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

by Charlotte Gordon

  There was a rural feeling to this new part of London. Here she could walk out her front door and see open fields, creeks, and farmland. Cows lowed; sheep grazed. Now and then a stray pig wandered by. Little Fanny was delighted with these country pleasures. She jumped over sticks and marched in place like a soldier. She loved apple pie and wanted to help Marguerite “mix the butter and flour together.” She was not allowed to use the big apple-paring knife—little knives for little girls, Mary said—but she was consoled when Mary told her, “When you are as tall as I am, you shall have a knife as large as mine.” They adopted a puppy and Mary taught Fanny how to take care of him, recording one of the lessons in the little book she wrote to help Fanny learn to read, “Oh! The poor puppy has tumbled off the stool. Run and stroke him. Put a little milk in a saucer to comfort him.” To ensure Fanny’s sympathy for the animal, she added, “When the book fell down on your foot, it gave you great pain. The poor dog felt the same pain just now. Take care not to hurt him when you play with him.” Mary delighted in these times together as much as Fanny did; after all, she had almost missed watching her daughter grow.

  One pleasant spring day, while paying a visit to Rebecca Christie, Mary discovered that Godwin had stopped by, hoping to see her. The spring air, the time with Fanny, and the distance from Imlay had all helped Mary regain her strength, and she was flattered. She waited for Godwin to return, and when he did not appear, she took matters into her own hands. On April 14, she walked to his lodgings on Chalton Street in nearby Somers Town. Although respectable women were not supposed to visit men alone in their rooms, Godwin welcomed her, accepting her unorthodox behavior without any question, and the first of many long conversations began. He invited her for tea the next day and then saw her as frequently as possible, for plays, more teas, walks, and dinner parties.

  Usually, they met with the lively circle of friends Godwin had cultivated, including numerous female admirers whom he termed “the fairs.” Although he was gratified by their attention, he was not always sure how to negotiate the tricky waters of flirtation. He had many odd habits, including long silences, catnaps at inopportune moments, and startling coughs. When his admirers made romantic overtures, Godwin recoiled, unwilling to reveal his inexperience. One day, about a year before, the unhappily married Maria Reveley had tried to kiss him, but he pulled away in embarrassment—a hesitation he would regret in the years to come.

  Maria was beautiful, cultured, and confident enough in her charms to bear Godwin no ill will and she quickly became Mary’s favorite of the “fairs.” She admired Mary’s work and welcomed the opportunity to get to know her. Mary, too, was eager to befriend Maria. She needed new companions, as she had fallen out of touch with Ruth Barlow, and her sisters were cold and distant. Eliza was still not speaking to her, and Everina only occasionally sent a terse note. Mary loved Rebecca Christie and Mary Hays, but Rebecca was not an intellectual and Mary Hays had never lived abroad. Maria, on the other hand, was both a scholar and cosmopolitan. She had been raised in Constantinople and Rome, spoke several different languages, and had a deep interest in political philosophy, literature, and the rights of women. In addition, she had a little boy named Henry who was around the same age as Fanny. The children could play and the women could talk—Mary had never had the opportunity for such a friendship before.

  Over the next few weeks, Maria confided in Mary about her neglectful husband, and Mary told Maria about Imlay and her sufferings in France and Sweden. Neither woman could know that they were laying the groundwork for a future in which Mary could play no part—that years later, after her husband died, Maria would marry a man named Gisborne and move to Italy, and there, as though the fates had planned it, befriend the desperately lonely Mary Shelley.

  Mary was less keen on Elizabeth Inchbald, a gossipy widow in her early forties, the author of several badly written novels who had the good looks of the girl next door (or, as her contemporaries said, “a milkmaid”) and the snobbish manners of a duchess. The poet Coleridge warned Godwin not to trust Inchbald, saying she seemed warm and friendly but underneath was “cold and cunning.” He was right. Inchbald was envious of the other women in Godwin’s court and did her best to undermine their claims. Amelia Alderson, a beauty with literary aspirations who flirted outrageously with the stiff Godwin, wrote to a friend, “[Mrs. Inchbald] appears to be jealous of G’s attention to [me] and makes him believe I prefer [Holcroft] to him.” Inchbald already loathed Mary because, long before they met, Mary had panned her literary efforts as naïve, boring, and ridiculous. Now that Godwin was entranced by Wollstonecraft, Inchbald’s antipathy only intensified.

  But Inchbald was the only “fair” who did not like Mary. The rest of Godwin’s admirers immediately warmed to Mary, who felt happier than she had in years. She had stumbled into a group of ready-made female friends and was drawing closer to a man she respected and enjoyed. Nonetheless, she was unsure of Godwin’s feelings. A confirmed bachelor, he invited Mary and the others to the opera, or parties, but when it came to any deeper kind of relationship, he kept his distance. In Political Justice, he had declared he did not believe in marriage, and so no one thought it surprising that he lived alone. Clearly, he was a pure philosopher who did not need love—or so gossiped those who wondered if he had ever had an affair.

  And yet Godwin’s time with these graceful, witty women had helped him develop at least some of the elements of playful repartee. He had learned to dress with more flair, according to Amelia, who reported to a friend that Godwin had put aside his fusty old coats and ministerial shirts and now wore “new sharp-toed red morocco slippers [and a] green coat and crimson under waistcoat.” He had also cut his unfashionably long hair and stopped powdering it in order to assert his sympathy with the French revolutionaries. Stuffy though he could be, Godwin was a true radical, and even he acknowledged that it was time he looked like one.

  Still, despite these sartorial improvements, Godwin could never compete with Imlay’s charms. Even the fairs had been unable to help him lose his awkwardness, particularly with women. Atheist that he was, he still had the manners of a clergyman. He disapproved of frivolity, rarely made jokes, frequently looked bored at parties no matter how brilliant the conversation, never complimented anyone, and had no idea how to talk about anything other than literature and political philosophy, and usually his own political philosophy.

  Yet for all his irritating ways, for all that she was not sure what he wanted from her or how close he wanted to be, Godwin seemed trustworthy to Mary precisely because he was so adamantly, even defiantly, not charming. She saw how loyal he was to his friends, and how he never shied away from speaking his opinions even if he hurt someone’s feelings. He was not the sort of man who would run off with a young actress. He would not even want to. Indeed, the stories that circled around Godwin featured his primness, his refusal to embrace even his closest female friends. He was virginal, impregnable, the embodiment of rectitude. Before he met Mary, Godwin had occasionally attempted to embark on a flirtation, but was too shy to succeed. Amelia Alderson was amused at his attempts at gallantry, writing a friend, “It would have entertained you to see [Godwin] bid me farewell. He wished to salute [kiss] me, but his courage failed him.…”

  After Imlay, Mary liked being with a man who valued the exchange of ideas more than love affairs, and she was unsure whether she desired anything more. Increasingly, she trusted Godwin’s stalwart honesty and intellectual rectitude. Yes, he was often silent, coming to life only when he disagreed with someone, believing it his duty to point out holes in other people’s arguments; yes, hostesses dreaded his arrival—he was a difficult guest, dozing off when bored, sermonizing when interested—but Mary was not put off. She could see that Godwin admired her and, better yet, was impressed by her moods and sorrows. Imlay had dreaded her displays of feeling, viewing them as burdensome, a demand for something he could not deliver; Godwin regarded Mary’s propensity for depression as evidence of her depth, her highly strung nature,
her artistic soul.

  As the spring turned to summer, both Mary and Godwin began to dream of an unlikely new love, although they hardly confessed these dreams to themselves, let alone to each other. Mary did not want to be hurt again. In retrospect, she realized that she and Imlay had made love with a kind of recklessness that guaranteed disaster. She had not waited to learn about Imlay’s character and had allowed herself to be swept along without testing his integrity. Now she kept herself in check. She went for long walks with her staid admirer, who listened with empathy to her complaints, her ideas, and the details of her melancholy reflections, but no kisses were exchanged. They did not even hold hands.

  By mid-May, Godwin was eating supper at Mary’s house on a regular basis, and early in the summer, Mary took their relationship a step further, allowing Godwin to read the first draft of her latest writing project, a play based on her relationship with Imlay. Even though she never responded well to criticism, Mary listened to his comments, most of which were negative. The story was “crude and imperfect.” Her grammar and punctuation were sloppy. Mary did not take offense, however; instead, she asked for guidance. Maybe Godwin, impeccably educated as he was, could teach her the rules of syntax—an unlikely foundation for romance, perhaps, but for Mary, there could be few more intimate exchanges. She wrote to reveal herself to the world; commas, sentences, and paragraphs were the only tools she had. Years earlier, she had begun her passionate friendships with both Fanny Blood and Jane Arden by asking them to correct her grammar.

  Godwin found Mary’s request exquisitely flattering. Five years earlier, he would never have dreamed that Mary Wollstonecraft would turn to him for advice. Her new deference was gratifying. Besides, their literary discussions gave him an opportunity to sit close to her, almost touching as they pored over her ink-blotted pages.

  But even with Godwin’s assistance, Mary could not get the play to work. Eventually, she put it aside to start writing a companion piece to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a novel she called The Wrongs of Woman. In this new work, she wanted to dramatize the plight of abused and abandoned females, exposing the falseness of popular novels in which feminine weakness was glorified and the heroine’s suffering was a cue for the hero’s entrance. In many ways, this was the plot that had almost killed her. She had invested Imlay with all the powers of a hero, giving him the opportunity to rescue her with her first suicide attempt. But he was no hero, and would not become one no matter how long she played the role of the helpless female. To survive, she had been forced to give up hope that he would one day save her, and without the tools of writing and self-reflection, she might have failed. Now she wanted readers to see how dangerous this formula could be. Women needed to be able to stand alone. Men should not be seen as the “rescuers” of women; giving them that kind of power could all too easily make them brutes.

  As with Letters from Sweden, her old mode of writing, discursive and philosophical, no longer seemed the best way to make her point. Mary wanted readers to have a visceral experience of the suffering of women. At the same time, she was intent on exploring the psychology of her heroines, to show their responses to their harrowing experiences and some of the reasons for their destructive decisions. Her ultimate hope was to help her readers see the necessity for reform. If women continued to be infantilized, society would spiral downward.

  That July, she began to map out the plot of her new novel, while Godwin left for a vacation in Norfolk. Having spent so much time together during the previous months, both parties brooded over their relationship while apart. Although by now they recognized that something more than a friendship had begun, both were reluctant to declare themselves: Mary because she did not want to display too much ardor for “fear of outrunning” Godwin; Godwin because he was too well aware of what a poor figure he cut next to Imlay. He had never made love to a woman, and he had been embarrassed when, earlier in the summer, he had sent Mary a stilted love poem and she had scoffed at his efforts, declaring that she did not want an artificial composition, but instead “a bird’s eye view of your heart.” Do not write me again, she said, “unless you honestly acknowledge yourself bewitched.” Godwin, always literal-minded, felt criticized, missing Mary’s rather bold invitation to reveal himself. Instead, he could hear only her mocking tone and was too timid to realize that Mary was urging him to declare his love. Inexperienced and afraid, he possessed neither the wisdom nor the experience to know that she was only protecting herself until he declared himself more openly.

  Mary must have been more encouraging in person, however, because while he was in Norfolk, Godwin screwed up his courage and tried again, penning a slightly sheepish letter in which he attempted to express his love, albeit in mock-heroic terms, as he could not yet bring himself to risk complete sincerity:

  Now, I take all my Gods to witness…that your company infinitely delights me, that I love your imagination, your delicate epicurism, the malicious leer of your eye, in short every thing that constitutes the bewitching tout ensemble of the celebrated Mary.…Shall I write a love letter? May Lucifer fly away with me, if I do! No, when I make love, it shall be with the eloquent tones of my voice, with dying accents, with speaking glances (through the glass of my spectacles), with all the witching of that irresistible, universal passion. Curse on the mechanical icy medium of pen and paper. When I make love, it shall be in a storm, as Jupiter made love to Semele and turned her at once to a cinder. Do not these menaces terrify you?

  Mary did not much care for his humor, but she recognized that his facetiousness masked an anxiety that was understandable; after all, she had been in his position only three years earlier. In addition, there was a certain appeal to this reversal: she the confident lover, Godwin the nervous virgin. Yet for all their long walks and conversations, for all the hours spent confiding their fears and dreams to each other, it was still difficult for her to consider being vulnerable again, particularly with a famous man who already had a flock of female admirers.

  CHAPTER 29

  MARY SHELLEY: PISA

  [ 1820–1821 ]

  fall of 1820 was a quietly productive time for Mary Shelley. She wrote during the day, nursed little Percy, went for walks, and bathed in the spa waters of the Bagni di San Giuliano. In the evenings, she and Shelley admired Venus hanging low in the sky, “the softened tints of the olive woods, the purple tinge of the distant mountains…the heaven-pointing cypress,” the “boat-like moon” casting a “silvery light,” the crickets “humming,” and the fireflies and glowworms flickering. Looking back, Mary would remember this place as a kind of paradise. But Shelley was restless. A wealthy admirer of his poetry had written to him that summer, inviting him to take an excursion to the Middle East. Shelley did not tell Mary about this offer, knowing it would upset her, but he immediately wrote to Claire proposing that she accompany him and begging her not to tell her sister.

  Despite appearances, Shelley was not interested in having an affair with Claire, at least not at this particular juncture—though the events of 1814–15 remain shadowy. Rather, Mary’s preoccupation with Percy and her rejection of Shelley after William’s death had taken their toll. Shelley felt unimportant, hemmed in by being a husband and a father. Mary was less angry now, but she remained distant sexually and Shelley was frustrated. Lively, enthusiastic Claire worshipped him. He wished she were with them and not in Florence. She understood how cold Mary could be and could always be counted on to commiserate with him over her stepsister’s failings.

  But in the end, Shelley stayed in Italy, contenting himself with solo ventures into the countryside and hiding his resentment so successfully that Mary was unaware of how he felt. She enjoyed being alone with her husband and child and was disappointed to learn that Shelley had invited Tom Medwin to pay them a visit. When Medwin did arrive that October, he was short on money and happy to have free lodging. Having just returned from seven years in India, where, he said, he had spent his time hunting tigers, riding elephants, and touring Hindu temples, h
e declared himself eager to renew his friendship with Shelley.

  Shelley did not hear the false note in Medwin’s stories, but Mary heard the clichés and was less enthralled. Medwin repeated himself, she said; he was puffed up, self-absorbed, and loud; he was always the hero of his own tales and a sponge on their finances. The worst part was that he did not have any particular plans for the future and seemed content to stay with them indefinitely.

  But Medwin was not there simply to sponge off the Shelleys. He was genuinely fascinated by his notorious cousin. He had not seen him since they were teenagers and carefully recorded his first impressions:

  His figure was emaciated and somewhat bent; owing to near-sightedness, and his being forced to lean over his books, with his eyes almost touching them; his hair, still profuse, and curling naturally, was partially interspersed with grey…but his appearance was youthful, and his countenance, whether grave or animated, strikingly intellectual.

  As for Mary, she was not Medwin’s type, either in looks or personality, but he thought she was a good match for his cousin, describing how Shelley found respite “in the tenderness of affection and sympathy of her who partook of his genius, and could appreciate his transcendent talents.”

  At the end of October, they all moved back into Pisa. Shelley had found a new and even more spacious apartment on the Lung’Arno, this time at the Casa Galetti, a villa that stood next to one of the most imposing marble palazzi. They had the entire first floor and two additional rooms on the fourth floor, one for Shelley’s study and one for Medwin’s bedroom. Shelley had moved from feeling rejected by Mary to rejecting her himself. When he was home, he retreated upstairs. “Congratulate me on my seclusion,” he wrote to Claire. Yet Shelley’s defection from their living quarters left Medwin largely on Mary’s hands, and by mid-November he had gone from being a minor annoyance to a bothersome intrusion, irritating Mary by reading aloud when she was trying to focus on finishing Valperga.