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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Shelley’s grave. (illustration ill.39)

  Twenty-three-year-old Percy, on the other hand, missed home and dragged his feet when she suggested they visit a gallery or historical site. Unlike his scholarly mother, he did not like spending hours reading and writing. He missed the English countryside, disliked the heat, and had little interest in art. He would much rather have been sailing on the Thames than gazing contemplatively at the hills of Tuscany.

  Finally, in August 1843, after a year of being abroad, Percy had had enough and said so. Mary was disappointed, but she listened. She had done her best to shape him into a poet or a philosopher, a Godwin, a Shelley, or a Wollstonecraft, but he had steadfastly remained his country squire self. Fortunately, she realized that it was time to accept her son for who he was—loving, loyal, and sturdy—and encouraged him to return to England while she spent a month in Paris with Claire.

  When fall came, she joined Percy in London and they decided to return to Putney. Percy wanted to live close to the river, and Mary was happy to move out of the center of the city. Their cottage was small, but it was quiet and had a pretty garden. Here Mary organized the notes she had taken on their trip, and by January 1844 she had finished the first volume of what would be her last work, a travel book she called Rambles in Germany and Italy, a final tribute to her mother. Consciously imitating Wollstonecraft’s Letters from Sweden, she described how she felt uplifted by the landscape, blessed by “the immeasurable goodness of our Maker.” Like her mother, she preached the healing powers of solitude and Nature, and, in true Wollstonecraft/Godwin/Shelley fashion, she also delved into politics, arguing against Austria’s occupation of Italy. She devoted many pages to the art she had encountered, revealing her own analytic brilliance while drawing on ideas from The Symposium. Artists should not be censored for depicting scenes of homosexual love, she declared—a bold stance that was anathema to most Victorians.

  However, when the book came to press, no one noted her erudition or her observations on art, many of which would be echoed by Ruskin less than fifty years later, earning him the respect denied Mary. Instead, most reviewers confined themselves to applauding her anti-Austrian stance, as it dovetailed with popular foreign policy of the time, although of course a few were unhappy that a woman would dare write about politics at all. Mary was not unduly cast down; for her, there was nothing new about being misread and overlooked. In addition, she had received some news that had been a long time coming.

  On April 24, 1844, Sir Timothy finally died. Percy was now Sir Percy, the proud owner of Field Place, the Shelley ancestral home in Sussex. Mary was relieved that he had come into his inheritance, but also worried that Sir Timothy might have found some underhanded way to deprive her son of the estate. Perhaps there was no money left. Maybe the surviving Shelleys would make it impossible for Percy to claim his rightful share.

  Her fears were well founded. Lady Shelley had stripped Field Place of every bit of furniture except the fire grates. Shelley had promised bequests to Claire, Hunt, Peacock, and Hogg. He had also promised £6,000 for Ianthe, his daughter by Harriet. The total came to £22,500, which left Mary and Percy in desperate straits, unable to pay off their creditors or honor Shelley’s intentions. Ordinarily, they could have relied on the Shelley holdings, which brought in an annual income of £5,000 or more, to help them get back on their feet. But the summer of 1845 brought terrible weather; the crops died, and the farmers could not pay their rents. Luckily, Mary, a veteran of dire fiscal problems, knew how to manage. She sold off parts of the estate, cut their expenses, negotiated with creditors, and made a plan to slowly pay off their debts while gradually honoring Shelley’s bequests. However, the legatees were suspicious about why they had not received their money. Claire was the worst offender. She wrote frequent furious letters: Where was her inheritance? Were Percy and Mary trying to deprive her of what was rightfully hers? Only when she came home to England for four months and saw that Mary and Percy were doing their best to manage a difficult situation did she soften. When she returned to Paris, she wrote a peacemaking letter, saying that it had done her good to be with them:

  Near you and Percy it is impossible to be unhappy, for your unity is so charming and there is so much calm and happiness in you it imparts a most beneficial influence…and then your conversation so nice and so universal draws one out of the narrow cares of self.

  Mary wrote back that her only goals were “To do a little good—to watch over those dear—to enjoy quiet—& if one can be a little amused voila tout?”

  It was impossible to live at the crumbling Field Place, and so Mary and Percy continued to stay in Putney, where old friends often came to visit, including Leigh Hunt and, surprisingly, Aubrey and his wife, Rosa, as Mary had come to accept Aubrey’s second betrayal with remarkable dignity. Over the next few years, she devoted herself to turning the few resources she and Percy had into a solid foundation. After a few good harvests and careful economy, Mary had settled their debts, leaving them with enough income to buy a home in London, a four-story town house at 24 Chester Square in Pimlico. There was even enough left over for Percy to purchase a yacht. Mary tried not to worry, as she knew that Percy was far more sensible than his father, and his new vessel was sturdy and well equipped for all weather. Besides, he knew how to swim.

  But for all their newfound security, Mary felt increasingly ill. The headaches she had endured six years ago in Italy had continued intermittently, and now they returned in full force. The doctor she consulted said it was “neuralgia of the heart”—a misdiagnosis. Her back hurt, the nerves felt tingly, “alive,” and at times she thought her “spine would altogether give up the ghost.” She was troubled by a tremor that made it difficult to write, eat, walk, or take care of her daily needs. The doctors were at a loss, and finally, as they often did with gentlewomen of Mary’s class and background, they diagnosed a nervous complaint, just as they had with the poet Elizabeth Barrett, who had been confined to her bed before she ran off to Italy with Browning, inspired by Mary’s own elopement with Shelley.

  However, Mary was not yet ready to retire to her bedchamber. She sought cures in Baden-Baden and Brighton and consulted different physicians. And yet, though she had periods when her back pain subsided, the headaches never really went away. She read light novels and followed politics but could not do any work that was too taxing. She consoled herself by entertaining friends when she felt up to it and keeping watch for a suitable bride for Percy. At last, in March 1848, the right young woman appeared at the home of friends in Bayswater.

  Small and plump, Jane Gibson St. John had already been married; her husband had died, leaving her a widow at age twenty-four, the same age Mary had been when Shelley died. She was neither beautiful nor artistic, but her merits were just what Mary had been looking for. She was sensible, loyal, and loving toward Percy. In addition, she was deeply reverential toward Mary. Years later, when she recalled meeting her husband for the first time, it would be her mother-in-law she would describe, not Percy: Mary was “tall and slim,” with “the most beautiful deep set eyes I have ever seen.” She wore dresses of a “long soft grey material, simply and beautifully made.” No one else had ever described Mary as tall, but then Jane was short and plump.

  Here at last was a daughter, Mary felt. It did not take much to persuade Percy that Jane was the right woman. He felt appreciated, even admired, by Jane. Although he and his mother had come to an understanding after the last European expedition, Mary still had a way of making him feel inadequate. She pushed him to read more, to follow politics, and to go to the theater and galleries. He knew she worried about his passion for his yacht. Jane, on the other hand, seemed to like him as he was. She did not ask him what he was reading or wonder what his thoughts were on Italian unification. She encouraged him to go sailing. Best of all, she had never met his brilliant father, so she could never compare them and find him wanting.

  Their courtship was rapid, even though Percy was not much of a suitor, largely beca
use the women had already decided the matter. Percy proposed in March and married Jane on June 22, 1848, a wedding that resulted in a long and loving partnership, although they had no children. Jane was happy to let Percy putter around on the river. She oversaw his wardrobe and meals, and spent most of her time with her mother-in-law, reading quietly, chatting, and listening to stories about the past.

  The family’s finances were in far better shape now, thanks to Mary’s management of their affairs, and so the young couple renovated Field Place and moved there with Mary in the fall of 1848. Mary took Shelley’s old bedroom for herself; from there, she could look out over the grounds to a grove of cedar trees and watch the sun set in a splash of lavender and orange. Shelley had told her stories about the “Great Old Snake” who lived in the garden and the “Great Tortoise” who used to trundle across the lawn to visit him. But the snake had been accidentally killed by the gardener and no one but Shelley had ever reported seeing the tortoise.

  The house had once been a simple farm dwelling that Shelley’s grandfather had turned into a stately gentleman’s manor with a Georgian façade and two wings that enclosed a wide green lawn. Shelley had once terrorized his little sisters with stories about an alchemist who lived behind a locked door in one of the garrets under the rafters. There was a huge kitchen with an old stone floor, and an enormous oak staircase. In the long, graceful drawing room where Shelley’s parents had entertained the local gentry, the young Percy had pleased his father by reciting Latin poetry after tea, waving his arms in a theatrical way, which made his little sisters laugh. He also liked to perform his mother’s favorite, Gray’s poem “Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes.” There were stables in the back, an orchard, and, on the other side of the south meadow, a large lake called Warnham Pond where Shelley’s father had kept a rowboat for his son to paddle about and explore the surrounding rivers and creeks. One cannot help but wonder why the Shelleys did not teach young Percy to swim.

  Beautiful though it was, Field Place was low-lying and wet, dangerously placed for the health of both ladies. “The whole place is a swamp—Nothing can be so bad for me,” Mary wrote to Claire, blaming the house for her suffering since the true source of her ailments had still not been diagnosed. Confused and now frightened by periodic bouts of paralysis, Mary found even short walks exhausting. She could hardly ride in a carriage. It was too difficult to write much anymore, even letters. The doctors continued to attribute her complaints to nervousness, prescribing cod liver oil and rest. In February 1849 she updated Claire, “I walk very well—but must not use my head—or strange feelings come on—”

  Jane was a devoted nurse. She fussed over Mary, plumping her pillows, making tea, and reading to her. She also assumed more responsibility for running the estate. Although Percy had nicknamed her Wren, this was a misleading moniker, as Jane was more like a hawk when it came to those she loved. For instance, when Claire came to visit in the spring of 1849, it was Jane who protected Mary and Percy from a terrible outbreak of Claire’s wrath.

  Claire’s niece, Charles’s daughter Clari, had arrived at Field Place a few weeks before her aunt, met John Knox, a friend of Percy’s, and promptly fallen in love. The young couple had become engaged, but unfortunately no one had thought to write Claire and apprise her of this. When she arrived, Claire, caught unaware by her niece’s plans, jumped to the conclusion that Clari’s engagement was the result of a secret plot concocted by her sister. She raged at Mary, at Clari, and at Percy until Jane swept in and took charge. She shooed Mary upstairs to her bedroom, threatened Claire until she left the house swearing never to return, and then sat right down with Clari to plan her wedding. A month later, under Jane’s watchful eye, Clari married John Knox, and the Shelleys held a ball to celebrate the occasion. Claire was not invited and never forgave Jane, or Percy, for that matter. In fact, she issued an ultimatum to her relations: there could be no communication with any of the Shelleys:

  Until they have made reparation for their insolence to us, it stamps with dishonour any member of our family, who holds any intercourse but a hostile one with them, and my resolution is taken and I will part from any of my relations who do.

  For Mary, the whole matter raised her estimation of Jane even higher. If Jane could subdue Claire, she could handle anything, and so it was without any regrets that Mary gave up the reins of the household to her forceful daughter-in-law. To Jane, however, this surrender was yet another symptom of her mother-in-law’s failing health. She and Percy took Mary to the south of France that fall, hoping the mild weather would renew her strength, and, at first, the plan worked. Mary felt well enough to sip wine and tour the coastland on the back of a donkey. When they returned to England the following summer, she felt much improved. She could sit outside in the gardens watching Percy’s dogs run freely about the grounds and listening to the doves cooing in their dovecote. But as the weather worsened that fall, her headaches grew more intense and she felt a constant numbness on her right side. To Jane, it was clear that her mother-in-law needed to be near the best doctors, and so the trio settled in Chester Square, where at last, on December 17, 1850, Dr. Richard Bright (discoverer of Bright’s disease) diagnosed Mary with a brain tumor.

  Percy was not in the room when Mary heard this news, and she and Jane held a whispered conference, deciding to keep the diagnosis secret, as it would only worry him. For the rest of the month the two women kept him in the dark. Mary managed to sit up a little every day, and Percy and Jane took turns by her bedside. But by the beginning of January, there could be no more secrets. Mary’s left leg was entirely paralyzed, and it was almost impossible for her to speak. When they told him about the tumor, Percy grew pale and silent. He had lived with his mother for almost all of his life. They had rarely spent more than a few months apart. He stayed by her bedside, praying for her to recover, but to no avail.

  On January 23, Mary suffered a series of violent convulsions and was never conscious again. She lay in a coma for eight days, dying on the evening of February 1, 1851. She was fifty-three years old. Percy and Jane were with her when “her sweet gentle spirit passed away without even a sigh,” as Jane later recalled. Percy was inconsolable. A world without Mary was unthinkable.

  CHAPTER 40

  MARY AND MARY: HEROIC EXERTIONS

  Mary Shelley died, her reputation underwent a slow and invidious transformation. Her obituaries focused on her roles as a wife and daughter and minimized her work as a writer and editor. “It is not…as the authoress even of Frankenstein…that she derives her most enduring and endearing title to our affection,” read the column in The Literary Gazette, “but as the faithful and devoted wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley.” Even the liberal Leader identified her first as the daughter of Wollstonecraft and Godwin, then as the wife of the “most Christian hearted” Percy, and only as an afterthought as the author of Frankenstein. The one obituary that did focus on her literary achievement ran in the Athenaeum, but though it praised Frankenstein, it dismissed most of her other writing. There was only a brief mention of her biographical essays and travel books, a lukewarm assessment of The Last Man, and no discussion of her other novels. Not one reviewer noted her role in promoting and editing her husband’s work. Mary had almost painted herself out of the picture.

  The view of Mary as a secondary light, the wife of the great poet and not much more, was so durable that it lasted almost a century. Critics ignored or misunderstood Mary’s novels, writing them off as trivial or “romances”; her encyclopedia articles went unread, and her actions to promote the welfare of women remained hidden, buried in archives and unseen letters. It was not until 1951, in Muriel Spark’s groundbreaking biography, that readers were introduced to Mary’s sophistication as a writer and her decidedly non-Victorian ideas. The character known as “Mrs. Shelley” was finally challenged as the fiction it had always been.

  In the 1970s, Mary’s standing, like her mother’s, benefited from the women’s movement, but rebuilding he
r reputation was still a slow process. The scholar Betty T. Bennett noted that when she published the first volume of Mary Shelley’s letters in 1980 one reviewer “suggested that Mary Shelley’s letters were not worth publishing.” Undeterred by such criticisms, over the last thirty years, many distinguished literary scholars have devoted their careers to analyzing Mary Shelley’s work, shedding light on her innovations, brilliance, and stratagems. Combing through archives in America, England, and Italy, biographers have restored the complexity of her relationship with Shelley, refuting the claims of previous writers who, following Trelawny’s lead, had deemed her unworthy of her genius husband. As a result, Mary’s self-discipline as a professional writer, her originality as a novelist, and her seriousness as a political thinker have finally emerged from the fog that threatened to obscure her name forever.

  But until recently most readers did not fully understand the impact of her mother on Mary Shelley. Radicals criticized her for straying from her mother’s ideals. She was accused of being a coward, even though throughout her life she had remained a staunch disciple of her mother. Her body of work is notable for her commitment to the rights of women and her condemnation of unchecked male ambition. She had devoted her life to upholding her mother’s philosophy, and one of her greatest fears was that she would fall short of Wollstonecraft’s brilliance. In 1827, she wrote a friend:

  The memory of my Mother has always been the pride and delight of my life & the admiration of others for her, has been the cause of most of the happiness…I have enjoyed. Her greatness of soul [has] perpetually reminded me that I ought to degenerate as little as I could from those from whom I derived my being.