they arrived at their inn they could not get a fire or anything warm to eat.

  The journey and subsequent events had done little to lift Mary’s despair. On her first evening in Sweden, she wrote, “My friend—my friend, I am not well—a deadly weight of sorrow lies heavily on my heart.” Gilbert did respond to her laments, but he was not very sympathetic. He told Mary that she was torturing him with her complaints and that she was not being respectful of him or his feelings. Mary wrote back saying she would stop criticizing him, but then she contradicted herself, closing the letter with a meticulous recitation of Gilbert’s flaws, dissecting him as though she were reviewing a bad book: he was irresponsible; he was fearful; he was selfish; he was like Hamlet, unable to decide what to do or how to act. Understandably, Imlay did not write back for several days.