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

by Charlotte Gordon

  A few months after Trelawny’s return, Claire, too, came back to England. After Vienna, she had spent five years as a governess in Russia, leaving only when her employers somehow learned of her liaison with Byron and fired her. Exposed as a woman of ill repute, she was left without a job or a place to stay, as no one would hire her. Now she was home for an extended visit, but if Mary had hoped for support from her stepsister, she was to be disappointed. Claire agreed with Trelawny that her stepsister was being weak, complaining that Mary had given up everything for “a share in the corruptions of society.” She implied that she, Claire, would never have been so lacking in principle, and she did not let Mary forget that she had spent the years they had been apart living in accordance with Wollstonecraft’s philosophy of independence, teaching these ideals to her students while Mary had let her mother’s standard fall. Mary, however, refused to be drawn into battle. She needed to keep a low profile. Sir Timothy had been horrified by The Last Man, withholding her allowance in an attempt to stop her from writing, and had only recently relented. The Godwins, and Claire herself, depended on Mary’s capacity to earn a living.

  The irony is that even as she criticized Mary, Claire made herself at home in Mary’s guest room, eating Mary’s food and enjoying the comforts of her lodgings on Tarrant Street, not far from the Godwins. Mary, meanwhile, shut herself away each morning, writing stories to pay the rent. Her resistance to injustice would always have to be underground, but it would not be any the less formidable. She continued to have her work published, and although her stories were for ladies’ annuals, they contained many of her beliefs—disguised and softened, but still in evidence. There was much to be said for quiet, steady behind-the-scenes work. “A solitary woman is the world’s victim,” she reflected, “and there is heroism in her consecration.”

  This idealized portrait of Mary Shelley is meant to represent her appearance as a young widow. Painted posthumously, it was based on recollections of her son and daughter-in-law, as well as on a death mask. (illustration ill.37)

  CHAPTER 36

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE MEMOIR

  [ 1797–1801 ]

  Godwin had never been given to personal speculation, but in the first few weeks after he lost his wife, he allowed himself to wonder what might have happened if he had met Mary Wollstonecraft at the Hoxton haberdashery all those years ago. He had been nineteen and attending Hoxton Academy, and she sixteen, living only a half mile away. He liked to think that had he made polite inquiries, found out where she lived, and asked her feckless father for her hand in marriage, their lives would have been entirely different. They would have had twenty-two years together, writing, reading, and loving each other.

  Nevertheless, Godwin did not fool himself into thinking he could have changed her. He was diffident, she was passionate. He was logical, she was imaginative. He had learned more from her than from all of his books. With Mary, he had felt a delicious, “voluptuary” pleasure that was a revelation.

  Her friends helped him pay for a plain monument to mark her grave. Godwin had it inscribed simply, with no mention of religion:

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

  GODWIN

  AUTHOR OF

  A VINDICATION

  OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN

  BORN 27TH APRIL, 1759

  DIED 10TH SEPTEMBER, 1797

  Still, this was not enough of a memorial, he felt. This extraordinary woman’s life could not be over just like that. But there were many others who felt the same way, and, as a result, a contest over who had been closest to Mary and who had the rights to her story began only days after she died. Although it was not as dramatic as the competition over Shelley’s heart, the repercussions would be just as telling.

  Godwin had left Henry Fuseli off the guest list for the funeral, and Johnson took Godwin to task, telling him that even though Fuseli and Mary were no longer close, Fuseli had been “the first of her friends”; Fuseli had met Mary long before she knew Godwin, and so had Johnson, but Godwin did not relent; he knew how hurt Mary had been by Fuseli’s rejection before her first suicide attempt. And so, like the thirteenth fairy, the resentful Fuseli took revenge, spreading poisonous rumors about Mary. She was so desperate for his love, he said, that she bombarded him with letters—none of which he read. She pursued him so relentlessly for sex that even he was embarrassed for her sake.

  Godwin also dismissed Mary’s relationships with her female friends and her sisters. During Mary’s final days, Godwin had picked a fight with Mary Hays, telling her there were too many people in the house and she should go home. When Hays protested, saying she was “not altogether insignificant” and she felt she was offering comfort to her dying friend, Godwin snapped at her, saying Hays was not respecting his grief and was poisoning their friendship. Hays never forgave Godwin, but unlike Fuseli, she remained loyal to Mary’s memory.

  Godwin was even crueler when it came to Everina and Eliza. He did not write to either of his wife’s sisters after Mary died. Instead, he told Mary’s friend Eliza Fenwick to write to Everina, though not to Eliza, who had refused to speak to Mary after her return to London. He did tell Mrs. Fenwick to include a message for Eliza that Mary had a “sincere and earnest affection” for her, and Mrs. Fenwick obeyed, telling Everina: “No woman was ever more happy in marriage than Mrs. Godwin. Who ever endured more anguish than Mr Godwin endures?”

  Godwin can perhaps be forgiven after the shock of his loss, but Eliza Fenwick should have known better. Godwin was not the only person in pain. The sisters could easily have felt as much anguish as the heartbroken widower. They had been angry with Mary, but that did not destroy their bond with her. She had been a far better protector to them than their own mother. Even at the end, when they were estranged, she had felt so concerned about their future that she had been looking for money to send them in the weeks before her death. Now she would never be able to build a bridge between them, and neither would they. The conflict was left permanently unresolved, “the girls” in a painful state of limbo, and Godwin was doing nothing to help.

  In fact, Godwin was actively distancing himself from those who had once been close to his wife. Like Fuseli, many of Mary’s friends were put off by his pronouncements that he was the only one who had truly understood her, with dangerous repercussions, since, as writers, they were capable of penning their own versions of her life. And a few of them would do just that—solely to spite Godwin.

  Wollstonecraft, after all, was a notable figure, a famous woman. People were curious about her. They wanted to know the real story behind her public face. Already, glowing death notices and obituaries were appearing in The Monthly Magazine and The Annual Necrology.

  Godwin’s competitive ire was raised. Those who ventured forth with opinions about Mary needed to be put in their place. Before a week was up, he had begun to write her story. This would allow him to stake his claim while raising money to take care of their daughters. He had no doubt such a book would sell.

  On September 24, nine days after the funeral he did not attend, Godwin recorded in his diary that he had finished the first two pages of A Memoir of the Author of the Vindication, the book that would ruin Mary’s reputation for almost two hundred years. The first words he wrote—“It has always appeared to me, that to give to the public some account of the life of a person of eminent merit deceased, is a duty incumbent on survivors”—sound strangely distant for a man who had just lost his wife, but Godwin was being as emotional as it was possible for him to be. To call Mary “a person of eminent merit” was high praise for this stiff philosopher. He had never met a person like Mary, he said; she had been so candid, so actively searching for answers, so brave, so determined.

  Disciplined though Godwin was, it was not easy to work at the Polygon in the weeks after Mary’s death, and not just because of his own grief. The household was in an uproar. The cook did not know what to make for dinner. There were no clean linens for three-year-old Fanny. Baby Mary never seemed to stop crying. No one reme
mbered how Godwin liked his tea. The kitchen ran out of eggs. Without Mary, the staff was bereft as well as bewildered. Not only had Wollstonecraft provided them with their directions, she had asked them about their lives and sympathized with their problems. They had loved her. Her grief-stricken friends compounded matters, dropping in at all hours to weep in the front parlor. Never one for niceties, Godwin was sharp with visitors and annoyed by the servants.

  If Mary had been watching her husband struggle to work in this chaos, she might well have felt a little sorry for him, but she might have also been amused. To save money and restore order, Godwin had given up his Chalton Street office and moved into his wife’s study. Here, he hung the portrait John Opie had given him above the fireplace and put her books on his shelves. Yet now that he was in her position, he was discovering the truth of her words about the many interruptions of domesticity. Just as he settled down to write, Fanny would try to talk to him. The maid and cook had quandaries that it seemed only he could solve. Merchants sent messengers to dun him for payment. Workmen came to repair the window sashes.

  Finally, at his wits’ end, Godwin instituted a new rule: the staff could not bother him during his writing hours, and neither could his stepdaughter. This meant that Fanny, who had always had the run of her mother’s office, had to endure yet another loss. She was not allowed to knock on the study door, let alone open it and whisper to him; he was out of bounds until he dined at one o’clock, a rule from which he never wavered, even when he heard the baby’s cries floating downstairs from the nursery.

  Having established this system, Godwin could now square up to the challenges of writing A Memoir. He had known Mary for only the last eighteen months of her life, but he dismissed that as a trivial detail. She had told him stories about her childhood; he understood her inner spirit. Any facts he did not know, he could easily discover for himself. What mattered—he was sure—was the deep love that had bound them together, the special insight that he and he alone had into her character.

  He spent hours sifting through Mary’s unpublished manuscripts, and to the horror of future scholars, he burned the play she had worked on during their first summer together, deeming it unworthy of Mary’s talents. He read the old letters that she had copied with an eye toward posterity, and wrote to friends for any others they might have in their possession. He interviewed Margaret Kingsborough (the future Mrs. Mason), Mary’s charge from her days as a governess. Yet he did not take the most obvious step of all. He never contacted Mary’s sisters. Instead, he wrote a letter to someone who hardly knew her: Hugh Skeys, Fanny Blood’s widower, asking the basic questions Eliza and Everina were best equipped to answer. Mary had not been in touch with Hugh for many years and had little respect for him, but that did not stop Godwin: “I should be glad to be informed,” he wrote to Skeys, sounding like a solicitor rather than a bereaved husband, “respecting the schools she was sent to & any other anecdotes of her girlish years. I wish to obtain the maiden name of her mother, & any circumstances respecting her father’s or her mother’s families.” As an afterthought, he added, “Her sisters probably could tell some things that would be useful to me respecting the period when they lived together at Newington Green.”

  One can understand why he did not reach out to Mary’s brothers, as they had long been out of touch. No one knew where Henry was. Charles had gone to America. James had been in France, but he had been accused of being a British spy and his whereabouts were unknown. Edward had never been worth talking to as far as Mary was concerned. But it is difficult to know why Godwin did not write to the Wollstonecraft sisters at this stage of the project. Perhaps he was worried about upsetting them, or about what they would think of him publishing a “life” so swiftly. But if he had wanted to offend “the girls,” he could not have chosen a more effective strategy; Everina and Eliza were outraged when they realized he was not consulting them. Skeys had sent them Godwin’s questions, but Godwin was moving forward with A Memoir so quickly that they would not have time to send him their input. Once she understood what was happening, Everina wrote to Godwin with her concerns:

  When Eliza and I first learnt your intention of publishing immediately my sister Mary’s life, we concluded, that you only meant a sketch to prevent your design concerning her memoirs from being anticipated.…At a future date we would willingly have given whatever information was necessary and even now we would not have shrunk from the task, however anxious we may be to avoid reviving the recollections it would raise, or loath to fall into the pain of thoughts it must lead to, did we suppose it possible to accomplish the work you have undertaken in the time you specify.…I think it is impossible for you to be even tolerably accurate.

  Although Godwin would paint Mary’s sisters as jealous women who had never appreciated their famous sister, this letter suggests that the sisters were clearly suffering from the shock of Mary’s death. For their sister’s sake, Everina says, they would have endured the pain of going back and remembering times long past, if only they had been asked.

  Everina wrote with the same verve and righteousness as Mary often had. Above all, she knew how much research was entailed in writing a good biography, and like her sister, she was not afraid to tell Godwin his mistakes—in this case, that his “life” was “premature.” He did not even know their mother’s maiden name! She did not bother to ask the most pressing question: Why had he not written to them directly? The answer seemed obvious. He did not care what they had to say. Unfortunately, Godwin, famous though he was for his logic and philosophical bent, ignored Everina’s cautions. Everina wanted him to draw back and wait until his feelings had cooled; Godwin wanted to write while white-hot with grief. This was a mistake. His neglect of Eliza and Everina’s storehouse of information hurt his Memoir at the same time that it sealed his estrangement from the women who had grown up with Mary and who were the blood relations of little Fanny, the very people most likely to take an active interest in her.

  The modern biographer can only mourn this loss. Few people could have told him more about the first part of Mary’s life than her sisters. They could have given Godwin a glimpse of what it was like to live with Mary, confide in Mary, and be taken care of by Mary when they were small children. They could have explained why they were angry with Mary and what it felt like to hate her—and to love her. They admired her enough, after all, to live according to her philosophy of self-reliance. Granted, their choices were limited. But neither had surrendered to a loveless marriage; nor had they resorted to life with their brother, Ned. Both were determined to maintain themselves. Indeed, this sense that they could be independent was the greatest lesson their sister had taught them, and it is one that Godwin overlooked completely. That is because the bold Mary, the adventurer, the girl who had taken care of her sisters, found them jobs, started a school, fought against their father and eldest brother, and taught them to be free at all costs—the woman who said she did not need a man to live a good life and neither did they—this Mary was not Godwin’s favorite version of his wife. He had been repelled by Mary’s brashness when he met her at Johnson’s house with Tom Paine. She was too assertive for him then, too confident and too pushy. For all of Godwin’s lofty ideas, he was still a man of his time. Once, as a reprimand to Mary Hays, he told her that she was not being feminine enough. “To speak frankly,” he said, “I think you have forgotten a little of that simplicity & unpresuming mildness which so well becomes a woman.”

  For Godwin, then, Mary’s sisters were not only beside the point, they had things to say that he did not want to hear. He had fallen in love with a wounded Mary. She had tried to kill herself just a few months before they met, and to him, strangely enough, this made her seem more appealing. She was like a female Werther—the hero of the novel they had read the night before she went into labor; Werther, too, had been driven mad by love. Werther, too, had tried to die because of his broken heart. Sublime passion, the ability to be consumed by love—that is what he admired about Mary; that is what h
e wanted to show the world. She was soft and yielding, a woman whose tender heart had been trodden upon, a “fair” who needed to be saved, a heroine of high romance. She was not—he was emphatic about this—the virago that many, including himself, had thought her to be after she published Rights of Woman.

  With these priorities in mind, he felt no need of the petty domestic details her sisters could provide. Even Mary’s literary achievements were secondary in his mind. What really mattered were the grand events of her life, and these were her love affairs. A bestselling novelist, Godwin knew how to craft a story. He dwelt on Mary’s painful childhood to show the reader the hardship she overcame, but only briefly mentioned her positions as a lady’s companion and governess; he skimmed over her experience as a professional journalist, but focused undue attention on her relationships with Fuseli, Imlay, and himself. In his hands, then, Mary becomes a tragic heroine; a woman defined in relation to men, not an independent individual, making her own choices and way in the world.

  As a result, the book reads like a page-turning gothic drama, not an analytic study. Mary suffers at the hand of her despotic father, falls in love with Fuseli, and flees to France to escape his rejection. She stays in France during the Terror because of her grand passion for Imlay, has a child out of wedlock, and tries to kill herself twice. Only at the end of her life does she find happiness. And this happiness was, of course, with Godwin.