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

by Charlotte Gordon

  What is interesting is the subversive twist Mary gives to the story. She based Valperga’s plot on the life of Prince Castruccio Castracani, a historical figure depicted as a hero by Niccolò Machiavelli in his short biography of the man. In Mary’s version, though, the prince is a destructive force. His hunger for power destroys the freedom of his people and ultimately leads to the death of the woman he loves, the countess Euthanasia. Mary had to invent this character from scratch, as no such woman could have existed in the thirteenth century. To Mary, in this one case, historical accuracy was less important than creating a female counterforce to Castruccio. In a dramatic departure from Machiavelli, she made Euthanasia a champion of peace and freedom, as well as the leader of the forces who try to stop the prince but fail.

  The peculiar names of Mary’s hero and heroine point to the themes she wanted to emphasize. The name Castruccio Castracani brings to mind castrati, the Italian term for male singers who were castrated to preserve their soprano voice. If only the countess could check or castrate Castruccio, the world would be a happier, more peaceful place, Mary implies. As it is, Euthanasia is fated to die the “good death” that her name suggests; there is no room for her in Castruccio’s warlike world.

  Valperga’s dark message is as much a political diatribe as Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy. Mary attacked the values espoused by Machiavelli and adopted by many statesmen ever since. Machiavelli had promoted war, not peace. Falsehood, not truth. Absolute rulers, not freedom. A prince had to commit wicked deeds to secure his power, Machiavelli said—an affront to Mary’s idealism. Over the centuries, many other thinkers had condemned Machiavelli’s “means to an end” political philosophy, but Mary was the first to write a novel that demonstrated the suffering caused when Machiavelli’s advice is put into action. Castruccio betrays those he loves. He fights wars to consolidate his holdings. He is treacherous and cruel, killing opponents without mercy. Like Victor Frankenstein’s, his ambition is boundless; he pursues “Honour, fame, dominion,” in the face of Euthanasia’s protests. As a result, “the people [are] driven from their happy cottages,” Euthanasia laments, “often a poor child lost, or haplessly wounded, whose every drop of blood is of more worth than the power of the Caesars.…”

  Like Shelley, Mary was fighting against injustice, depicting the consequences of tyranny. Under the surface, though, she indicted Shelley himself. The prince causes the death of children. So, Mary thought, had Shelley. And, like Mary, Euthanasia is helpless. She cannot vanquish the prince’s army or change his mind, and so she does what Mary sometimes wished for herself: she sails off to die. Her people are left in Castruccio’s hands—frightened, poor, and tyrannized.

  Mary had made her point, a point that had been made by her mother before her: when men are guided by ambition, not love, and by fame, not family, then women and children pay the price. Castruccio’s lust, like Matilda’s father’s, brings about the destruction of those he loves. Although Valperga could not seem more different from Wollstonecraft’s Vindications, for Mary Shelley—living during a more conservative time than her mother—the best way to call for reform was to use fiction. Besides, she was well aware that one of her mother’s original goals as a writer was to explore the minds of women; thus in both Valperga and Matilda she had tried to achieve this aim, albeit using very different techniques, but always in the service of her mother’s philosophy. Mary’s estrangement from Shelley, difficult though it was, had the benefit of giving her more independence, aesthetically and politically. Her most influential teacher, as well as her inspiration, was now her dead mother, not her husband.

  As Mary put the finishing touches on Valperga, news came that the newly crowned King George IV—whom the Shelleys despised—had driven his wife, Queen Caroline, out of England simply because he disliked her. Now the queen, whom they admired as the symbolic leader of the liberal movement in England, was in Italy, a living example of how all women, even queens, were at the mercy of men, and how liberty so often was the victim of tyranny. To Mary, the world had begun to seem a place of eternal contention, a never-ending struggle between evil and good, ambition and love. And, in her experience, evil usually won.

  CHAPTER 28

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A HUMANE AND TENDER CONSIDERATION”

  [ 1796 ]

  by the success of Letters from Sweden, Mary took confidence from having persevered in the face of Imlay’s rejection. Only a few months earlier, she had been floating unconscious down the Thames; now she had achieved new heights, having written her most popular book to date. In December she had dinner with Mary Hays, an aspiring writer who had sought out Mary for advice a few years before. Mary had responded with her usual honesty, telling Hays not to apologize so much for her work. They had met briefly once or twice before but had never forged an intimate connection. Now Mary discovered they had much in common. Both were living alone. Both were attempting to earn their living by their pen. And both were nursing a broken heart.

  Mary Hays had fallen in love with a revolutionary Unitarian who enjoyed having long philosophical conversations with her, but did not want a sexual relationship. Frustrated, she consoled herself with her work and her close friendships with other men, among them William Godwin, who had become an international celebrity since Mary had last met him five years ago. Stiff, short, and awkward though he was, Godwin had attracted many female followers.

  To Mary Hays and her friends, Godwin’s tome An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, published in 1793, was one of the most important protests against the conservative British backlash to the French Revolution. Godwin had witnessed the defeat of the Reform Bills of 1792 and 1793. He had seen the leaders of the reform movement arrested and persecuted by the government. In his eyes, both the monarchy and Parliament were corrupt institutions. He championed natural rights, arguing that all governments, not only unjust ones, impinged on these rights, and that human beings should be allowed to govern themselves. This was less a naïve idealization of the human spirit than an expression of Godwin’s disillusionment with both the French revolutionary tribunes and the British constitutional monarchy. In The Adventures of Caleb Williams, the novel he wrote the year after Political Justice (1794), he declared that his purpose was to demonstrate the various methods “by which man becomes the destroyer of man.” He had yet to see a political system that truly promoted equality and justice, he wrote, and so, for all its tightly ordered arguments and dry style, its long lists of philosophical and historical examples, Political Justice is an angry book, designed to provoke the authorities and ignite the spirit of reform.

  And yet Godwin’s call for change was also essentially conservative. He argued for gradual, rational reform, not sudden coups d’état. He was appalled by the bloodshed of the French Revolution, writing that it was reason, and reason alone, that could save human beings from themselves. However, this moderate stance was lost on Godwin’s contemporaries. To them, the sheer shock value of Political Justice transformed Godwin into an icon of revolution—a misunderstanding of Godwin that persisted after he died, when radicals of all stripes—most notably Peter Kropotkin, one of the first public advocates for anarchism, and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels—took up Godwin as their hero, citing him as an important influence.

  But even though Godwin did not espouse violence, he did believe in liberty. Risking imprisonment, he wrote a formidable defense of twelve radical intellectuals who had proposed legal reforms and were arrested for high treason in 1794. A dangerously on-edge Parliament had cracked down on civil liberties, suspending habeas corpus, arresting as a traitor anyone who disagreed with the king, and outlawing all meetings, pamphlets, and petitions. Godwin published his article in The Morning Chronicle, stirring public outrage at their incarceration. All twelve men were released, and Godwin was hailed for his commitment to political freedom. The young William Wordsworth told his friends, “Throw aside your books of chemistry and read Godwin.” “Truth, moral truth…ha
d taken up its abode [in him],” wrote the essayist William Hazlitt.

  For all his newfound fame, Political Justice did not earn Godwin much money. The prime minister, William Pitt, laughed at the book’s five-hundred-page length as well as its ponderous solemnity. He did not need to censor this enormous volume, he said, because no one would read it, let alone buy it, since, priced at over a pound, it was far too expensive for the ordinary citizen. But Pitt had underestimated the influence of Godwin’s words. Throughout the country, reformers swore by Political Justice, forming book groups that purchased it for their members to share. Eventually, it sold more than four thousand copies, enough to win Godwin acclaim, but not enough to keep him afloat. He had to stay busy as a writer of novels and political commentary to maintain even the simple life he had chosen. He rented inexpensive rooms far from the center of London, had one servant, an old woman who cleaned his rooms each morning, and allowed himself few luxuries, choosing to write books that pleased his conscience rather than the public.

  Political Justice was published a few months after Godwin had met Wollstonecraft for the first time at Johnson’s dinner party for Thomas Paine, an event he remembered with distaste. As he recalled it, Mary had dominated the conversation, leaving him to twiddle his thumbs at the other end of the table. That everyone else at the party, particularly Paine, had praised her wit and had actually seemed to enjoy her company only made matters worse. Three years later, he still blamed her for his silence that night, characterizing her as loud and intrusive.

  Mary, on the other hand, had heard of Godwin’s noble achievements from many of her friends when she returned to London, having missed his sudden ascent to fame while she was in France. Still, even his reputation as a staunch defender of reform was not enough to dispel her own unpleasant memories. She, too, remembered their meeting, and she regarded him as rigid and awkward, someone to ridicule, not respect. As she drew closer to Mary Hays, though, Wollstonecraft heard about a different Godwin, a dear friend who had “shown a humane & tender consideration” for Hays when she had confided in him about her wounded heart. Although Mary confessed that she could not picture Godwin as a sensitive listener, she declared that his kindness to Hays had raised Godwin in her esteem. Hays reported Mary’s words to Godwin, who was annoyed by the backhanded nature of Wollstonecraft’s compliment. She “has frequently amused herself by depreciating me,” he muttered, refusing Hays’s request that he meet Mary again.

  But Hays had decided that her “dear friends” needed to learn to appreciate each other, and she plotted to get the two into the same room so that each could witness the other’s “excellent” qualities. She told Godwin that Mary had “a warm and generous heart” and, intriguingly, had almost died of her sufferings despite her strength of mind. Godwin remained unconvinced, and Mary was so focused on her own heartbreak that she was reluctant to meet new men, let alone a man she had found unappealing to begin with. And yet Hays persisted. She insisted that Wollstonecraft and Godwin come to her house for tea. And on January 8, 1796, they did.

  When the fateful afternoon finally rolled around, things began badly. Saddled with preconceptions and bad memories, the two principals eyed each other warily. Godwin was condescending and unfriendly, making it painfully obvious that he did not like Mary and was only overlooking what he took to be her many faults because he believed in doing “justice” to his enemies. Mary was no better. She had come to the tea party not to begin a new friendship, she implied, but only to please Mary Hays.

  As the afternoon wore on, however, both Godwin and Mary were surprised at the changes time had wrought. Years of social engagements had eased some of Godwin’s self-consciousness. Instead of being pedantic, he now seemed eccentric, a genius, a man of importance. Mary, too, had gained in social skills and confidence. She was gentler, more of a listener and far less preoccupied with making her own points; the Revolution and the backlash in England had disillusioned her; political contention no longer seemed so important. Now, as in Letters from Sweden, it was affairs of the heart and mind that interested her—emotions, psychology, and the self—essentially, the topics of her battles with Imlay. What role could Nature play in healing an individual’s pain? How was civilization harming or helping the human spirit? Could the life of the imagination triumph over a life dedicated to material pleasures? She had not lost interest in politics and current events; it was just that she was now fascinated by the interior life, the reasons and feelings behind people’s actions—why they did what they did.

  Fortunately, Godwin, too, found these themes engrossing, having explored the psychological effects of tyranny in his novel Caleb Williams. And so, as the talk turned literary on this first meeting, it quickly became clear to Mary that Godwin’s goal in writing was like hers: to inspire the reading public to take action against political, economic, and social injustice. He, too, had a hatred of arbitrary authority, a faith that writing books could ameliorate the human condition, and a fascination with what lay below the surface of people’s motivations: What was the psychology of the oppressor and the oppressed, the tyrant and the victim?

  But everything might have stalled there if Mary had not been beautiful. Despite his Calvinist upbringing, Godwin appreciated attractive women, and motherhood had rounded Mary’s figure, just as suffering had softened her outlook. Always attractive, at age thirty-six, she was now considered lovely by most who met her. One new acquaintance reported that she was a “very voluptuous looking woman.” And though one of her eyes had a slight droop, left over from one of her illnesses, that flaw did not stop the poet Robert Southey from extolling her expressiveness; her face, he told his friends, is “the best, infinitely the best.…Her eyes are light brown, and though the lid of one is affected by a little paralysis, they are the most meaning I ever saw.” She still called herself Mrs. Imlay, even in these liberal circles where most people knew her story, but her suffering made her seem exotic and original rather than unacceptable, particularly next to Mary Hays, whom even a dear friend described as “old, ugly, and ill-dressed.” Godwin’s best friend, Thomas Holcroft, a widower, was so smitten with Mary that he penned her a fulsome love letter proposing they embark immediately on a sexual adventure:

  I never touched your lips; yet I have felt them, sleeping and waking, present and absent. I feel them now: and now, starting in disappointment from the beatific trance, ask why I am forbidden to fly and fall on your bosom and there dissolve in bliss such as I have never known, except in reveries like this.

  Although she was not attracted to the bespectacled Holcroft, Mary handled his overtures with a diplomacy she had not possessed prior to her own rejections at the hand of Imlay. Her reply to his letter does not survive, but the warm friendship they developed that spring suggests that her words were compassionate and allowed Holcroft to maintain his dignity.

  This new Mary was much more to Godwin’s liking. For all of his radicalism, he believed that women stood in need of male protection. He valued “the softness of their natures [and] the delicacy of their sentiments.” A muted Wollstonecraft better fit his ideas of femininity; she did not interrupt or challenge anyone’s opinions, and she looked sadly vulnerable. After their first afternoon, he reflected, “sympathy in her anguish added in my mind to the respect I had always entertained for her talents.” When, a week later, they met at another party, he found himself agreeing with his friend Holcroft: Mary was not only an intelligent woman, she was eminently desirable.

  Intrigued, Godwin purchased Letters, and from the first page he was captivated. In his diary he described his reaction in an unusually long entry:

  [Mary] speaks of her sorrows in a way that fills us with melancholy, and dissolves us in tenderness, at the same time that she displays a genius which commands all our admiration. Affliction had tempered her heart to a softness almost more than human; and the gentleness of her spirit seems precisely to accord with all the romance of unbounded attachment.

  But as impressed as she was with the new Godwin, Ma
ry was still brooding over Imlay. The act of writing Letters from Sweden had improved her mood, and she no longer believed that she could truly be happy with Imlay, or even that he was worth loving, but it was still difficult to let go of the idea of him entirely. It was not until mid-February, when Imlay returned to London for business, that she finally accepted her loss. She and Fanny bumped into him at the Christies’ and Fanny, immediately recognizing “Papa’s” voice, rushed toward him for a hug. Imlay embraced his daughter and spoke gently to Mary, promising to see her the next day, but when he visited, he was his usual noncommittal self. Kind but distant.

  Strangely enough, it was this, his matter-of-fact, businesslike reserve, compared to the Sturm und Drang she had provoked from him in their previous confrontations, that finally got through to Mary and she accepted his departure with an equanimity that would have been impossible a year before. She knew that Imlay could never offer her the love or the passion she wanted. And so when she felt the tug of her old despondency, she was wise enough not to let it take hold, packing herself and Fanny into a carriage to visit friends in Berkshire. Here she replenished her energy without any danger of running into Gilbert, and when she returned to London, she wrote to him, “I part with you in peace.” Although she had made this declaration many times before, this time Mary meant it. When they met by accident later that spring, she noted that she did not feel particularly cast down.

  In fact, her melancholy was receding. Fanny was now almost two years old and was chattering, running, playing with a ball, laughing at jokes, and altogether more independent, giving Mary a sense of renewed freedom. The primroses bloomed, announcing the arrival of spring. The fruit trees flowered, and Canterbury bells, vibernum, iris, stock, sweet peas, and lilacs grew along the paths in the parks. Flush with the glories of Nature, Mary moved to Cumming Street, Pentonville, on the outskirts of London, away from the house in Finsbury Square that she associated with Imlay.