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

by Charlotte Gordon

  13 “You will I dare say” CC to Byron, May 6, 1816, TCC, 43.

  14 “the year without a summer” For an overview of the worldwide effects of the eruption, see Henry Stommel and Elizabeth Stommel, Volcano Weather: The Story of the Year Without a Summer (Los Angeles: Seven Seas Press, 1983).

  15 “Never was a scene” MWS to Fanny, May 17, 1816, Letters MWS, 1:13.

  16 “blue as the heavens” Ibid.

  17 Elise Duvillard For a more complete portrait of Elise, see Seymour, MS, 152.

  18 “We do not enter” MWS to Fanny, May 17, 1816, Letters MWS, 1:13.

  19 “the delightful scent” Ibid.

  20 “Look…at the innumerable fish” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 164.

  21 He and the emperor had “soar[ed]” “Ode to Napoleon,” in Byron, The Works of Lord Byron (1828), 513. For more on Byron’s adulation of Napoleon, see John Clubbe, “Between Emperor and Exile: Byron and Napoleon 1814–1816,” Napoleonic Scholarship: The Journal of the International Napoleonic Society 1 (April 1997), http://www.napoleonicsociety.com/english/scholarship97/c_byron.html.

  22 “Childe Harolded” J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott, vol. 5 (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1882), 140.

  23 “Farewell to the Land” George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Works of Lord Byron (London: 1828), 537.

  24 “eight enormous dogs” PBS to Peacock, August [10], 1821, Ingpen, ed., The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2 vols. (London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1912), 2:897. This letter was written six years after the Geneva summer, but according to contemporaries, Byron’s collection of animals never underwent any significant change.

  25 “I have been in this weary hotel” Grylls, Claire Clairmont: Mother of Byron’s Allegra, 65; CC to Byron, May 27, 1816, TCC, 47.

  26 “bashful, shy, consumptive” May 27, 1815. William Rossetti, ed., The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori (London: Elkin Mathews, 1911).

  27 to recite Coleridge’s A War Eclogue, June 1–5, 1816, ibid., 113.

  28 “Read Italian” May 31, 1816, ibid.

  29 “Our late great Arrival” “J.S.” to “Stuart,” June 6, 1816. Quoted in Seymour, MS, 153.

  30 “league of incest” Byron to John Cam Hobhouse, November 11, 1818, John Murray, ed. Lord Byron’s Correspondence, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 2:89.

  31 “There was no story” Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron: Noted During a Residence with His Lordship (London: Henry Colburn, 1824), 14.

  32 the white drapes Byron recalled, “I was watched by glasses on the opposite side of the lake, and by glasses, too, that must have had very distorted optics.” Ibid. Seymour writes, “Monsieur Dejean promptly installed a telescope for the use of visitors to his hotel. Spying across the lake, the hotel guests argued about whether it was Mrs. Shelley’s or her sister’s nightdress they could see.…” MS, 153.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A REVOLUTION IN FEMALE MANNERS” (1791–1792)

  1 “I myself” MW to William Roscoe, October 6, 1791. Letters MW.

  2 “the glowing colours” Ibid.

  3 “as a philosopher” Wollstonecraft, Vindication of Woman, 53.

  4 the present state Ibid., 28.

  5 “strength of mind” Ibid.

  6 “What nonsense” Ibid., 45.

  7 “The education” Ibid., 105–6.

  8 “to be the toy” Ibid., 52.

  9 “Love, in [women’s] bosoms” Ibid., 56.

  10 “A revolution in female manners” Ibid., 65.

  11 “I here throw down my gauntlet” Ibid., 71.

  12 Some write Mary wrote, “Rousseau exerts himself to prove that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right: and I, that all will be right.” Ibid., 31.

  13 Rights of Brutes This work appeared anonymously, but the copy in the British Museum asserts that Taylor was indeed the author. Thomas Taylor, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (London: 1792).

  14 decency and propriety Review of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in Critical Review, second series, vol. 5 (1792), 141.

  15 “the absurdity” Review of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in Critical Review, second series, vol. 4 (1792), 389–90.

  16 “We shall leave” Critical Review, second series, vol. 5 (1792), 141.

  17 “mist of words” Wollstonecraft, Vindication of Woman, 29.

  18 “the most melancholy” Ibid., 23.

  19 “Another argument” Godwin, Political Justice, vi.

  20 “These are the times” Thomas Paine, The American Crisis (Rockville, MD: Wildside Press, 2010, 1776), 7.

  21 “I can scarcely begin” Paul, Friends, 1:360.

  22 “I have a singular” Ibid.

  23 “could do no credit” Godwin, Memoirs, 57.

  24 “It is wandering” Wollstonecraft, Vindication of Woman, 41.

  25 the “gloomy side” Godwin, Memoirs, 57.

  26 “the delicate frame” William Godwin, Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794; London: Penguin, 1988), 50.

  27 “Had I allowed” MW to William Roscoe, January 3, 1792, Letters MW, 194.

  28 In May, after Paine From the safety of Paris, Paine lashed back at King George, “If, to expose the fraud and imposition of monarchy…to promote universal peace, civilization, and commerce, and to break the chains of political superstition, and raise degraded man to his proper rank; if these things be libellous…let the name of libeller be engraved on my tomb.” “Letter Addressed to the Addressers on the Late Proclamation,” in The Thomas Paine Reader, ed. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin Classics, 1987), 374.

  29 “If I thought” MW to Henry Fuseli, ?late 1792, Letters MW, 204–5. This letter is actually a reconstruction of the different fragments recorded by Fuseli’s biographer, John Knowles, 204 n471.

  30 “was in an agony” MW to Joseph Johnson, ?October, 1792, Letters MW, 205.

  31 “I find that I cannot live” John Knowles, The Life and Writings of Henry Fuseli (London, 1831), 167. This is Fuseli’s version of events, recorded by his devoted amanuensis, Knowles. Mary did not leave behind her version of the story. Thus, despite the frequency with which the details of this scene are cited by Wollstonecraft’s biographers, in reality it is difficult to ascertain the exact details of her relationship with Fuseli. In later years, Fuseli enjoyed bragging about his conquest of the author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. His biographer, Knowles, does not question Fuseli’s assertions about his relationship with Mary, and Mary herself did not leave behind much evidence about her feelings, except for a few allusions in her letters.

  32 But in 1883, Godwin’s biographer Paul wrote, “I utterly disbelieve that there was anything whatever in the relations of Mary and Fuseli, than those of a young woman to an elderly fatherly married friend, with whose wife she was on most affectionate terms. Godwin in part adopted [this story], but he really had known next to nothing of his wife’s early life. He is even demonstrably wrong in much that he says which he might have known.…The letters [between Fuseli and Mary] which exist are of the most common place character, and I have read them all.…” Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, quoted in Gordon, VAL, 387–88. Gordon further complicates matters by suggesting that Mary did have romantic feelings for Fuseli but discovered that Fuseli and Johnson were having a secret affair and that that is why she felt rejected. VAL, 386–87. This is a compelling argument, but it must remain speculative, as there is no scholarly consensus about the exact nature of the Fuseli/Wollstonecraft relationship. It does seem clear that Mary had deep feelings for Fuseli. Also, it seems true that she felt rejected by him. But the details of this rejection, as well as the true nature of her desire, have never been confirmed by her papers.

  33 “I intend no longer” MW to William Roscoe, November 12, 1792, Letters MW, 206.

  34 “her breasts” Todd, MW:ARL, 199.

  35 “I
shall not now” MW to William Roscoe, November 12, 1792, Letters MW, 208.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: MARY GODWIN: FITS OF FANTASY (1816)

  1 Byron amused himself Thomas Moore, The Life of Lord Byron: With His Letters and Journals (London: John Murray, 1851), 319. Mary Shelley was Moore’s source for the account of the Geneva summer with the Shelleys.

  2 a little brother June 18, 1816. Rossetti, ed., Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 127.

  3 “worth nothing” June 15, 1816, ibid., 123.

  4 “super-added” quoted in Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder (New York: Vintage, 2010), 317.

  5 “[W]hat is it” Quarterly Review, 1819, quoted in ibid., 318.

  6 He did not go as far Moore’s comparison of Byron and Shelley is useful here. He writes that Byron was more of a pragmatist than Shelley: Byron was “a believer in the existence of Matter and Evil, while Shelley so far refined upon the theory of Berkeley…to add…Love and Beauty.” Life of Lord Byron, 317.

  7 “the experiments” Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein, 10.

  8 “a piece of vermicelli” Ibid.

  9 everyone should write a ghost story Moore, Life of Lord Byron, 394.

  10 “I saw—with shut eyes” Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein, 10.

  11 “agreed to write each a story” Percy Shelley, “Preface to the 1818 Edition,” in The Original Frankenstein, ed. Charles E. Robinson (New York: Vintage, 2009), 432.

  12 Polidori’s diary I am indebted to Miranda Seymour for this insight. She writes, “[Mary’s] assertion is undone by Polidori’s diary in which, writing at the time as Mary was not, he stated that they all, with the exception of himself, began writing at once. It is unlikely that he would have neglected to mention the consoling fact, had it been a fact, that his admired Mary was also short of an idea.” MS, 157.

  13 “When I placed my head” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 10.

  14 Kubla Khan Coleridge described the experience of composing this poem as a waking dream, referring to himself in the third person. It was as if “all the images rose up before him as things…without any sensation or consciousness of effort. On awaking, he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved.” M. H. Abrams, ed., The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 4th ed., 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 2:353.

  15 Dreams were unbidden Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein, “My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me,” 10.

  16 Edgar Allan Poe Poe’s description of how he composed The Raven, treating the act of composition as a logical puzzle to be solved, and, interestingly, stating his debt to William Godwin, can be found in “The Philosophy of Composition.” Nina Baym, ed., The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5th ed., 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 1:1573–80.

  17 more drawn to Shelley Fiona MacCarthy writes, “Meeting Shelley at this juncture was more important to Byron than he ever admitted.…The younger man’s purity of attitude, his radical idealism, sustained a solemn belief in the intrinsic value of poetry and in Byron’s responsibility to himself and to others as one of poetry’s supreme practitioners.” Byron: Life and Legend (London: John Murray, 2002), 291.

  18 His earliest love affairs “Thyrza” was actually John Edleston, a Trinity College chorister. Byron met and fell in love with Edleston in 1805. Definitive evidence of this attachment emerged in 1974, when a new “Thyrza” poem was discovered in the archives of John Murray, Byron’s publisher, with the words “Edleston, Edleston, Edleston” inscribed on top. MacCarthy, Byron: Life and Legend, 145–46.

  19 For Shelley, the relationship was more Holmes writes, “Shelley was unusually subdued in the elder poet’s presence.” He also suggests that Byron “inhibit[ed]” Shelley. Pursuit, 334–36.

  20 “really began” June 18, 1816. Rossetti, ed., Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 128.

  21 “Beneath the lamp” ll. 245–54, Abrams, ed., Norton Anthology of English Literature, 362.

  22 “shrieking and putting” June 18, 1816. Rossetti, ed., Diary of Dr. John William Polidori, 128.

  23 This strange image For further explanation of the origins of Shelley’s vision, see Sunstein’s account, MS:R&R, 112. See also Holmes, Pursuit, 328–29.

  24 “fit of fantasy” Moore, Life of Byron, 394.

  25 No one thought Richard Holmes writes that imaginative endeavors and scientific experiments were not seen as opposite activities during this era, but were directly related; Romantic science and Romantic poetry were linked by “the notion of wonder.” Age of Wonder, xv–xxi.

  26 “so possessed” Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein, 11.

  27 “It was on a dreary night” Mary Shelley, Original Frankenstein, ed. Robinson, 80.

  28 she could hear In her introduction to the revised Frankenstein (1831), Mary Shelley re-creates the setting for her dream: “I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond.” Frankenstein, 11.

  29 he and Byron had barely survived PBS to Thomas Love Peacock, July 12, 1816, Letters PBS, 483.

  30 “pretty babe” July 26, 1816, Journals MWS, 121.

  31 “fervid with ghostly” Quoted in Holmes, Pursuit, 343.

  32 “Democrat, Philanthropist, Atheist” Holmes, Pursuit, 342. See Gavin de Beer, “The Atheist: An Incident at Chamonix,” in Edmund Blunden, Gavin de Beer, and Sylva Norman, On Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 43–54.

  33 “[The view]” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 82.

  34 his sentence sounding The comparison has been drawn by many scholars. My attention was drawn to it by Seymour, MS, 159.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: PARIS (1792–1793)

  1 Both of Mary’s sisters For an analysis of the situations of both sisters, see Todd, MW:ARL, 174.

  2 “You will easily” MW to Everina, December 24, 1792, Letters MW, 214.

  3 “Not the distant” MW to Johnson, December 26, 1792, ibid., 217.

  4 “I apply” MW to Everina, December 24, 1792, ibid., 214.

  5 “an old pair” Richard Twiss, A Trip to Paris in July and August, 1792 (London: 1792), 105.

  6 “very difficult” Ibid., 89.

  7 Walking was unpleasant For a detailed description of the streets of eighteenth-century Paris, see Jacobs, HOW, 118.

  8 She hated the dirty MW to Everina, December 24, 1792, Letters MW, 215.

  9 “the striking contrast” Mary Wollstonecraft, Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, edited by William Godwin, 4 vols. (1798), 3:39–42.

  10 “a few strokes” MW to Johnson, December 26, 1792, Letters MW, 216.

  11 “The inhabitants flocked” Ibid.

  12 “Europe observes” Joseph Trapp, ed., Proceedings of the French National Convention on the Trial of Louis XVI, Late King of France and Navarre, from the Paper of the World (London: 1793), 53–58.

  13 “I am grieved” Wollstonecraft, Posthumous Works, 44.

  14 For Camus For a study of the legacy of the regicide, see Susan Dunn, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).

  15 one gentleman MW to Ruth Barlow, February 1–14, 1793, Letters MW, 220.

  16 “Women should have” Charles Seymour and Donald Paige Frary, How the World Votes: The Story of Democratic Development in Elections (New York: C. A. Nichols, 1918), 12.

  17 “Bliss was it” William Wordsworth, The Prelude, in The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth (London: Wordsworth Editions, 1994), 245.

  18 “She wept” Ibid., 735.

  19 “the simple goodness” MW to Everina, December 24, 1792, Letters MW, 215.

  20 Mary’s embrace Not all biographers agree with this depiction of Mary’s initial attitude toward sexuality. For example, Janet Todd a
rgues, “the Rights of Woman had revealed a puritanical attitude toward pleasure, consonant with [Wollstonecraft’s] experience and upbringing. Although procreative sex was proper, recreative sex was in the main distasteful and unwise.” MW:ARL, 235. In 1986, Cora Kaplan famously argued that Wollstonecraft failed to embrace female sexuality because she remained in thrall to Rousseau’s depiction of female sexuality as uncontrollable and dangerous. Kaplan writes, “She accepts Rousseau’s ascription of female inferiority and locates it even more firmly than he does in an excess of sensibility.” See “Wild Nights: Pleasure/Sexuality/Feminism” in Sea Changes: Essays in Culture and Feminism (London: Verso, 1986), 38–39, 45–46. However, Rights of Woman is meant to be a critique of the power imbalance between men and women, and the inherent dangers for women of living inside such a system. It was not written as a critique of female sexuality, but as a critique of the system that allowed and, indeed, encouraged the abuse and rape of women.

  21 “charming grace” Emma Rauschenbusch-Clough, A Study of Mary Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1898), 201–2.

  22 “Woman is born free” Olympe de Gouges, The Rights of Woman, trans. Nupur Chaudhuri, in Women, the Family and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750–1880, ed. Susan Groag Bell and Karen Offen (1791; Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1983), 104.

  23 “mothers, daughters” Olympe de Gouges, Oeuvres, ed. Benoîte Groult (Paris: Mercure de France, 1986), 105.

  24 “legal sexual equality” Megan Conway, “Olympe de Gouges: Revolutionary in Search of an Audience,” in Orthodoxy and Heresy in Eighteenth-Century Society: Essays from the Debartolo Conference, ed. Regina Hewitt and Pat Rogers (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002), 253.

  25 “a woman has the right to mount the scaffold” de Gouges, The Rights of Woman, 104–9.

  26 The marquis de Condorcet Todd, MW:ARL, 211. Todd argues that Wollstonecraft found de Gouges’s ideas too extreme, but although Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman never goes as far as de Gouges’s call to arms, this is due in large part to context. Paris in the 1790s was far more radical than London in the 1780s, allowing de Gouges to take positions that were more revolutionary than Wollstonecraft could have dared to articulate in conservative England.