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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Mary was pleased to have the chance to put Shelley’s work before the public, though she remained frustrated that Sir Timothy would not allow her to write an authoritative account of Shelley’s life. Having anticipated his refusal, however, she had devised a strategy that would allow her to publish her version of Shelley’s biography while escaping Sir Timothy’s attention. She would write extensive notes on each poem, far more comprehensive than the notes in the 1824 edition, setting the works in context and revealing those parts of Shelley’s experience she felt the public should hear, but all under the guise of an “editor,” not a biographer.

  She began immediately, once again opening up the diaries and organizing the papers she had not looked at for more than a decade. The task was monumental and far more painful than sifting through her father’s notes. Back came Shelley, little Clara, William, Allegra, Fanny, and Byron. So, too, her younger self: cold, angry, and resentful. There was also a host of happier memories—Geneva, Marlow, the early years in Italy—but these were, if anything, even more difficult to bear. Most exhausting of all, though, was confronting Harriet’s ghost. “Poor Harriet to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows as the atonement claimed by fate for her death,” she wrote.

  She had found all his secrets during her first round of editing and had brooded over what to do with these painful details for many years. Should she offer them to the reader, risking her husband’s reputation? No, she decided. Not because of her dignity, but because of his literary legacy. If they knew too much about his private life, most people would refuse to read his work, just as they refused to read her mother’s books after Godwin wrote his tell-all memoir. She was not going to do to Shelley what her father had done to Wollstonecraft.

  The most honorable thing, she decided, would be to leave out the biographical details her audience would find shocking, but tell them she was doing so. That way, readers would know that there were secrets and that she was not going to reveal them. “This is not the time to relate the truth,” she wrote in the preface, “and I should reject any colouring of the truth.” Thus she makes no mention of the other women in Shelley’s life, nor does she discuss her own elopement. Instead, she uses silence like a censor’s pen, at once marking and covering the deleted passages, a gesture toward a greater truth, the stories she could not tell.

  As compensation, she included fascinating tidbits about the circumstances in which Shelley composed his poems, painting vignettes of her husband wandering through the shady park at Marlow and gazing at the sea from the glass room on top of the house near Pisa. She describes him propped against the mast of his boat reading and writing, marveling at the fireflies in Bagni di Lucca, and spotting the bird that would inspire To a Skylark. Throughout her notes she emphasized Shelley’s lyrical voice and his spiritual qualities—how pure he was, how little he sought worldly fame, how passionately he loved his art. Having been the target of criticism for so many years, Mary knew that if she wanted people to accept and love Shelley the poet, she must skirt the issue of his politics, his eccentric ideas about morality, and his lack of religious faith.

  It took months of effort, during which time she became ill and depleted. By February 1839, Mary was worn out; “I am torn to pieces by Memory,” she wrote in her journal. Even her new cottage in Putney along the Thames, with its view of gardens on the nearby hillside, did little to cheer her up. In March, she was filled with a “sort of unspeakable sensation of wildness & irritation.” She had to take periodic rests, but when Moxon suggested she slow down publication of the next volume, she refused. She finished in May, and in her introduction apologized for the illness that she felt had weakened her work.

  When the reviews came for the first volume, the critics praised Shelley but complained about Mary. The Examiner disagreed with her interpretations of her husband’s work, and The Spectator and the Athenaeum criticized her editing. They felt she had left too much out—an opinion seconded by Shelley’s old friends, led of course by the bitter Trelawny. She was the worst possible editor for Shelley’s work, he claimed. In response to these criticisms, Mary and Moxon published a new edition of the first volume that included more of the controversial material, particularly Shelley’s political verses and the poems that explicitly undercut the accepted morals of the day. Just as Mary had predicted, conservative readers took umbrage, resulting in a suit for blasphemy against Moxon, the last case of the kind in England. The book remained in print, but the legal battle that ensued was a costly reminder of all that Mary had feared.

  She spent the summer and fall preparing the prose volumes, wrestling with what to include and what to leave out. She did not want “to mutilate” Shelley’s work and yet she knew that some of his ideas were too shocking for the public to handle. She did not include many of his letters to her father, even though Godwin had kept most of them, as they revealed too much about their private lives; she also did not include passages that were atheistic. Nevertheless, she was prepared to take some risks. For example, when Leigh Hunt suggested that she tone down the homosexual references in Shelley’s translation of the Symposium, she refused, saying it was important to retain “as many of Shelley’s own words as possible.” Weighted down by her sense of responsibility to the future and to the poet, she labored to make the decisions she felt he would have wanted. When at last she was finished in 1840, she felt as though she could never write another word.

  For all of Mary’s apologies, her four-volume edition of Shelley’s complete works crowned the campaign she had begun with Posthumous Poems. In painting her portrait of Shelley, she went even further than she had in 1824, no longer simply hinting at his angelic status, but telling her readers that he had left this world to dwell in a higher sphere:

  His spirit gathers peace in its new state from the sense that…his exertions were not made in vain, and in the progress of the liberty he so fondly loved.…It is our best consolation to know that such a pure-minded and exalted being was once among us, and now exists where we hope one day to join him.…

  Skillful fiction writer that she was, Mary had turned her atheistic, free-love, antigovernment, radical husband into a Victorian martyr. The only liberty she had taken, she believed, was to leave out what was personal, what the public could not understand, and what was not, at any rate, their business. Thus, to the modern eye Mary’s portrait of Shelley seems incomplete, but Mary believed she had captured the essence of Shelley on paper. Indeed, if she had not played the editorial role for which she has been castigated ever since, nineteenth-century readers might never have encountered her husband’s work and it might have been lost forever. Unlike her mother and her father (or Shelley, for that matter), she chose not to confront her audience head-on, tempering her notes to suit their tastes. A sellout, some might say, but Mary was a veteran of the literary marketplace; she knew what readers would like and what they would not.

  And she was right. New readers, unaware of Shelley’s radical ideas and the scandals attached to his name, bowed to Shelley’s genius and ushered him into the halls of the great English poets. Looking back, it may seem odd that no one wondered how Shelley had gone from being a famous atheist to “Christian hearted,” from being an unknown poet to a literary star. But Mary had done her job so well that no one asked any troubling questions. He was praised in most quarters, even those where he would have been spurned had he still been alive. The priggish chaplain at Eton College dedicated a fulsome elegy to his memory, exclaiming over his spiritual virtue and artistic genius.

  The finishing touch was Mary’s invisibility. Just as in Posthumous Poems, not once does she mention her role as editor. For all anyone knew, Shelley had left behind an orderly pile of finished poems and essays that were ready for publication. Mary did not reveal the effort she had poured into his work, declaring that she was simply an apostle to a great man whose lessons of love and purity could not be understood by just anyone, let alone herself. And so it was that she created her greatest fiction of all: “Mary Shel
ley,” the humble Victorian wife, an individual who bears as little resemblance to the actual Mary as “Shelley the poet” does to the real Shelley.

  At the same time, Mary’s own fame was steadily growing. In the winter of 1839, her friend Richard Rothwell painted her portrait to display at the Royal Academy. For the sitting, she chose to wear a black dress that looks as though it might slide off her snowy shoulders. Her hair is combed tightly back. She looks pale, sorrowful, and worn down, as indeed she was—too tired to smile or to hide her sadness from the artist. “Time…adds only to the keenness & vividness with which I view the past,” she told Hunt, “for when tragedies & most bitter dramas were in the course of acting I did not feel their meaning & their consequences as poignantly as I now do.”

  Portrait of Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell, displayed at the Royal Academy in 1839. (illustration ill.38)

  For all her melancholy, at age forty-two Mary was coming into her own. She had many new friends, an impressive array of political and creative thinkers including Benjamin Disraeli, Samuel Rogers, Walter Savage Landor, and the Carlyles. She had remained friendly with Aubrey’s sisters and had forgiven him enough to meet his wife, Ida, and their children. Even better, she had shed those who had betrayed her or been cruel to her. She rarely saw Jane. And her relationship with Trelawny, always on shaky ground, had come to a bitter end in 1838. Trelawny had eloped with one of Mary’s married friends, Augusta Goring, the sister of Aubrey’s wife. Rejected by London society, he and Augusta lived in virtual exile, not far from Putney. Mary could usually be counted on to be sympathetic in such situations, but when Trelawny asked her to reach out to Augusta, Mary refused. He had denounced her in public one time too many. Later, Trelawny would cite this as further evidence of her shallowness, but if anything, it was proof of Mary’s hard-earned wisdom. She had a long record of helping those who chose to live outside the rules of society, but in the case of Trelawny and Augusta, she did not see why she should risk her own social standing (or, more important, Percy’s) to further the cause of a man who had done nothing to help her and had in fact intentionally hurt her with his criticisms, no matter how blameless Augusta might be. As a result they never spoke again, and Trelawny escalated his campaign against her, writing to Claire, “She lives on hogs wash—what utter failures most people are!”

  Then, one day late in 1839, Mary received the news that Aubrey’s wife, Ida, had drowned in an accident on the family’s country estate. Almost instantly, Aubrey was at her side again, turning to her for comfort. With four small children to manage, he felt overwhelmed and lonely, confessing his struggles to Mary. As they had in the days before his marriage, they spent many hours alone, strolling through the London parks and drinking tea in her drawing room. Mary hoped that this time they might marry, but by the summer, she was still uncertain about how he felt. “Another hope—Can I have another hope?” she wrote in her journal.

  Aubrey could not remarry until the requisite period of mourning was at an end, and since he had not yet declared himself, Mary decided to go forward with a plan she had been dreaming of for almost two decades—a return to Europe. After years of scrimping, she had finally saved enough money, and she, Percy, and one of his friends from Cambridge set forth for Italy in June 1840. Mary’s spirits soared the moment they were on the road; “I feel a good deal of the gipsy coming upon me,” she wrote.

  They traveled along the Rhine to Frankfurt and Zurich, and when at last they crossed the Alps into Lombardy, Mary reflected that she had returned “to my own land.” Her fluency in Italian came flooding back; she delighted in the sun, the yellow hills, the vineyards, and the fresh lemons and strawberries. But she was also stunned by the sorrow she felt, “amounting almost to agony”; the pines, the glimmer of Lake Como, the fishermen calling to one another—all seemed unchanged: Shelley at her side; Wilmouse reaching for her hand. At times, her head ached so much that she was forced to lie down. Other times, she was gripped by violent tremors. She attributed these ills to the sorrows she had endured, the pain of remembering those she had loved and lost, and although that may well have been true, there was also a biological basis for Mary’s physical ailments, one she never suspected. The headaches and the fatigue were the first signs of the brain disease meningioma that would eventually end her life.

  While the boys sailed and explored, Mary wrote long letters and visited with other guests at the hotels. She tried not to fix her hopes on a future with Aubrey, but it was difficult to control her dreams. Earlier that year, she had written in her journal:

  A friendship secure helpful—enduring—a union with a generous heart—& yet a suffering one whom I may comfort & bless—if it be so I am happy indeed.…I can indeed confide in A’s inalterable gentleness & affection…but will not events place us asunder—& prevent me from being comfort to him—he from being the prop on which I may lean—We shall see—If I can impart any permanent pleasure to his now blighted existence, & revivify it through the force of sincere & disinterested attachment—I shall be happy.

  But as had happened before, the weeks passed and no letters arrived from Aubrey. Mary’s forebodings grew. At the end of September, she sent the boys back to England to return to the university while she made her way north to Paris, where Aubrey’s brother, Charles, had offered her his apartment on the Rue de la Paix. Here she entertained friends, receiving visits from admirers of her work and of Shelley’s, including the poet Alphonse de Lamartine and the writer Charles Sainte-Beuve. Then bad news came. Claire, who had moved back to London to take care of the elderly Mary-Jane, wrote that Aubrey had become engaged to Rosa Robinson, a friend of Mary’s and the younger sister of Isabel, the young woman Mary had helped rescue thirteen years earlier. Rosa was young and respectable. She offered the hope of more children and would make a good wife for a politician. They were to be married in December.

  Rejected and humiliated, Mary remained in Paris through January of 1841. When at last she did return to her empty cottage, it was a difficult homecoming, “unhappy, betrayed, alone!” she wrote in her journal. The only brightness in her life was that Percy, having earned his degree from Cambridge, would turn twenty-one in November and his grandfather had promised to give him an allowance of £400 a year. Combining his income with hers, they would have more than enough to live on. When the big day came, they celebrated by buying some furniture and moving to Half Moon Street, a fashionable Mayfair neighborhood.

  Yet the freedom from debt also gave Mary more time to brood. “I gave all the treasure of my heart; all was accepted readily—& more & more asked—& when more I could not give—behold me betrayed, deserted; fearfully betrayed so that I wd rather die than any of them more—” She did not finish the sentence. In fact, she never wrote another word in her journal. The emotional cost had become too much to bear.

  That June, the end of an era came. Mary-Jane Godwin died, having expressed a wish to be buried in St. Pancras churchyard next to Godwin. Claire, who had loathed her time in London, joined Mary at the graveyard for the funeral and then, after requesting another loan from Mary, sailed to Paris. The distance between the two sisters had become an established fact—neither wanted more of a connection, but neither did they want to sever all ties. Each needed her independence, but each acknowledged the other’s importance, writing on a regular basis and always making plans for visits. They had shared too much to lose each other.

  Mary felt no particular sadness at the death of her stepmother, but neither did she feel the relief she had once imagined she would. Instead, she felt as though one of the last links to her childhood was gone. She and the Clairmont children, Claire and Charles, were the only ones left from their strangely mingled family. Charles had married and had children, but he lived in Europe.

  Alone in London, Mary found herself increasingly dependent on Percy. But Percy was beginning to pull away, enjoying flirtations with various young women, and Mary worried that he would choose the wrong person. The blood of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Shelley ran in P
ercy’s veins, making him a sort of crown prince in Mary’s eyes, a royal son of literature. The woman he chose to marry was of the utmost importance. There was also the added worry that the wrong wife would resent Mary’s presence and try to separate her from her son. For Mary, this would have been disastrous, since Percy remained at the center of her life, and she feared that he would leave her behind now that he had come of age. However, Percy showed no sign of discontent and never considered living apart from his mother. He allowed Mary to submit the young women he met to a sharp-eyed scrutiny and remained perfectly tranquil when his mother whisked him back to Europe in the summer of 1842 to remove him from a relationship she deemed unsuitable.

  For Mary, however, this new trip seemed ill-fated. The heat in Dresden drained their energy, the friends they had invited to travel with them were difficult and moody, and everything was too expensive. However, when they arrived in Italy, Mary revived. Venice, Florence, and Rome, particularly Rome, delighted her, although, as before, her joy was tinged by sorrow. This time she tried to find the graves of Clara and William, but they were unmarked, and she was unable to locate them. Only Shelley lay in stately repose in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Trelawny had planted cypresses around his tombstone, a startlingly large white rectangular slab set in the ground like an enormous paving stone. The quote from The Tempest was engraved in an elegant cursive script, and above it in large block letters was the Latin phrase that Hunt had suggested: cor cordium, heart of hearts.