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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Although Godwin’s projects consumed much of Mary’s time, she did not stop her own literary endeavors. A year after he died, when she was forty, she finished a new novel, Falkner. Interestingly, she thought this book her best, an opinion difficult for modern readers to share given the obtrusive plot contrivances, wooden characters, and stilted dialogue. However, Mary did not judge her books by their ability to capture the realities of daily life, or the actual rhythms of conversation. She cared about ideas, assessing her books—and all books, for that matter—on their philosophy. If one follows these criteria, then Mary is right; in Falkner, she gives full voice, at last, to many of the ideas she had only hinted at before.

  The heroine of Falkner shares the same name as Frankenstein’s bride, but she is far stronger than the first Elizabeth. Whereas in Frankenstein Elizabeth is killed by the monster and is a symbol of helpless innocence, in Falkner the new Elizabeth vanquishes her foes and saves the men in her life. A heroine protecting the men she loves would have been unimaginable in Mary’s earlier novels. The Countess Euthanasia is defeated by the warrior prince, Valperga; all the women die in The Last Man; and even in the more optimistic Lodore, the daughter cannot save her father. But in Falkner, Elizabeth persuades both her father and lover to lead a quiet domestic life rather than chasing after their dreams of glory. Her values triumph over theirs and they are all happier for it.

  Mary’s work had come full circle. In Frankenstein, the hero’s ambition destroys everyone he loved. Homes are burned down; family ties, annihilated. Margaret Saville, the sister of Robert Walton, does help rescue her brother, but this point is overshadowed by Frankenstein’s downfall and his helplessness in the face of his desire for knowledge, fame, and power. In Falkner, on the other hand, Mary emphasizes the power of the heroine to save the male characters from their ambitions, preserving their lives and bringing them into the warmth of the family. Although the revolutionary implications of this might be lost on today’s audience, to contemporary readers the novel’s subversive conclusion is unmistakable. Acting not as a warrior, but as an advocate for peace, Elizabeth creates a utopia based on the “feminine” values of compassion, love, and family. Without the follies caused by male ambition, Mary implies, there would be no more war, no more children lost.

  Most critics disliked this overturning of values. Men were supposed to save women; women were not supposed to save men. And, besides, war was glorious. Only cowards backed away from battle. Yet Falkner did receive a few compliments for its imaginative reach and philosophical reflections. The Athenaeum thought it one of Mary’s finest novels. The Age also admired it, but The Examiner complained about the novel’s lack of morality and other reviewers found it just too depressing. Sales were sluggish and Mary, who was in the midst of the Spanish and Portuguese “Lives,” which she finished that summer, decided that Falkner would be her last novel. There was too great an emotional cost in writing a book and then watching as people abused it.

  CHAPTER 38

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE WRONGS

  [ 1797–1798 ]

  going through Mary’s papers while writing A Memoir, Godwin had discovered the unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, as well as the passages she had cut from her letters to Imlay—the long strings of insults, the repetitive catalogues of suffering, her rage at his abandonment. By removing these sections from the final version of Letters from Sweden, Mary had demonstrated literary judgment of the highest order, but Godwin did not heed his wife’s decisions. He pieced the excised passages back together again and published them as a section of a new book he entitled The Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

  As with A Memoir, this publication would gravely harm his wife’s stature as a writer, but Godwin was not consciously trying to hurt her legacy. He had different standards for letters than for works such as the Vindications. Mary’s passionate missives did not have to prove a point or have a logical structure, he believed; rather, their depth of “feeling” was a positive feature, revealing her to be tender and womanly instead of “amazonian.” He hoped they would help win the sympathy of readers and redeem her literary reputation. On the other hand, he did edit several of Mary’s other works, most notably her essay “On Poetry,” diluting her ideas to make them less radical and reshaping the essay to conform to his own notions about what constituted good writing.

  Many of these revisions were Godwin’s misguided attempt to make his wife seem more acceptable to the public and to help the book sell. Desperate to raise enough money to settle Mary’s bills and his own, he signed over the copyright to Johnson, who agreed to pay off Mary’s creditors in return. This was an act of charity on Johnson’s part, since he knew he would never make money from a book that the public, still horrified by Godwin’s account of Wollstonecraft’s life, would refuse to buy. However, Johnson was a man of principle. He wanted to help his old friend, and he believed that Mary’s unpublished works were worthy of publication, even if unfinished or flawed.

  If there had been a book to salvage Mary’s literary reputation, Posthumous Works was not it. Readers overlooked the single most important essay, “On Poetry,” taken aback by the furious tone and obsessive quality of Mary’s unedited letters to Imlay. To them, her bold professions of love, her demands, the pleading and the rage—all of which Godwin had seen as evidence of his wife’s romantic nature—confirmed her as a dissolute and hysterical woman, obsessed with love and sex. She became notorious for being exactly what her published Letters from Sweden had proved she was not: undisciplined, histrionic, and self-absorbed.

  After Posthumous Works went on sale in the spring of 1798, any standing that Wollstonecraft had retained after Godwin’s Memoir was almost entirely eradicated. Gone were the professional author, the political correspondent, the hard-edged philosopher, the educational innovator, and the bold businesswoman who single-handedly supported her family and friends. Gone, too, were the loving mother, the sensible partner, and the empathic lover. In her place was a crazed, self-destructive, sex-starved radical. If one looks up “Prostitution” in the index of The Anti-Jacobin Review, the entry reads, “see Mary Wollstonecraft.” Experts warned parents against letting their daughters read Wollstonecraft’s books, claiming her words could promote suicide, foster licentiousness, and destroy the very fabric of decent society.

  Mary had always been a controversial figure. Her enemies had routinely hurled epithets at her morality as well as her politics, but now Godwin had provided the ammunition they needed to bury her for good. Not only were her ideas incendiary, they claimed, but she herself was disgraceful, her life a series of disasters. In article after article, they dismantled her status as a leading intellectual and made her name a watchword, a warning of the dangers that would ensue if women were allowed too much leeway.

  The atmosphere in London was already tense when Posthumous Works appeared. The Irish had risen in revolt and London workers, angry at bread prices, pelted the king’s carriage with rocks, staging protests in the streets. The newspapers blamed Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and other radicals for bringing anarchy to the kingdom, suggesting that they were French agents. To a nation on edge, the ideas of these reformers appeared as dangerous as the army that Napoleon was building across the Channel.

  Matters were further exacerbated by a scandal that occurred around the same time as the publication of A Memoir and Posthumous Works. Mary’s former charge, sixteen-year-old Mary, the youngest daughter of Lord and Lady Kingsborough, ran away with a married cousin twice her age. In a fit of vengeful fury, her brother killed the cousin and was tried for murder. The court proceedings were widely publicized, and before long, a savvy journalist made the connection: Wollstonecraft had been Mary’s governess. The promiscuous author of Rights of Woman was to blame for “the misconduct of one of [her] pupils, who has lately brought disgrace on herself, death on her paramour, risk to the lives of her brother and father, and misery to all her relatives.…” Ten years had passed since Wollstonecraft h
ad taught Mary, but this did nothing to slow the avalanche of criticism. If other women followed Wollstonecraft’s example, one critic spluttered, there would be “the most pernicious consequences to society.” Mary’s influence could lead to the disintegration of the family and the kingdom as a whole.

  Of her many friends, only Mary Hays was willing to publish a defense of Wollstonecraft. The others remained silent. Godwin had gone too far and the times were too dangerous. Besides, it was difficult to defend Wollstonecraft, since in many ways her detractors were right: her work was indeed a sustained call to arms, a battle cry for the natural rights of both men and women. She did want the status quo overturned; she was on the side of revolutions; she loathed what she called “the good old rules of conduct.” There were exceptions to the generalized condemnation—Blake, Coleridge, and the other Romantics still supported her ideas and held firm to their belief in her genius—but they were not particularly helpful. Having themselves been pilloried by the critics, they had learned to dismiss their enemies. It would not have occurred to them that Mary Wollstonecraft needed them to defend her.

  But unfortunately, she did. As a woman writer, her case was different from theirs. In the years after Wollstonecraft’s death, it became increasingly risky for women to venture into the “male” territory of philosophy and politics. Anyone following in Wollstonecraft’s footsteps risked being called a whore, her reputation ruined. In England, in the century after her death, few philosophical works would dare to address “the woman question,” with the exception of John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, which declared his belief in the equality of the sexes. But even Mill, who had read and admired Wollstonecraft’s work, did not mention her once. Later generations of women’s rights advocates continued to distance themselves from Wollstonecraft, believing her notoriety would hurt their cause. In 1877, the Victorian reformer Harriet Martineau disparaged Wollstonecraft as “a poor victim of passion,” arguing that the “best friends” of the women’s movement “are women who…must be clearly seen to speak from conviction of the truth, and not from personal unhappiness.” Robert Browning cemented her image as a “desperate” spinster in his poem Wollstonecraft and Fuseli despite an urgent letter from Godwin’s biographer, C. Kegan Paul, who told Browning that Godwin had been deceived by Fuseli in A Memoir, and that he actually knew very little about his wife’s early life. In 1885, when Karl Pearson, the leader of a socialist group, proposed naming the organization after Wollstonecraft, the female members threatened to resign. Few people wanted to be associated with the pathetic figure that she had become in the popular imagination.

  And yet Godwin’s ill-advised attempts to celebrate his wife’s memory did not entirely fail. Posthumous Works preserved and compiled many of her drafts, unedited letters, and unfinished works, offering future scholars insight into her process as a writer as well as evidence of her artistry. In addition, he used Posthumous Works to continue his exploration of the question that he had introduced in A Memoir, the question Mary herself had asked over and over again: What was it that set her apart? Was it her character, her life experience, or some mysterious personal quality? Mary had tried to answer this in all of her books, declaring that she was “the hero of each tale” she composed. In both Mary and Maria, she had been intent on “tracing the outline of the first period of her own existence.” “A person has a right…to talk of himself,” she had announced in an “advertisement” to Letters from Sweden. But the grammatically correct male pronoun betrays the difficulties she faced when she wanted to talk about herself. As Mary knew only too well, women were not supposed to place their experience at the center of any narrative, fictional or otherwise.

  Mostly, her deeply held beliefs sustained her. On the one hand, she was unique, the first of a new genus, but like all women she had endured prejudice and hate; her sufferings, though specific to her, exemplified the injustices that others also had to suffer; and it was the general experience that she wanted to expose. If she could show her readers what it felt like to be powerless, what it was like to be a woman without legal recourse, poor, abused, and at the mercy of others, if she could reveal the root causes of human suffering and misogyny, then perhaps she could galvanize her readers and save others from the same miseries.

  Fortunately, Wollstonecraft had already built a loyal audience before she died, and this select group kept her ideas alive despite the campaign to obliterate her name. For them, it was her most controversial books that were the most important. The Utopian socialist Robert Owen, only twenty-six years old when Wollstonecraft died, was so inspired by her call for justice that he included a quotation from one or the other of the Vindications in almost all of his tracts and pamphlets. In 1881, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony published the first volume of their monumental History of Suffrage, they put Wollstonecraft at the top of their list of heroic women “[w]hose earnest lives and fearless words, in demanding political rights for women have been, in the preparation of these pages, a constant inspiration.” Carrie Chapman Catt, the president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, declared that all women owed gratitude to Wollstonecraft for sacrificing herself for the sake of the human race. Catt even set the first annual meeting of the Alliance on the 150th anniversary of Wollstonecraft’s birth—April 27, 1909.

  Women writers were also inspired by her bravery. She became a secret lifeline between generations, or, as Elizabeth Barrett Browning put it, a literary “grandmother.” Despite her husband’s negative portrait of Wollstonecraft in his poetry, Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary were important role models for Elizabeth. Reading Wollstonecraft at age twelve gave her the courage to flee her repressive father. She saw herself as another Mary Shelley and eloped with Browning to Italy, where she devoted herself to the cause of women’s advancement, creating an independent literary heroine named Aurora Leigh who turned down offers of marriage for the sake of art, poetry, and freedom.

  In the mid-1850s the Victorian author Mary Ann Evans, writing under the name of George Eliot, penned an essay praising Wollstonecraft for her “loftiness of moral tone,” seeking to free her from the cloud of shame that still clung to her name. For Eliot, who lived with a married man and wrote books that criticized the hypocrisy of Victorian society, Wollstonecraft’s fate was a disturbing example of what could happen to a female intellectual if she broke the rules of sexual conduct. To counter the “prejudice against the Rights of Woman as in some way or other a reprehensible book,” she declared that readers would be “surprised to find it eminently serious, severely moral, and withal rather heavy—the true reason, perhaps, that no edition has been published since 1796, and that it is now rather scarce.”

  Almost a century later, Virginia Woolf laid claim to Wollstonecraft, publishing an essay in 1935 in which she declared:

  Many millions have died and been forgotten in the…years that have passed since [Wollstonecraft] was buried; and yet as we read her letters and listen to her arguments and consider her experiments, and realize the high handed and hot blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick of life, one form of immortality is hers undoubtedly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her voice and trace her influence even now among the living.

  In place of Eliot’s grave Victorian philosopher, Woolf depicts a lively young woman, the perfect emblem for the modern woman, brimming with passion for politics, dedicated to reform and social justice, and with no patience for dishonesty or stupidity. In Woolf’s hands, Wollstonecraft suddenly seems alive, fun, even, unharmed by the bitter calumny that has been heaped on her head, a brave impetuous woman whose ideas are worthy of emulation.

  And yet, despite the efforts of these writers, Wollstonecraft still remained largely unread, regarded as a curiosity rather than an essential figure until the advent of the women’s movement in the 1970s. Over the last four decades, innumerable biographies and critical studies have redeemed her work and placed her ideas and her life in historical and cultural context
. She is now a fixture in anthologies of philosophy, British literature, and women’s literature and is a staple in courses on intellectual history, the history of women, and feminist theory. Nevertheless, though this might seem like a triumph, the tale of Wollstonecraft’s legacy is a cautionary one. She was almost lost to history, her name nearly obliterated. Her critics used sexual scandal to try to silence her words, and they nearly succeeded. Wollstonecraft was almost forgotten, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman unread, and her call for justice unheard.

  CHAPTER 39

  MARY SHELLEY: RAMBLINGS

  [ 1837–1848 ]

  the summer of 1838, just before Mary turned forty-one, Edward Moxon, Tennyson’s publisher, offered her £500 to edit a four-volume set of Shelley’s collected works. He also wanted her to provide biographical material for those readers who had already encountered Shelley’s poems and were eager to know more about him. Here it was at last: the opportunity Mary had dreamed of for more than a decade, but would Sir Timothy allow the project to move forward? Mary wanted to complete it quickly because several pirated copies of Shelley’s poems, marred by mistakes and misprints, had sprung into print since his death. There were now five unauthorized collections in circulation.

  In the intervening years, Sir Timothy’s lawyer had died and he had hired a new representative named John Gregson, who was sympathetic to Mary’s cause. An admirer of Shelley’s poetry, Gregson had talked Sir Timothy into paying Percy’s tuition at Cambridge, and as a result Percy had just completed his first year at Trinity College. Now Gregson persuaded Sir Timothy to allow Mary to publish Shelley’s work by telling him he should be proud of his son’s poetry and reminding him that the Shelley name no longer spelled scandal. Sir Timothy drew the line at a biography, however. He did not want the old stories retold. It had taken sixteen years, but at last Shelley’s reputation as a poet had begun to displace his reputation as a philanderer and atheist. Mary’s preface to Posthumous Poems had helped, as had the passage of time. Many of the scandalmongers of the previous generation had died.