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

by Charlotte Gordon

  What is man? And of what are we made? Within that petty frame resided for years all that we worship, for there resided all that we know and can conceive of excellence. That heart is now still. Within the whole extent of that frame there exists no thought, no feeling, no virtue. It remains no longer, but to mock my sense and scoff at my sorrow, to rend my bosom with a woe, complicated, matchless and inexpressible.…

  Fanny was brought home for dinner that day so she could kiss her mother’s body goodbye and then returned to the Reveleys. Since Godwin did not believe in God, he took no comfort in the idea of a reunion in heaven. In his mind, Mary was gone. Utterly gone. He shut himself in his study while Mary’s friends cut locks of her hair to remember her by, distributed her possessions, and wrote letters to tell the sad news. The artist John Opie paid a sympathy call and touched Godwin deeply by giving him a portrait of Mary he had painted that summer when she was in the last stages of pregnancy. She looked soft and wistful, as though she knew what was going to happen.

  Godwin’s friend James Marshall organized the funeral, with Godwin providing the guest list, and on September 15, five days after Mary died, her friends and family gathered in the churchyard of St. Pancras, just a few steps from where she and Godwin had been married five months before.

  The graveyard at old St. Pancras church in London. (illustration ill.36)

  If anyone had hoped to see the widower, however, they were to be disappointed. Godwin was grieving the only way he knew, alone in his study, with a book open and a pen in his hand.

  CHAPTER 35

  MARY SHELLEY: “THE DEEPEST SOLITUDE”

  [ 1823–1828 ]

  Shelley’s death, Mary was surprised and saddened to discover that Hunt now regarded her with suspicion. She thought of him as one of her closest friends, yet he had been cold and aloof ever since he arrived. She did not know that Jane had poisoned Hunt against her, telling him that Mary had made Shelley miserable in his last months, not loving him as he deserved. Nor did Mary know that Shelley had complained about her when he saw Hunt right before he died. Bewildered and hurt, she thought Hunt must still be angry over their quarrel about Shelley’s heart.

  Shaken, she turned to her journal, speaking to Shelley as though he were still alive: “It is not true that this heart was cold to thee.…Did I not in the deepest solitude of thought repeat to myself my good fortune in possessing you?” However, she resisted acting the part of the conventional widow, weeping and sighing like Jane. “No one seems to understand or to sympathize with me,” she wrote, crossing out words in her distress. “[They] seem to look on me as one without affections.…I feel dejected and cowed before them, feeling as if I might be the unfeeling senseless person they appear to cond consider me. But I am not.”

  That September, Jane departed for England, but Mary remained behind with the Hunts and Byron. Leaving Italy felt too much like abandoning Shelley, Clara, and William. And so, as she always had, she turned to her studies for support, reading Greek and medieval Italian history. Unlike the loss of William, which had reduced her to silence, Shelley’s death unlocked the floodgates. She tried to summon him back with her words, writing long grief-stricken entries in her journal. With the help of Hunt and Byron, she produced the first edition of The Liberal, the magazine that Shelley had dreamed up in Pisa and that he had invited Hunt to edit. On October 15, the first issue was published, and it included one of Shelley’s recent works, May-day Night; A Poetical Translation from Goethe’s Faust, which Mary had edited and readied for printing. For the second number, published a month later, she contributed her own work, “A Tale of the Passions; or, The Death of Despina”—a story she had written before Shelley died—and another poem of Shelley’s, Song, Written for an Indian Air. Hazlitt, one of her father and mother’s old admirers, contributed a poignant essay, “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” and Byron included his bitter Vision of Judgment. Mary’s goal was to make a living through her writing. “It is only in books and literary occupations that I shall ever find alleviation,” she wrote to Jane that December. Above all, she would not turn to another husband to take care of her. Despite her admiration for her Greek prince and the rush of excitement she had felt with Trelawny, no man could ever live up to Shelley.

  Byron had decided to leave Pisa in mid-September and head for Genoa to set up residence in the splendid Casa Saluzzo. She and the Hunts followed suit, moving nearby, renting the forty-room Casa Negroto with a garden and two sweeping staircases—plenty of space to share, Mary thought, especially compared to the Casa Magni. But the Hunts were not in the mood to be pleased. They had come to Italy to start a new magazine, and now one of its principal supporters and contributors had died. As sad as they were, they had their own futures to consider. Marianne was pregnant with her seventh child and homesick for London. Italy was not as romantic as she had thought it would be. Their new accommodations were inadequate, she said: “The number and size of the doors and windows make it look anything but snug.”

  It was an unseasonably cold autumn. The Casa Negroto had only one central fireplace, and so Mary and Percy were forced to huddle with the Hunts simply to stay warm. The notoriously unruly Hunt children fought, played pranks, overturned furniture, scraped their elbows, and pounded up and down the stairs. Percy was used to the quiet life of an only child and clung to his mother, crying if any of the noisy brood approached him. When the Hunts had stayed with Byron, the children had damaged his house, and Marianne, instead of reprimanding them, had taken umbrage at Byron:

  Can anything be more absurd than a peer of the realm—and a poet—making such a fuss about three or four children disfiguring the walls of a few rooms. The very children would blush for him, fye Lord B.—fye.

  Claire had not made the move to Genoa. Back in Pisa, tensions had risen once again between the two sisters. Like Mary, Claire was heartbroken over the loss of Shelley, but she was also still devastated over Allegra and was hurt that Mary was so consumed with her own grief that she could not console her. Then there were money worries. Both Mary and Claire had depended on Shelley financially. It was unclear how they would support themselves and whether they would inherit anything from his estate. Claire had been preparing herself to work as a governess. But she had yet to find a suitable job, and she looked to Mary for assistance. Mary, anxious about her own future with Percy, was not very forthcoming. She gave what money she thought she could spare, but it was not much, so, in a huff, Claire moved to Vienna to be near her brother, hoping to find a position in Austria. She had never let go of the idea of becoming an independent woman in the style of Mary Wollstonecraft and had refused at least one offer of marriage—Henry Reveley, Maria Gisborne’s son, had been hopelessly in love with her—to preserve her liberty.

  Fortunately for Mary, the most famous member of the Pisan group remained loyal to her. For six years, Byron and Mary had been literary colleagues and friends. He had never lost his respect for her, or his affection, despite his usual sardonic suspicion of women. He saw that she was almost out of money and paid her to copy some of his new work, amending some passages in accordance with her suggestions, asking her advice about publishing his memoirs, and reassuring her that Shelley’s father would pay her a generous annuity; after all, she was a widow with a young son.

  But Byron was the exception. The English in Genoa refused to acknowledge her, continuing to view Mary as a member of the shocking League of Incest. To Mrs. Gisborne, she confided, “Those about me have no idea of what I suffer; for I talk, aye & smile as usual—& none are sufficiently interested in me to observe that…my eyes are blank.” Trelawny swept into town with a beautiful new mistress, who was already married to someone else and was trying to keep her adultery a secret. Mary thought that this was hypocritical behavior and said so; if the woman was truly in love, she should sacrifice her reputation to be with Trelawny. That, after all, is what Mary had done for Shelley. Trelawny was furious and cut off relations with her in rage.

  By spring, Mary was penniless.
Shelley had left behind a complicated tangle of bills, and Sir Timothy had not written to her once, nor had he offered to continue paying her Shelley’s monthly income. Mary assumed that this was meant to be a rejection, but Byron assured her that Sir Timothy’s silence was undoubtedly due to legal proceedings and sent a letter to Shelley’s father on her behalf, informing Sir Timothy of her financial need. Her own father wrote repeatedly, urging her to come home, telling her that he would help her manage Sir Timothy. And so, reluctant though she was to return, she made plans to sail back to England, if only to arrive at an agreement with the Shelleys.

  Before Mary left, however, news came that she had been right about Sir Timothy. A letter from his lawyer arrived, announcing that he had no intention of helping the woman who had “estranged my son’s mind from his family, and all his first duties in life.” He said that he would support Percy, but only if she would agree to part with him. If not, then she could expect nothing. Byron urged her to accept this offer, but Mary refused. “I should not live ten days separate from [Percy],” she declared. Though the situation seemed bleak, Mary decided to go through with the trip home, hoping that Shelley’s father would soften once he met his grandson.

  A few weeks before her departure, Mary and Hunt had a rapprochement. Hunt had witnessed her quiet misery all winter long, as well as the depth of her pride. He remembered Mary’s reserve from their summer in Marlow and knew that she was not capable of falsehood. At last he came to the conclusion that Jane had been spreading lies and wrote Jane an angry letter, but Jane never acknowledged any wrongdoing and continued to tell her malicious stories.

  Relieved to be back on good terms with Hunt, Mary invested her last thirty pounds in the trip home, beginning with a hot, dusty eighteen-day odyssey to Paris. Without Shelley, there were no private coaches or elegant inns. She bumped north in the public stagecoach, pressed against other sweaty, ill-tempered passengers, with Percy on her lap. She had read Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden so many times that it was easy to imagine herself in her mother’s shoes, traveling alone with a small child, abandoned by the man she loved, and from this she took comfort. In addition, Percy was remarkably even-tempered, displaying a mildness that was both a comfort and a heartbreaking surprise to his mother, who every day searched his countenance for evidence of his volatile father.

  When at last they arrived in London it was August 25, five days before Mary’s twenty-sixth birthday. Godwin met her at the wharf with William, the twenty-year-old half brother she had not seen since he was fifteen. She had been gone for five years, but London had changed so much in her absence that without her father to guide her, Mary would have been completely lost. “I think I could find my way better on foot to the Coliseum at Rome than hence to Grosvenor Square,” she said somewhat wistfully.

  The most startling development was the newly dug Regent’s Canal, which ran in a straight line through the city, reaching north into the villages of Mary’s childhood, cutting off streets and reshaping neighborhoods. But there were other significant changes as well. Huge factories had sprung up near Paddington, St. Pancras, and Camden Town, coughing smoke into the already polluted London air. Gaslights bloomed on every street corner, transforming nighttime London from a dusty, dark rabbit warren to a brightly illuminated hive, a change that Dickens would later lament in Sketches by Boz. The shops on the newly designed Regent Street lured people away from Mayfair to gawk at the novelties produced by factories: cheap china dishes and ready-made cloaks, mass-produced fans and powdered cinnamon.

  But even if Mary no longer knew London, London had not forgotten her. In the first week of August, the Lyceum Theater had mounted a production called Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein. Protesters marched outside the theater, bearing placards condemning “the monstrous Drama founded on the improper work called ‘Frankenstein.’ ” Appalled though she was by this hostility to her book, Mary still enjoyed going to the theater to see the play. She could feel a “breathless eagerness in the audience.” She also felt Godwin’s pride. “Lo & behold,” she wrote to Hunt, “I found myself famous.”

  Unfortunately, Mary earned no money from this production, nor from any of the others based on her book. In nineteenth-century England, playwrights were allowed to borrow freely from novels without crediting the original author. They were also under no obligation to adhere to the original story. Stage versions of Frankenstein focused on simplifying the intricacies of the novel, making it easier for audiences to digest. In the hands of these adaptors, Mary’s multifaceted creature became one-dimensional, a pure villain, rather than the complex mix of victim and murderer Mary had written. Another odd development was that over time Mary’s hubristic Dr. Frankenstein almost entirely disappeared from public awareness; by the 1840s, the word “Frankenstein” had become synonymous with “monster”; in one early instance, a Punch cartoonist pointed out the dangers of relaxing English rule in Ireland by drawing a monster in the act of destroying a town, labeling it “The Irish Frankenstein.” To the public, Mary’s name became inextricably entwined with that of a murderous fiend. As her fame grew, the many layers and multiple perspectives of the novel were gradually forgotten.

  During the first few weeks of the autumn of 1823, Mary and her father visited old friends, went to exhibitions, and took a boat ride down to Richmond. Her younger brother proved to be an amusing companion, delighting Mary by referring to the sixty-seven-year-old Godwin as “the old gentleman”—an irreverence she had never allowed herself. To her surprise, Mary-Jane left her largely alone. If anything, her stepmother seemed a pitiful figure these days, overwrought, histrionic, and bitter.

  When at length they met Sir Timothy’s lawyer, William Whitton, he emphasized Sir Timothy’s animosity, underlining the fact that Shelley’s father wanted nothing to do with his son’s widow or with young Percy. He refused to meet them, but did offer some financial support, granting Mary a scant £200 a year—£100 for her and £100 for Percy. In modern equivalencies, this gave them less than $20,000 or about £12,000 a year to live on. Furthermore, he made the money contingent on her continued residence in England, and, worse, on a kind of gag rule. She was not to publish any of Shelley’s works or write anything about him. If she disregarded either of these stipulations, she would be cut off without a penny. Finally, if Sir Timothy discovered that Mary was in debt and could not support herself and her son, then he would seize Percy—Mary’s greatest fear.

  This was crushing news. Mary had sustained herself with visions of writing her husband’s biography, extolling his genius and defending him against the claims of immorality still clinging to his name. She had not been dissuaded by the fact that defending Shelley was a dangerous undertaking—John Chalk Claris (“Arthur Brooke”), a poet who had dared to write an elegy for Shelley, was castigated by no fewer than five different journals, and Hunt’s sister-in-law, Bess Kent, was reviled simply for quoting one of Shelley’s poems in her botanical treatise on houseplants.

  Nevertheless, she needed Sir Timothy’s money, and thus would have to wait before she could give Shelley his due. To augment her income, Mary turned her hand to writing for magazines. Her father introduced her to his literary contacts, but otherwise he made no move to help, maintaining his position that it was Mary’s job to support him financially, dead husband or no. Dutiful daughter that she was, when she published a story in The London Magazine, she gave her father what funds she could spare. Later that fall, on the strength of her earnings, she moved into her own quarters with Percy, staving off her loneliness by spending most of the time she was not writing with her father and brother. On rare occasions she visited Jane Williams, who, as an unmarried woman with two illegitimate children, was suffering in enforced isolation outside London in Kentish Town.

  Unaware as she was of Jane’s malicious gossiping, Mary began to contemplate a move out of the city to be nearer her old friend. Sometimes she even dreamed of earning enough money to take Jane and her children back with her to Italy. And with Shelley’
s death, her notion that she did not belong among the living had resurfaced. Not only her dead husband, but her children, her sister Fanny, and her own mother waited for her on the other side. Sometimes, they felt close enough to touch. Only Percy, and sometimes her father and brother, could break through her melancholy shell.

  Sir Timothy’s order notwithstanding, Mary decided to produce a volume of Shelley’s work anonymously. However, this project was bigger than it initially seemed. Shelley had never been a tidy person, and his papers were in greater disarray than Mary had expected. He had written when inspired, on whatever was available, and had jammed scraps and notebooks into his writing desk, scribbled on the backs of envelopes, and stuck pieces of paper into whatever book he happened to be reading. Many poems had been composed on different sheets, making it difficult to tell where new poems began and old ones ended. Those poems that were written on one piece of paper were often lodged between doodles of trees and sailboats.

  For Mary, daunting though the project was, sifting through Shelley’s papers helped her resurrect her husband’s presence, giving her the sense that they were still in communication, that he was still speaking to her. She made the additions and deletions he seemed to indicate, choosing final versions and piecing together lines written in different locations. Fortunately, she was not working with entirely foreign material. She and Shelley had talked about some of the drafts; the collaborative spirit between husband and wife that had begun in the joint journal in Paris, when Mary was sixteen and Shelley twenty-one, held even after his death.

  But there were also plenty of poems that they had not discussed and that Mary was reading for the first time. Many of these had been written during the tragedies of the last years and lamented his loneliness, or praised Jane or Emilia at her expense. As difficult as these were to read, Mary knew that if she wanted the public to see his best work, she would have to push herself to piece together these verses as well. This was a painful enterprise, but she did not hesitate, as she believed that her personal feelings did not matter when it came to art. Great literature was great literature, even if it caused her pain. Accordingly, she set herself the task of sewing stanzas together, reordering and deleting, ultimately creating one of her greatest and most unsung achievements: a coherent collection of Shelley’s work.