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

by Charlotte Gordon

  When Shelley looked out the window, he had seen “the sea rushing in.” Then the scene changed and he saw himself running down the hallway into Mary’s room; he meant to strangle her, he said.

  To Mary, this was almost too much to bear. Her husband seemed possessed by a demon, worn down so much by her fears and complaints that he wanted to murder her. During the next week, Mary remained in bed, her spirits desperately low. When news came that Leigh Hunt—who had agreed to come help start the literary journal—had arrived at Byron’s house in Livorno with his wife and six children, she was horrified when Shelley said he wanted to sail across the Gulf to see his friends.

  Mary implored him to stay, and although at first he listened, the bay continued to beckon; his beautiful, spirited vessel reared and plunged on the waves. He wanted to show her off to his lordship. Finally, on July 1, he and Edward packed the Ariel with supplies. He stuffed his copy of Keats’s poems in his pocket and put on his favorite nankeen trousers. Mary dragged herself out of bed and again begged Shelley not to abandon her, but he was adamant; he had already put off his trip once because of her and was now determined to go. In despair, Mary jotted a sad little note to Hunt: “I wish I cd write more—I wish I were with you to assist you—I wish I cd break my chains & leave this dungeon—”

  On the morning of their departure, Mary watched the Ariel’s sails disappear against the horizon with a sense of foreboding. When news came that they had arrived safely, she sent Shelley a plaintive letter begging him to come home soon. He wrote back right away, assuring her they would be back in a week’s time, by July 8. But the eighth came and went without any sign. Three more days passed. On Friday, letters arrived from Hunt and Byron, mentioning that Williams and Shelley had in fact left on Monday as he had promised. When Mary read this, as she later wrote Mrs. Gisborne, “the paper fell from me—I trembled all over—Jane read it—‘Then it is all over!’ she said. ‘No, my dear Jane,’ I cried, ’it is not all over, but this suspense is dreadful—come with me, we will go to Leghorn [Livorno]…& learn our fate.”

  They found some locals to row them to Lerici and hired a carriage to drive the twenty miles to Byron’s house in Pisa, as he had just returned there from Livorno. They arrived on his doorstop at midnight. Mary, still recovering from her miscarriage, was as pale as death. “A desperate sort of courage seemed to give her energy,” Byron said later. “[She] looked more like a ghost than a woman.…I have seen nothing in tragedy on the stage so powerful, or so affecting.…” But sympathetic though he was, he had no news.

  Mary and Jane continued on to Livorno without pausing to rest; here they met Trelawny, who confirmed that the men had indeed sailed on the eighth. The good news was that no accident had been reported. All they could do now was return to Casa Magni. Trelawny came with them, checking for information at every port along the way. When they reached Viareggio, the news was grim. A dinghy had washed ashore along with a water bottle, and the descriptions of both made Mary feel sure they were Shelley’s. That is when, as Mary said, “our calamity first began to brake [sic] on us.” She did not want to succumb to despair, both for her own sake and for Jane’s, and strove to appear hopeful, doing her best not to cry, afraid she would not stop once she started. But when they crossed the Magra River, she almost lost control:

  I felt the water splash about our wheels—I was suffocated—I gasped for breath—I thought I should have gone into convulsions, & I struggled violently that Jane might not perceive it.

  When she caught a glimpse of the sea, “a voice from within me seemed to cry aloud,” she wrote later, “that this is his grave.”

  Still, until they knew for certain, the possibility that the men had survived remained. Trelawny left to search for more news, while at Casa Magni a terrible vigil began. “Thrown about by hope & fears,” Mary stationed herself at Shelley’s telescope, training it on each sail that crossed the bay. She took laudanum to sleep but spent most of her time in despair. Unfortunately, the usually silent villagers happened to be celebrating a festival. “They pass the whole night in dancing on the sands close to our door,” Mary wrote, “running into the sea then back again & screaming all the time one perpetual air—the most detestable in the world—”

  At last, on the evening of July 19, Trelawny arrived. His face, frozen like a death mask, frightened Caterina, the maid. Jane fainted before he could speak. Yet Mary, silent and white, listened to every word. The bodies of Shelley, Williams, and an eighteen-year-old boy named Charles Vivian, whom they had hired as an extra hand, had washed up in different locations along the coast between Massa and Viareggio. The corpses had been partially eaten away and had already begun to decompose. They could identify Edward by his boots. The only things that distinguished Shelley’s body from the others were his nankeen trousers and the volume of Keats’s poems tucked into the pocket of his jacket.

  This self-portrait of Edward Williams was found in the wreckage of the Ariel and suffered extensive water damage. (illustration ill.33)

  Slowly, the story came together. Shelley and Williams had had a glorious week at Byron’s house in Livorno. Shelley had romped with Hunt’s children and been so overjoyed to see Hunt that he could not stop saying “how inexpressibly happy” he was. They traveled to Pisa to see the leaning tower and listen to the organ in Pisa’s Duomo. “He was looking better than I had ever seen him,” Hunt recalled. “We talked of a thousand things—we anticipated a thousand pleasures.” Elated, relaxed, and sunburned, Shelley had been in uproarious spirits, laughing so exuberantly at his friends’ jokes that at one point he had to lean against a doorway, tears running down his cheeks. He was excited at the prospect of starting his new magazine, The Liberal. With Hunt and Byron as his co-conspirators, he began to draw up plans for outraging Parliament and eviscerating the stuffy conservatives back home.

  The weather was uncertain on July 8, but Shelley and Williams were determined to sail back to Casa Magni. It would take about seven hours to cover the fifty or so miles between Livorno and La Spezia. They left around two in the afternoon; the sun was high, and under ordinary circumstances, they would have reached the village around nine in the evening. But at five or six o’clock a sudden squall blew in from the southwest. The sky turned black. The rain spattered down and the wind gusted, churning the water into huge waves. The Ariel was on the open sea, about ten miles offshore, at least four hours from the protected waters of the Gulf of Spezia and three hours out from Livorno. One or two ships were near enough to see the Ariel’s sails, but these vessels, captained by local sailors who understood the seriousness of the storm, headed to shore immediately. One of the captains reported that he had seen the Ariel continuing her journey north, braving the wind and the towering waves.

  What happened next is less clear. Later in life, Trelawny said he thought that pirates had rammed the side of the boat, sinking it, but this story was one of Trelawny’s fabrications, inspired, perhaps, by his guilt over the unseaworthiness of the vessel he had helped design. Other tales sprang up, too. In these, Shelley was painted as the quintessential Romantic poet, a man who wanted to die because he was disillusioned with life and yearned for freedom from his earthly ties. In one such version, told years after the tragedy, an Italian fisherman had supposedly drawn up beside the Ariel and offered to take them on board, but “a shrill voice [Shelley’s]…was distinctly heard to say ‘No.’…The waves were running mountains high—a tremendous surf dashed over the boat which to his astonishment was still crowded with sail. ‘If you will not come on board for God’s sake reef your sails or you are lost,’ cried a sailor through the speaking trumpet. One of the gentlemen [Williams]…was seen to make an effort to lower the sails—his companion seized him by the arm as in anger.”

  In fact, just a few weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday, Shelley, for all his moments of despair, was, as both Byron and Hunt had testified, in excellent spirits at the time of the accident. Certainly he had reached his prime as a writer. He was deeply immersed in “The Triumph
of Life” and his play about the Indian princess; he was eager to publish political articles in The Liberal. He may have been smitten with Jane, but that did not mean he did not love Mary or his little boy. In his last note to Mary, he had written, “How are you my best Mary? Write especially how is your health & how your spirits are,…Ever dearest Mary.” And so, despite his stock of cyanide, it seems clear that he did not intend to die yet, at least not in the Ariel. If anything, he and Williams thought they could outrun the storm, never suspecting that Shelley had made the Ariel a death trap in his attempt to make her faster than the Bolivar. Not only had he added extra sails to make her faster, he had stored “three tons and a half” of pig iron in her hull to give her more ballast and keep her from capsizing in a heavy wind. The problem was that with all this extra weight she was in danger of sinking if she took on too much water.

  As it was, the only hope they would have had of riding out the storm was if the cabin boy, Charles Vivian, had climbed up the mast and taken down the topsails or reefed the mainsails. Otherwise, with her sails up, the already unseaworthy Ariel would have been exposed to the full force of the wind. An examination of the vessel after she washed up on shore showed that this probably never happened, as the masts had snapped off the deck. Furthermore, the rudder had ripped from the hull, leaving the men defenseless when the waves poured in. Trapped as they were, they would have had only a few minutes to realize they were going down. Williams was found with his shirt “partly drawn over the head, as if the wearer had been in the act of taking it off.” The young cabin boy washed onto shore, as did Shelley and Williams, with his boots still on.

  As the maid tried to revive Jane, Trelawny attempted to comfort Mary by praising Shelley: there was no greater poet, he declared, no more ethereal spirit. Later, Mary wrote to her father, “I almost was happy…to dwell on the eulogy that his loss thus drew forth from his friend. I have some of his friends about me who worship him—they all agree that he was an elementary being and that death does not apply to him.…I am not however so desolate as you might think. He is ever with me, encouraging me to become wise and good, that I may be worthy to join him.”

  Given Godwin’s views of Shelley’s morals, it must have been strange to hear his daughter declare that she was going to strive to be as virtuous as her husband, the man who had run away with two of his daughters and, according to Mary-Jane, caused Fanny’s suicide.

  Mary and Jane, joined by the equally grief-stricken Claire, traveled back to Pisa. Their first task was the problem of the bodies. The officials had thrown lime on the corpses and buried them on the beach where they had washed up, but they could not stay there. To complicate matters, Edward and Shelley had floated ashore miles apart. Two different rites would have to be conducted.

  Jane wanted her husband to be buried in England. Mary wanted Shelley next to their son in Rome. The Italian officials chose this moment to become particularly officious. The bodies had to be cremated, they said, and money paid to government offices. Mary was close to collapse, and so Trelawny, who had known Shelley for less than six months, took over. Mary was grateful for his help, little thinking that to Trelawny her surrender was evidence that she did not really care about Shelley, just as the Williamses had said. From here, it was an easy next step to convince himself that he was the person closest to the poet, in life and in death.

  The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard Fournier (1889), a Victorian reimagining of the scene. Pictured from left, Trelawny, Hunt, and Byron, though Hunt stayed in the carriage and Byron left early. (illustration ill.34)

  Always dramatic, Trelawny chose precisely the sort of theatrical rite that Mary would never have selected. Inspired by the fiery funeral pyres he had witnessed in India, he decided that if Shelley had to be burned, it should be a glorious event. Never having read Frankenstein, he did not realize that this plan actually duplicated Mary’s depiction of the monster’s wishes for his own funeral: to be burned, with his ashes “swept into the seas by the winds.”

  During the next few weeks, Shelley and Williams lay in their temporary graves, while Trelawny wrangled the temperamental Italian bureaucrats into agreement, and hired a few locals to help him construct the two different pyres, chopping wood, digging peat, and stacking logs. Finally, on August 15, all was ready. They burned Williams first, and on the sixteenth turned to Shelley. With the Italian officials looking on, Trelawny and the hired men dug up the poet’s corpse, which had turned “a dark and ghastly indigo colour” from the lime that had been thrown on it.

  Byron and Hunt had driven down from Pisa to pay tribute to their friend, but neither one, according to Trelawny, was very helpful. Before they lit the fire, Byron asked for Shelley’s skull, but Trelawny—Shelley’s self-appointed protector—refused, explaining later that he had heard a rumor that his lordship had once “used [a skull] as a drinking cup.” Hunt stayed in the carriage, unable to bear the smell or the gruesome sight, and when Shelley’s body was placed on the flames, even Byron retreated, leaving Trelawny alone to witness the event—yet more “evidence” to Trelawny that he was Shelley’s truest friend. He watched the air shiver, the flames uncannily bright. Then “the corpse fell open and the heart was laid bare.” This was the perfect memento, far better than a lock of hair or a watercolor; Trelawny reached out, scorching his hand, and snatched it, shriveled and black though it was. Afterward, he and Byron went for a swim in the very same “waves which had overpowered our friends,” as he later wrote.

  Perhaps if the locals had known how famous the poet would become, they would have turned out for the occasion; as it was, few onlookers were there. A clump of officials gathered at a distance to certify that quarantine regulations were being met. The small group of villagers who had been interested in the antics of the English gentlemen soon left, driven away by the heat. Neither Jane nor Mary was present. No one prevented them from being there, but no one seemed to expect them, either. Mary, though, wanted to know every detail of the proceedings. She carefully recorded Trelawny’s account in her journal, even the graphic details about the flames’ consumption of the body, and mourned by herself, reliving the summer in an eight-page letter to Maria Gisborne, an honest and heartbreaking account of what had passed:

  The scene of my existence is closed & though there be no pleasure in retracing the scenes that have preceded the event which has crushed my hopes yet there seems to be a necessity in doing so, and I obey the impulse which urges me.…All that might have been bright in my life is now despoiled—I shall live to improve myself, to take care of my child, & render myself worthy to join him.

  Meanwhile, Trelawny continued to oversee practicalities. He packed Shelley’s ashes in a box and sent them to the British consul in Rome. They were stored in the man’s wine cellar until the following spring, when Trelawny had dug Shelley’s grave in Rome, planted cypress trees, and bought a memorial stone, inscribing it with a quote from The Tempest:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  He saved a burial spot for himself next to Shelley, even digging his own grave so that his body could be placed in it immediately when it was his turn. As an afterthought, he wrote to Mary that there might be room for her as well.

  Eight years, almost to the day, had passed since Mary and Claire had run away with Shelley. Mary’s twenty-fifth birthday came and went, unmarked. Near breakdown, she strove to maintain a daily routine. Not only did she still have a child to care for, Godwin had taught her to be brave, to hold firm against the Wollstonecraft affliction of despair. Jane, she felt, was weaker than she was, and she wanted to be strong for her grieving friend. Yet this was almost impossible. Already exhausted from her miscarriage, she felt cast adrift, alone. For all of her anger, for all of her disappointments, she had made Shelley the center of her world—husband and friend, father and brother, as well as antagonist and enemy. Now, to cope with her heartbreak, she retreated to the iced-in landscape
she had inhabited after each of her children had died.

  To their circle of friends, Mary appeared unmoved. Hunt, in particular, was appalled. He had never understood her reserve. Shelley had complained about her lack of feeling on their last visit, and now Hunt could see why. Already a jostling for primacy had begun. Whom had Shelley loved most? Who was most heartbroken that he had died? Hunt put Mary at the bottom of the list and himself at the top. Trelawny agreed, and gave Shelley’s heart to Hunt. When Mary asked Hunt if she might have it, he refused, letting her know that he thought she had been unkind to his friend. It was only when Jane, in an unusual act of generosity, asked him to let Mary have it that he relented.

  Mary had won that round, but it was only the first in a long series of battles over who would become the keeper of Shelley’s flame.

  CHAPTER 34

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A LITTLE PATIENCE”

  [ 1797 ]

  the weather grew warm that spring, Godwin decided to take a walking vacation with friends, declaring that he believed he and Mary would enjoy each other even more if they had a little distance. Mary agreed to his plan only reluctantly. She felt slightly anxious letting go of her husband. Before he left, a new female admirer named Miss Pinkerton had cropped up, sending fluttery little notes and dropping by the house frequently—altogether too frequently, Mary thought. Godwin did not set any limits because he felt sorry for her, but also because it was pleasant, after all, to be admired by a pretty young woman.