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

by Charlotte Gordon

  After her father died, when she was struggling to write his biography, she allowed herself to pause and write an extended section praising her mother:

  Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those beings who appear once perhaps in a generation, to gild humanity with a ray which no difference of opinion nor chance of circumstances can cloud. Her genius was undeniable. She had been bred in the hard school of adversity, and having experienced the sorrows entailed on the poor and the oppressed, an earnest desire was kindled within her to diminish these sorrows. Her sound understanding, her intrepidity, her sensibility and eager sympathy, stamped all her writings with force and truth, and endowed them with a tender charm that enchants while it enlightens. She was one whom all loved who had ever seen her. Many years are passed since that beating heart has been laid in the cold still grave, but no one who has ever seen her speaks of her without enthusiastic veneration.

  In 1831, in a preface Mary wrote for a new edition of Godwin’s Caleb Williams, she publicly linked herself to her mother’s radical tradition, expressing unqualified admiration for Wollstonecraft:

  The writings of this celebrated woman are monuments of her moral and intellectual superiority. Her lofty spirit, her eager assertion of the claims of her sex, animate the “Vindication of the Rights of Woman”; while the sweetness and taste displayed in her “Letters from Norway” depict the softer qualities of her admirable character. Even now, those who have survived her so many years, never speak of her without uncontrollable enthusiasm. Her unwearied exertions for the benefit of others, her rectitude, her independence, joined to a warm affectionate heart and the most refined softness of manners, made her the idol of all who knew her.

  The laudatory tone of these passages makes it tempting to wonder what would have happened if Mary Shelley had directed her talents to the rehabilitation of her mother’s reputation, writing an analysis of Wollstonecraft’s ideas and innovations. Perhaps if her own life had not been interrupted by her husband’s death and then by her brain tumor, she might have embarked on this project. At the end of her writing life, after all, she had turned exclusively to the writing of biography and nonfiction.

  However, Mary’s allegiance to her mother has been invisible to some because, unlike Wollstonecraft, Mary did not embrace the political arena, nor did she write political philosophy. She was far more suspicious of the legislative process than her mother, father, or husband, having seen how little was gained by their public stands and how much was lost. But that did not mean that she wanted to distance herself from her mother’s radicalism. For Mary, change could come about only through art, through the actions of individuals and the integrity of one’s relationships. She announced her allegiance to Wollstonecraft in her five novels and two travel books, as well as in her essays on prominent writers for the Cyclopedia and in the more than two dozen stories, essays, translations, reviews, and poems she published in her lifetime. In all of her work, she emphasized the importance of the independence and education of women and critiqued the traditionally male values of conquest and self-promotion.

  Mary Shelley also left behind an enormous cache of papers for historians, so that a biographer who lived in more open-minded times could use them to tell the stories she could not. Painfully aware that a true biography of her husband had not yet been published, she never concealed the history of her relationship with Shelley, and she protested vigorously when one writer attempted to whitewash their liaison, leaving out any mention of Harriet in the story of their courtship. On a more personal level, she risked her reputation for the sake of other women, supporting Aubrey’s sister Gee when she separated from her husband and masterminding Isabel Robinson’s escape with Doddy.

  Indeed, her last public act demonstrates that she remained true to her mother’s principles right to the end. A few months before Mary died, her old friend Isabella Booth wrote to ask if she would petition the Royal Literary Fund for assistance on her behalf. Having nursed her much older husband through a long illness, Isabella was penniless and weary. She and Mary had not seen each other since Mary’s years in Scotland, and yet Mary, near death, hardly able to pen a legible word, wrote the Fund, putting her reputation on the line for the wife of a man who not only was notorious for his irreverent and reformist views but had also refused to let Isabella visit Mary because of her elopement with Shelley. Just as Wollstonecraft would have done, Mary connected Isabella’s plight to the sufferings of all women. “[Her husband’s] malady demanded a care & courage in nursing,” she wrote, “which for a woman to undertake & go through with alone demanded heroic exertion.”

  Mary’s words about Isabella’s “heroic exertion” have a larger resonance, perhaps because they are the last she ever wrote, but also because they could be said of her path through life. Like Isabella’s, her challenges had been daunting. True, there had been moments of joy. In the last year of her life, on Lake Como with Jane and Percy, she had written Isabella, “with the sun shining the blue lake at my feet & the Mountains in all their Majesty & beauty around & my beloved children happy & well, I must mark this as a peaceful & happy hour.” But mostly, Mary had felt alone, forced to support herself and those who depended on her in a world that condemned her for the choices she had made as a sixteen-year-old girl.

  The Fund shared none of Mary’s concern for indigent gentlewomen, rejecting her request. But Mary did not abandon Isabella, asking Percy to send her an allowance of £50 each year for the rest of Isabella’s life. In her novels, essays, and stories, and in her quiet behind-the-scenes actions, Mary Shelley had made the plight of women the driving force of her life, just as her mother had.

  DURING HER FINAL YEARS, Mary had put her literary affairs in careful order. She remembered all too well what it was like to deal with Shelley’s disorganized papers, and those of her father, and so she arranged her diaries and letters and Shelley’s notebooks for the generations to come. She believed that her daughter-in-law, Jane, would guide scholars to the papers she could not publish, the notes she had kept hidden. One of her most important treasures was a lock of her mother’s hair, to which she attached a note, “Jane and Percy to respect.” Many years later Jane would make the thick reddish locks into a necklace that is still held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

  Mary also talked to Jane about final arrangements, asking Jane to bury her in St. Pancras next to her mother and father. Despite her devotion to Shelley, despite the years of mourning and the love they had shared, Mary wanted her final resting place to be with her parents and not her husband. She may have felt unable to assert the views and ideals she shared with her mother in Wollstonecraft-like “vindications,” but she could make it clear that she considered herself, first and foremost, the daughter of the most famous radical female of the previous generation, as well as the daughter of the author of Political Justice.

  Jane was not averse to burying her mother-in-law separately from Shelley, but she was appalled at the thought of burying her in St. Pancras churchyard. “It would have broken my heart to let her loveliness wither in such a dreadful place,” she said. Over the last few decades, the church had become derelict; the new railroad had come to the north of London, splintering Mary’s old neighborhood and destroying the farmland. The graveyard had become a notorious site of “fishing,” or grave robbing, a macabre activity made famous in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities.

  A new location would have to be found, Jane decided, one suitable for her beloved mother-in-law, and it would have to be found soon, as the government had decreed that many of the St. Pancras graves were to be exhumed to make way for the railroad. Oddly enough, the young Thomas Hardy, the future novelist, was to oversee this project. Appointed by the Bishop of London, Hardy had the job of keeping track of which coffins went with which gravestones. When one visits St. Pancras today, the gravestones are stacked neatly around the twisted roots of an ash tree, a reminder of how many graves this churchyard once housed.

  After months of searching, Jane found a secluded churchyard at
St. Peter’s in Bournemouth, where she and Percy had moved for the mild weather and sea air. She was pleased that it was near their new home, Boscombe Manor, as then they could pay tribute to Mary as often as they wished. The only obstacle was that the vicar did not want famous radicals buried in his graveyard. Jane, who was used to getting her own way, ignored his protests, hiring some sturdy men to dig up the coffins of Wollstonecraft and Godwin. Once they were safely loaded in her private carriage, she drove to the gates of the Bournemouth church, where she waited with her skeletal companions until the vicar, reluctant to have a scene, let her in. His last plaintive caveat was that the burial take place late at night.

  Godwin and Wollstonecraft were reunited with their daughter in a large grave on the hill behind the church. For Mary’s epitaph, Jane and Percy memorialized her identity as a daughter, wife, and mother: “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Daughter of William and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Widow of the Late Percy Bysshe Shelley.” They left out any mention of Frankenstein, even though for Wollstonecraft and Godwin’s commemoration they cited Political Justice and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. They also made no mention of Mary-Jane in the plaque they put up to memorialize the family. When Claire heard this, she was furious. Her mother had been buried next to Godwin in St. Pancras churchyard, but Jane had left her behind, the eternal third wheel. She also left behind Wollstonecraft’s original gravestone—the one that Mary Godwin used to trace her letters on when she was a girl—which still stands in St. Pancras today.

  Jane did not care if Claire was offended. Just like Frankenstein, Mary-Jane was not part of the legacy she was trying to create. She wanted her mother-in-law to be seen as a noble, grieving widow and a loving daughter and mother, not as a rebellious stepdaughter or the author of a disgraceful novel. Most of all, she did not want her to be seen as following the promiscuous example of Wollstonecraft. In a red-draped corner of the drawing room at Boscombe Manor, she built a shrine, painting the ceiling blue with little yellow dots for stars. She hung the Rothwell portrait of Mary on the wall behind a row of glass-covered cases swathed in orange satin to keep the sunlight out. Devotees were ushered in to peek at the relics displayed on the shelves: Mary Shelley’s hand mirror and Mary Wollstonecraft’s amethyst ring, hair bracelets, manuscripts, and love letters, and an urn containing the remains of Shelley’s heart, discovered by Percy a year after Mary died. He had been reluctant to unlock his mother’s writing desk, but when at last he did, he found her journal, a copy of Shelley’s Adonais, and, wrapped inside, the dusty remains of his father.

  For Jane, Mary’s journal contained many unwelcome surprises, as did her letters. Shocked by what she found, Jane destroyed anything that might harm the Shelley name. The Naples incident—baby Elena and her questionable history—went up in smoke, as did many of Shelley’s letters to other women. Jane was neither as respectful nor as dedicated to the truth as her mother-in-law; in fact, she was far more conventional than Mary had ever dreamed—so much so that her actions are one of the central reasons that Mary’s political and literary ideals were misrepresented for so many years.

  Perhaps the most striking example of Jane’s revision of history is her version of Mary and Shelley’s courtship in a book she entitled Shelley Memorials. Published in 1859, this antiseptic little volume was designed and edited by Jane in order to clear the family of all scandals. Declaring she had gleaned the story of their love affair straight from Mary’s lips, Jane wrote that Shelley and Mary first confessed their feelings only after Harriet had died, and that Shelley had spouted a selfless anthem of love to reveal the depths of his passion for Mary:

  [Shelley], in burning words, poured forth the tale of his wild past—how he had suffered, how he had been misled, and how, if supported by her love, he hoped in future years to enroll his name with the wise and good who had done battle for their fellow-men, and been true through all adverse storms to the cause of humanity.

  In one sweep, she erased the irrational Shelley, the confused, terrified, and at times selfish young man who made love to one young woman while married to another. Vanished, also, was the rebellious red-haired beauty, the outrageous daughter of Wollstonecraft, the passionate teenager who ran away with a married man. In her place was a selfless wife and daughter, obedient and pliant, the embodiment of nineteenth-century womanhood, a Victorian ideal. Whether she knew it or not, Jane had acted in the spirit of Dr. Frankenstein, stitching together a new creature, one who bore little resemblance to her actual mother-in-law.

  Victorian society read Jane’s words and embraced Mary Shelley as a paragon of virtue—modest and unassuming—prompting those brave souls who still revered Wollstonecraft to dismiss her daughter as a hypocrite. The vindictive Trelawny capitalized on these criticisms in his account of Shelley’s life, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1878), painting Shelley’s marriage to Mary as “the utmost malice of fortune,” and Mary herself as a conventional, small-minded prig.

  Mary Shelley’s jealousy must have sorely vexed Shelley—indeed she was not a suitable companion for the poet—his first wife Harriett [sic] must have been more suitable—Mary was the most conventionable slave I ever met—she even affected the pious dodge, such was her yearning for society—she was devoid of imagination and Poetry.

  Trelawny even twisted the story of Shelley’s heart. In his version, Mary had been repulsed when he handed it to her after the pyre and had quickly given it to Leigh Hunt without a second thought.

  Of course, Claire, the final survivor of the Shelley circle, had also recorded her thoughts on their shared history, but since her bitter words about free love were uncovered only a few years ago, Mary’s hagiography of Shelley remained in place for over a century. The poet as an otherworldly “blithe spirit” dominated the imagination of nineteenth-century readers, as did Jane’s portrait of Mary as his ideal companion. Readers adored Mary’s Shelley—pure, fey, and brilliantly imaginative—and Jane’s Mary—pure, innocent, and eminently respectable. It was partly the times: Keats, too, became a saint. Even Byron went through a Victorian whitewashing, transformed from the leader of the League of Incest to a heroic poet who died for the sake of freedom.

  It is a sobering tale, the rise and fall of both Marys, since it so clearly points to how difficult it is to know the past and how mutable the historical record can be. For almost two hundred years, Wollstonecraft was written off, first as a whore and then as a hysteric, an irrational female hardly worth reading—slander that proved so effective in undercutting the ideals of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that it persists today in the rhetoric of those who oppose feminist principles. Mary Shelley, on the other hand, would be condemned for compromising the revolutionary values of her genius husband and her pioneering mother. Viewed as a woman who cared more about her place in society than about political ideas or artistic integrity, she was discounted as an intellectual lightweight, her only important work done with the help of her husband. They were attacks from opposite grounds, but both were equally and terrifyingly successful.

  At the end of her life, Mary Shelley could never have suspected that she and her mother would be treated so differently by history. She had spent her entire life following her mother’s lead. As a small child, staring at the words on the gravestone, “Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” she had believed that it was here, near her mother, that she could be most herself. And that, after all, was what she wanted most, a desire mother and daughter shared. To be themselves. The hurdles, the critics, the enemies, the insults, the ostracism, the betrayals, the neglect, even the heartbreaks—none of this had stopped them.

  Today, in their portraits, with their long skirts and solemn faces, both mother and daughter seem staid and venerable, as though they had lived their lives at their desks plotting out their essays and novels. The scandals are forgotten. The hubbub has died down. In the anthologies of English literature, their names are listed in the table of contents, before Dickens and after
Milton, their entries as significant and weighty as those for the men of their generation.

  But the paradox of their success is that most modern readers are unaware of the overwhelming obstacles both women had to overcome. Without knowing the history of the era, the difficulties Wollstonecraft and Shelley faced are largely invisible, their bravery incomprehensible. Both women were what Wollstonecraft termed “outlaws.” Not only did they write world-changing books, they broke from the strictures that governed women’s conduct, not once but time and again, profoundly challenging the moral code of the day. Their refusal to bow down, to subside and surrender, to be quiet and subservient, to apologize and hide, makes their lives as memorable as the words they left behind. They asserted their right to determine their own destinies, starting a revolution that has yet to end.

  Mary Wollstonecraft’s tombstone can still be found in the graveyard of old St. Pancras church, though her remains were moved to Bournemouth so they could be with those of her daughter, Mary Shelley. (illustration ill.40)

  To my mother,

  Emily Conover Evarts Gordon

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I would like to thank:

  My incomparable agent, Brettne Bloom, who believed in this book from the very beginning and gave me the courage to tell the story of these remarkable women.

  The team at Random House, especially Barbara Bachman, Jenn Backe, Steve Messina, Emily DeHuff, Chris Jerome, Karen Mugler, Joe Perez, and my editors—the brilliant Susanna Porter, whose vision, expertise, wisdom, and clarity were indispensable during the long years of writing this book and whose delight in the Marys buoyed me during the inevitable difficulties of such an enormous project; and the talented Priyanka Krishnan, whose patience, humor, clearheadedness, and organizational skills helped me shape the first draft into a coherent final version.