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

by Charlotte Gordon

  It is also true that by the time Godwin condemned Mary for running away with Shelley, he had changed his mind about marriage, since, right from the start, his union with Mary proved an experience contrary to his “doctrines.” His new wife did not try to rope Godwin into doing anything he did not want to do, and, within a few days of the move, he had established a new routine: early each morning he walked the two blocks to his office on Chalton Street, read, ate breakfast, and wrote until one, just as he always had. This arrangement was fine with Mary, who told him, “I wish you, for my soul, to be riveted in my heart; but I do not desire to have you always at my elbow.”

  Godwin’s separate work chambers meant they still needed to rely on notes to communicate during the day, and fortunately, Godwin saved many of Mary’s. She tells him the menu for dinner:

  I have ordered some boiled mutton, as the best thing for me, and as the weather will probably prevent you from walking out, you will, perhaps, have no objection to dining at four.

  She tells him how to behave with Fanny, and organizes their schedule:

  Fanny is delighted with the thought of dining with you—But I wish you to eat your meat first, and let her come up with the pudding; but should I not find you, let me now request you not to be too late this evening. (Do not give Fanny butter with her pudding.)

  She gets the last word in on arguments:

  I am sorry we entered on an altercation this morning, which probably has led us both to justify ourselves at the expence of the other.

  And:

  To be frank with you…I think you wrong—yes, with the most decided conviction I dare to say it, having still in my mind the unswervable principles of justice and humanity.

  She makes time for literary assignations:

  I have a design on you this evening, to keep you quite to myself (I hope then nobody will call!) and make you read the play—

  When Godwin returned home in the afternoon, he joined Mary and Fanny for a meal and then set out for his evening activities, adhering to the couple’s policy of seeing friends separately.

  By the end of April, Godwin confessed that he loved the feelings he was experiencing and regretted his past, during which he had considered philosophy more important than love. Despite his worries about spending too much time together, he found that he and Mary “were in no danger of satiety”:

  We seemed to combine, in a considerable degree, the novelty of lively sensation of a visit, with the more delicious and heart-felt pleasures of domestic life.

  But even with their unconventional arrangement, Mary still found that the move and the fatigue of pregnancy had set her work back. She spent the rest of April applying herself to her writing and fending off domestic duties. Despite their agreement that she would not become a household drudge, Godwin’s escape each morning left the running of the house largely to Mary, and that was precisely what she’d been keen to avoid. Why should she be the one who had to deal with landlords, the plumbing, and “the disagreeable business of settling with tradespeople”? She complained to Godwin:

  I am not well today my spirits have been harassed. Mary [the maid] will tell you about the state of the sink &c do you know you plague me (a little) by not speaking more determinately to the Landlord of whom I have a mean opinion. He tires me by his pitiful way of doing every thing—I like a man who will say yes or no at once.

  Theirs was not a usual relationship, she reminded him. He was not the only one in the family who had work to do, nor was he the only one who had the right to private hours of writing:

  my time, appears to me, as valuable as that of other persons accustomed to employ themselves.…I feel, to say the truth, as if I was not treated with respect, owing to your desire not to be disturbed—

  To the modern ear, this might sound like the ordinary lament of a harried wife. But for the eighteenth century, Mary’s claims were unorthodox. In essence, this was applied philosophy; she was asserting the rights she had argued for in Rights of Woman. Godwin tried to honor their agreement, saying he would shoulder some of the household responsibilities so that his independent wife could write, but he was never truly able to do so, leaving the bulk of the chores to Mary.

  Yet by the end of April, Mary had still managed to dash off an article for a new radical journal, The Monthly Magazine, entitled “On Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature.” On the surface, this essay seems to be a simple reiteration of some of the Romantic values Mary had first expressed in Letters from Sweden: the best writing is inspired by nature; civilization weakens artists, because it distances them from the original source of inspiration. In reality, though, Mary was airing her side of the argument with Godwin that had begun over The Wrongs of Woman: What constitutes good writing? How formal should writing be, how personal, how imaginative? These were not dry academic questions. Instead, they raised crucial points about education and gender, class and opportunity. In many ways, Mary’s reputation as a writer depended on the answers.

  Lacking any formal training in grammar and style as she did, Mary claimed that Godwin’s insistence on syntactical accuracy and traditional rhetorical devices had led him to value form over matter—always a mistake, she said. Since truly creative writers derive their force from Nature, their work must always be a little rough, a little raw (like hers). But this rough material has a strength and integrity that renders it superior to magnificently structured philosophical tractates such as Political Justice. Mary was advocating for a far more democratic order than Godwin was prepared to accept; she wanted to open the door for more people like herself to join the ranks of writers. An author did not have to be educated at an elite school to properly express his or her ideas, she said. All that was necessary was a good imagination.

  To prove her point, she paints a picture of a schoolboy not unlike the young Godwin, who is enamored of the poets of the past and devotes himself to imitating their work, never realizing that he is missing the truth of Nature, unrefined and splendid as “she” is. In fact, such students are actually at a disadvantage, she claims, because

  Boys who have received a classical education, load their memory with words, and the correspondent ideas are perhaps never distinctly comprehended. As a proof of this assertion, I must observe, that I have known many young people who could write tolerably smooth verses, and string epithets prettily together, when their prose themes showed the barrenness of their minds, and how superficial the cultivation must have been, which their understanding had received.

  Mary’s prescription for this problem was for young writers to turn to the outdoors. Shut in a traditional classroom, they could not be inspired by Nature, the true source of all art—a truly democratic premise, since anyone was capable of “genius” if he or she had the right sensibility.

  The originality of Mary’s stance is that it gave women entry into the hallowed hallways of literature, precisely because they had not received a classical education. Women’s lack of book learning, far from being a disadvantage, freed them to be closer to Nature. To Mary, a female artist could aspire to bolder innovations than men like Godwin. Mary herself would rather be a Greek poet, she implied, than read a Greek poet, rather be a force of Nature than describe one.

  This was a brilliant sleight of hand: Mary had taken her lack of formal education and turned it into a strength. Godwin, who had criticized her grammar and her lack of restraint, needed to listen more closely to his heart to attain true greatness. All men did. Spontaneity. Sincerity. These were as important as reason and learned allusions, and were certainly more important than grammatical correctness. She did not disavow philosophy. The rational pursuit of knowledge was still important, as without it, the imagination could be led astray; but she called on those such as Godwin who relied exclusively on logic to open themselves to the “warmth of their feelings.”

  This argument was not a simpleminded opposition of heart versus intellect, or emotion versus reason. Rather, Mary was declaring her right to be taken seriously as a woman, a wife, an
intellectual, and an artist, declaring that what was important in a piece of literature or in a personal debate was the content of what was said and the force with which it was presented, not its erudition, or showy style. Her Vindications mattered, therefore, because of the urgency of their message and should not be denigrated because of a few misplaced phrases.

  “On Poetry” did not occasion any particular response from readers, even though it was Mary’s clearest declaration of the new literary and aesthetic principles of Romanticism. But after she had finished it, she returned to The Wrongs of Woman, refreshed and revitalized, taking a break from reviewing for Johnson to give herself more time for the novel. Her aim, she said in her preface, was to show “the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society.” She began the story with Maria, the heroine, waking up inside a mental asylum, which Mary was able to render with chilling authenticity after her visit to Bedlam. The cries and wild shrieks of the mad men and women also probably hark back to Mary’s teenage years living near Hoxton Asylum. Maria’s husband has committed her to the asylum, not because she is crazy, but because he wants her fortune and because she has resisted his efforts to sell her into sexual slavery. Sixty-three years later, Wilkie Collins would use this same plot device in his famous novel The Woman in White: the innocent heroine is imprisoned in an asylum so that her villainous husband can claim her money. In Mary’s story, Maria has a sympathetic attendant named Jemima who recounts her own story of sexual abuse at the hands of evil masters—a groundbreaking moment for the English novel as Mary allows Jemima, the working-class female, to tell her own dark tale.

  There are similar characters in English literature before this, most notably the famous “whore” Moll Flanders, but Moll’s story is pure comedy; she is a trickster who triumphs over her enemies and emerges victorious in the end. Jemima has none of Moll’s joie de vivre and none of her luck. Mary emphasizes that Jemima has been a real prostitute, beaten and abandoned by countless men. This kind of gritty detail pushed Mary into new literary frontiers, since Jemima describes the sexual violence she has experienced in graphic terms, using language that had hitherto been off limits for fiction.

  The Wrongs of Woman is unfinished and difficult to read, as Mary was still working on it when she died and had not yet decided how it would end. She knew she was entering taboo territory by discussing female sexual exploitation, but since she was intent on exposing the evils that faced women, she never considered watering down her heroines’ sufferings. For Mary, the asylum was the central image of the book—its crumbling walls and dark passageways are her metaphor for the plight of eighteenth-century women. This was exactly the fate that Mary had feared for her sister Eliza.

  Indeed, by having both Maria and Jemima tell their stories, Mary showed that it did not matter whether a woman was rich or poor—either way, she faced the injustice encoded in the English common law. Jemima could not prosecute her abusers. Her masters had the legal right to rape her and victimize her. The same was true for the upper-class Maria; her husband had the right to tyrannize her despite her wealth and social status. In fact, this is probably one reason why Mary had difficulty developing the plot; female imprisonment is a necessarily static condition.

  If Mary had had the time to finish The Wrongs of Woman, it might well have been her bestselling book—even more successful than Letters from Sweden—as the public was fascinated by stories of spousal abuse. Only eight years earlier, London had been in an uproar over the chilling case of Mary Bowles, the countess of Strathmore, whose husband had kept her locked in a closet, starved her, raped her repeatedly, and tortured her until she almost died. Inconceivably, the English legal system protected the abusive husband, not the countess, since men had an ancient right “to chastise and confine” their wives. Not until 1891 would a husband’s right to “detain his wife” finally be overturned. Marital rape would remain legal for another century. The countess’s husband spoke for many when he proudly proclaimed himself an “enem[y] of petticoat government and the friend of matrimonial subordination.” In most people’s eyes, “the taming of bad wives” was an honorable undertaking. The countess did manage to obtain a divorce, but her ex-husband retained custody of her children, since they were considered the father’s property—a law that infuriated Mary Wollstonecraft. As she had once said to Imlay, “Considering the care and anxiety a woman must have about a child before it comes into the world, it seems to me, by natural right, to belong to her…but it is sufficient for man to condescend to get a child, in order to claim it.—A man is a tyrant!”

  Toward the end of The Wrongs of Woman, Maria pleads her case to a law court: “I exclaim against the laws which…force women…to sign a [marriage] contract, which renders them dependent on the caprice of the tyrant whom choice or necessity has appointed to reign over them.” But the law court ignores Maria’s impassioned outcry—a fate that Mary hoped she would not share at the hands of the reading public. She wanted Maria’s plea to awaken people, to open their eyes, ears, and hearts to the injustices all women faced.

  CHAPTER 33

  MARY SHELLEY: “IT’S ALL OVER”

  [ 1822 ]

  Mary and Claire arrived in San Terenzo, on the Gulf of Spezia, they found a tiny village where the people were desperately poor; the women barefoot, the children large-eyed and hungry. Although it was only a day’s ride west of Pisa, San Terenzo seemed cut off from the world. Lerici, the closest town, was about two miles away by boat, and almost impossible to reach by land. A ruined castle hung over the cliffs. There was a little church and some scattered windowless huts for the fishermen. Despite their fluency in Italian, Mary and Claire could not understand what the villagers said, and neither could their Italian servants, as the hamlet had its own dialect and its own customs: “Had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas, we could scarcely have felt ourselves further from civilization and comfort,” Mary wrote.

  The only way to get to the Casa Magni was by water, or by stumbling over the rocky beach. There was no path, as the house had originally been a boathouse. The ground floor opened directly onto the bay and could only be used for storing nets, lines, and oars. When the wind was strong, the waves spilled over the low wall that was supposed to mark the border between land and sea. The nearest shop was three miles away on the other side of a river that frequently overflowed. Square and unkempt, the house looked as though it had been dropped from the sky, wedged between the shore and a steep hill shrouded with cypress, chestnut, and pine.

  Casa Magni, the “pale faced tragic villa.” (illustration ill.31)

  Mary valued privacy and quiet retreats, but she hated the house from the moment she saw it. With its dirty whitewashed walls, its five dark arches facing the bay, and its one cavernous main room, it seemed hostile, even threatening. “A sense of misfortune hung over my spirits,” Mary recalled. Fifty years later, Henry James would describe the place as the “pale faced tragic villa.”

  When Shelley arrived with the Williamses and the rest of the servants, everyone helped unload the boats onto the beach. They had to carry the boxes up an outside staircase at the back of the house, the only way to reach their living quarters on the second floor. Three small bedrooms opened off the central room—tight quarters for five adults, three small children, the cook, the maids, and the nurse. And yet Mary and Shelley each took a bedroom, a telling indication of the state of their marriage. Mary’s depression that spring had taken a toll on their already strained relationship. In a letter to Mrs. Gisborne, Mary drew a picture of the floor plan: her room was on the south side of the central hall and Shelley’s on the north. Not only did they sleep apart, they were in separate areas of the house, as far from one another as possible. The Williamses took the room next to Shelley’s. The babies and servants were given cots in the back of the house. Claire camped out with Mary, or sometimes slept on a couch in the hall.

  Before Shelley had even unpacked his things, Mary launched into a litany
of complaints: The rooms were inadequate. The house was barbaric. They were cut off from the road. The villagers were “wild & hateful.” There was no privacy; the families would have to eat every meal together. The servants were threatening to quit. Shelley could not understand Mary’s misery. “The beauty yet strangeness of the scenery” that made Mary “weep and shudder” exhilarated him. He tried to console his miserable wife, but he loved the house. To him, it was as though they were living on a ship, exposed to all the sea’s moods, the pounding and shifting of the currents—a setting that matched the high pitch of his excitement that summer.

  Claire still did not know about Allegra’s death, and keeping this terrible secret put everyone on edge. However, no one wanted to be the one to tell her, and so a week passed and Claire was still in the dark. Finally, on May 2, Mary and Shelley had a meeting with the Williamses to discuss the situation. Claire, wondering where everyone had gone, came looking for them and overheard their discussion from the hallway. She did not have the fit of hysterics everyone had dreaded; nor did she fly into a vengeful rage. Instead, she grieved, intensely and silently, and no one could comfort her, least of all Shelley. He and Mary should have done more, she felt. They should have helped her take back her daughter. Their reluctance had cost Allegra her life.

  Shelley did his best to take care of Claire, asking Byron to send her a lock of Allegra’s hair and a picture, which Byron immediately did. Byron also told her that she could make all the arrangements for the burial, but Claire did not want to organize a funeral. She wanted Allegra out of the convent and alive. At this point, her rage ignited, and she vented her anger and sorrow at Shelley, who told Byron, “She now seems bewildered; & whether she designs to avail herself further of your permission to regulate the funeral, I know not. In fact, I am so exhausted with the scenes through which I have passed, that I do not dare to ask.”