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

by Charlotte Gordon

  6 “you set” Godwin to MW, August [date?], 1796, ibid., 349 n733.

  7 “Won’tee, as Fannikin” MW to Godwin, August 11, 1796, ibid., 347.

  8 “Did you” MW to Godwin, August 16, 1796, ibid., 348.

  9 “I have been” Godwin to MW, August 16, 1796, Wardle, Godwin and Mary, 14.

  10 and so felt rebuffed MW to Godwin, August 17, 1796, Letters MW, 348.

  11 “I might be” Godwin to MW, August 17, 1796, Wardle, Godwin and Mary, 16.

  12 “You have the feelings” Ibid., 17.

  13 “chez moi” For a brief explanation of Godwin’s notation system, see Todd, Letters MW, 348 n730. For a more complete description, see “William Godwin’s Diary,” Bodleian Library, http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

  14 “boy pupil” Godwin to Mary, undated, 1796, Wardle, Godwin and Mary, 44.

  15 he added “bonne” “William Godwin’s Diary,” October 9, 1796, http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk.

  16 “It is a sublime” MW to Godwin, October 4, 1796, Letters MW, 371.

  17 “little marks” MW to Godwin, November 18, 1796, ibid., 376.

  18 “You spoil little attentions” Godwin to MW, undated, 1796, Wardle, Godwin and Mary, 49.

  19 “attention” from him MW to Godwin, November 28, 1796, Letters MW, 381.

  20 “Can you solve this problem?” MW to Godwin, October 7, 1796, ibid., 372.

  21 “a radical defect” MW quoted Godwin in her letter, responding to his criticisms, September 4, 1796, ibid., 357–58.

  22 “What is to be done” Ibid.

  23 “Yet now” MW to Godwin, September 15, 1796, ibid., 365.

  24 “with [Fanny]” MW to Godwin, September 17, 1796, ibid., 366.

  25 “Why could” MW to Godwin, September 19, 1796, ibid.

  26 “cheerful, gay” MW to Godwin, November 19, 1796, ibid., 377.

  27 “distinguish always between your jest and earnest” Godwin to MW, undated, Wardle, Godwin and Mary, 50.

  28 “Go this way” MW to Godwin, September 10, 1796, ibid., 359.

  29 “came crowing” MW to Godwin, November 19, 1796, ibid., 377.

  30 “an extreme lowness” MW to Godwin, December 6, 1796, ibid., 382.

  31 “I was a fool not to ask Opie” MW to Godwin, December 7, 1796, ibid.

  32 “There was a tenderness” MW to Godwin, December 23, 1796, ibid., 386.

  33 “painful recollections” MW to Godwin, December 28, 1796, ibid., 387.

  34 “You have no petticoats” MW to Godwin, January 12, 1797, ibid., 391.

  35 “obviate the evil” MW to Godwin, December 31, 1796, ibid., 388.

  36 on February 6 For a comprehensive discussion of the sources that influenced Mary’s depiction of madness in The Wrongs of Woman, see chapter 36, particularly notes 23–28, in Todd, MW:ARL.

  37 The asylum was located For a comprehensive history of Bedlam during this period, see Catherine Arnold, Bedlam (London: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 172–80.

  38 shopped at an “old clothesmen’s” storefront “William Godwin’s Diary,” http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. On February 6, 1797, Godwin wrote, “old Clothes-man and Bedlam with Johnson and Wollstonecraft.” Todd suggests that maybe they saw an “old Clothes-man” in Bedlam. MW:ARL, 492 n23.

  39 “It seems” William Godwin, The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (London: G. G. and J. Robinson, 1797), 86.

  40 Puss went “wild” MW to Godwin, early 1797, ibid., 400.

  41 “most fruitful experiment” Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader (1932; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1960), 148.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: MARY SHELLEY: “LEAGUE OF INCEST” (1821–1822)

  1 “We are entirely” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, November 30, 1821, Letters MWS, 1:209.

  2 Byron was probably Medwin, Life of Shelley, 329.

  3 “the League of Incest” According to Byron, this story had its origins in a rumor spread by the poet Robert Southey. In 1818, Byron wrote his friend John Cam Hobhouse that Southey had said that Byron and Shelley “had formed a League of Incest” while they were in Switzerland. Marchand, ed., Byron’s Letters and Journals, 10.

  4 fat schoolboy There are many different accounts of Byron’s odd eating habits. But Andrew Stott points out that for Byron, his weight was not simply an aesthetic issue. Although he preferred the way he looked when he was slender, he also worried about how vigorous he felt when he was heavier. On the one hand, he enjoyed this vigor, but he also worried that it gave rise to his sexual binges and infamous rages, and so he dedicated himself to “starv[ing] the devil out.” See “The Diets of the Romantic Poets,” Lapham’s Quarterly, http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/the-diets-of-the-romantic-poets.php, accessed 9/23/13.

  5 “liked it the least” Medwin, Life of Shelley, 335.

  6 “[Byron’s] talk was” Ibid., 330–31.

  7 “[Shelley] alone” Edward Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (London: Edward Moxon, 1858), 39.

  8 “Our good cavaliers” MWS to Marianne Hunt, March 5, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:221.

  9 and called himself Ariel Hutchinson, ed., Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 665. Shelley’s Ariel pose originated in a poem he entitled “With a Guitar: To Jane”:

  Ariel to Miranda: Take

  This slave of Music, for the sake

  Of him who is the slave of thee,

  And teach it all the harmony

  In which thou canst, and only thou.

  To John Gisborne, Shelley wrote, “[Jane] has a taste for music, and an elegance of form and motions that compensate in some degree for the lack of literary refinement. You know my gross ideas of music and will forgive me when I say that I listen the whole evening on our terrace to the simple melodies with excessive delight.” June 18, 1822. He told Jane that she was his only “source of…consolation.” July 4, 1822, Letters PBS.

  10 his biographers The earliest skepticism about Trelawny’s life story comes in Edward Garnett’s introduction to Trelawny’s memoir, Adventures of a Younger Son (London: 1890), 8.

  11 “his Moorish face” January 19, 1822, Journals MWS, 391.

  12 “His ‘Tremendous!’ being indeed tremendous” Garnett, introduction to Adventures, 17.

  13 “the everyday sleepiness” January 19, 1822, Journals MWS, 391.

  14 “The Serpent is shut” Hutchinson, ed., Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 637.

  15 “the lines were too dismal” PBS to Edward Williams, January [date?], 1822, Letters PBS, 2:384–86.

  16 “Shelley sent us some beautiful” Jones, ed., Shelley’s Friends, 125.

  17 fully “natural” October 2, 1822, Journals MWS, 429.

  18 “Seek to know” October 2, 1822, ibid., 430.

  19 “Be severe” PBS to MWS, August 8, 1821, Letters from Abroad, 253.

  20 Shelley and Mary wanted £500 PBS to Ollier, September 25, 1821, Letters PBS, 2:353.

  21 “I long” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, February 9, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:218.

  22 Unfortunately, when Valperga For an overview of the novel’s reception, see Stuart Curran, “Valperga,” in Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley,110–11.

  23 On the title page Stuart Curran argues that when Mary declares herself as the author of Frankenstein she is advertising her radical credentials for her audience. He writes, “subscribing herself on the title page as ‘the Author of “Frankenstein” ’ she makes clear that she will do so on her own terms, conspicuously refusing to accept the implicit gender limits that barred women from focusing upon public issues in their writing.” Ibid., 114.

  24 The one critic John Gibson Lockhart reviewed Valperga in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, March 1823, quoted in ibid., 111. See also Michael Rossington, “Introduction” to Valperga (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xii–xix.

  25 “During a long—long evening” February 8, 1822, Journals MWS, 396.

  26 “calm gray eye
s” Trelawny, Recollections, 28–29.

  27 “Hindustani dress” Jones, ed., Shelley’s Friends, 131.

  28 “the prettiest” “Portrait de Mme. Shelley par le Comte de Metaxa,” in Sunstein, MS:R&R, 208.

  29 “for his moral” February 9, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:218.

  30 “You have” Trelawny, Recollections, xv.

  31 “the model of an American” Jones, ed., Shelley’s Friends, 125.

  32 “Trelawny…found” Garnett, introduction to Adventures, 8.

  33 Shelley “did not laugh” Edward Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (London: 1878), xvi.

  34 The Corsair Byron wrote Teresa, “I have met today the personification of my Corsair. He sleeps with the poem under his pillow, and all his past adventures and present manners aim at this personification.” “La Vie de Lord Byron” by Teresa Guiccioli, quoted in Journals MWS, 392 n1.

  35 “weak” and “ignoble” Trelawny, Adventures of a Younger Son, 20.

  36 Mary associated springtime “Spring is our unlucky season,” MWS to CC, March 20, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:226.

  37 the “Spezia plan” This is Holmes’s term. Pursuit, 696.

  38 declared that she would never dream There are different versions of Jane’s attitude toward the sailing plan. In general, most biographers agree that Jane expressed no uneasiness over the plan. But according to one report, “Mary said to Jane, ‘I hate this boat, though I say nothing.’ Said Jane, ‘So do I, but speaking would be useless, and only spoil their pleasure.’ ” Dowden, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2:465.

  39 Claire had written The letters that Claire wrote to PBS are lost, but her anxiety and her dream of kidnapping Allegra were well known to the whole circle. See Journals CC, 279–84.

  40 “insolent,” Byron said Quoted in Clarke, Shelley and Byron: A Tragic Friendship, 163.

  41 What is my Dear Papa doing? Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, Shelfmark: MS. Abinger c 69, fol. 1r. Also available online, “Shelley’s Ghost: Letter from Allegra to her father Lord Byron,” http://shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/letter-from-allegra-to-her-father-lord-byron.

  42 “Bedlam behaviour” Quoted in Clarke, Shelley and Byron: A Tragic Friendship, 163.

  43 “evil news” April 23, 1822, Journals MWS, 408.

  44 The wisest plan MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, June 2, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:236.

  45 “like a torrent” June 2, 1822, ibid.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “I STILL MEAN TO BE INDEPENDENT” (1797)

  1 declared her determination MW to Maria Reveley, Wednesday morning [c. spring/summer 1797], Letters MW, 425.

  2 The Times Quoted in Richard Holmes, Sidetracks: Explorations of a Romantic Biographer (New York: Random House, 2001), 208.

  3 “It is my wish” MW to Amelia Alderson, April 11, 1797, Letters MW, 408–9.

  4 “extraordinary characters” Brightwell, ed., Memorials of Amelia Opie, 63.

  5 “My fair neighbor” Godwin to Mary Hays, April 10, 1797, C. Kegan Paul, “Prefatory Memoir” in Letters to Imlay by Mary Wollstonecraft, lv.

  6 “Your secrecy” Thomas Holcroft to Godwin, April 6, 1797, in Paul, Friends, 1:240.

  7 “Some persons” Godwin to Tom Wedgewood, April 1796, ibid.

  8 “The assertrix” Knowles, Fuseli, 170.

  9 “In order to” Durant, “Supplement,” 313–14.

  10 “I most sincerely” Paul, Friends, 1:240.

  11 “the fervour” Ibid., 1:238.

  12 “The wound” MW to Amelia Alderson, April 11, 1797, ibid., 409.

  13 “Those who are bold” MW to Mary Hays, April [date?], 1797, Letters MW, 410.

  14 “Your broken resolution” Paul, Friends, 1:238.

  15 “all Mr Godwin’s” Ibid.

  16 “I wish you” MW to Godwin, June 6, 1797, Letters MW, 418.

  17 “I have ordered” MW to Godwin, July 3, 1797, ibid., 427.

  18 “Fanny is delighted” MW to Godwin, April 20, 1797, ibid., 410.

  19 “I am sorry” MW to Godwin, May 21, 1797, ibid., 414.

  20 “To be frank” MW to Godwin, July 4, 1797, ibid., 428.

  21 “I have a design” MW to Godwin, July 3, 1797, ibid., 426.

  22 “were in no danger” Godwin, Memoirs, 174.

  23 “the disagreeable business” MW to Godwin, April 11, 1797, Letters MW, 407.

  24 “my time, appears to me” Ibid.

  25 Mary claimed that Godwin’s insistence Todd writes, “In reiterating her belief in truth from observation and the necessity of independent thinking and self-expression, [Wollstonecraft’s] essay, ostensibly a meditation on art, nature and the artist, formed another answer to Godwin and his incomprehension of her personal method of writing.” MW:ARL, 425.

  26 All that was necessary Harriet Jump Devine argues that “On Poetry” is Wollstonecraft’s definitive defense of the imagination as a central tenet of Romantic aesthetics. See “ ‘A Kind of Witchcraft’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Poetic Imagination,” Women’s Writing 4, no. 2 (1997): 235–45.

  27 “Boys who have received a classical education” Mary Wollstonecraft, “On Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature,” in Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols., ed. William Godwin (1798), 3:169–70.

  28 “warmth of their feelings” Ibid.

  29 “the misery and oppression” Wollstonecraft, Maria, 59.

  30 “to chastise and confine” Wendy Moore, Wedlock: The True Story of the Disastrous Marriage and Remarkable Divorce of Mary Eleanor Bowes, Countess of Strathmore (New York: Crown, 2009), 288.

  31 “enem[y] of petticoat government” Ibid., 287.

  32 “Considering the care” MW to Imlay, January 1, 1794, Letters MW, 238.

  33 “I exclaim” Wollstonecraft, Maria, 142–43.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: MARY SHELLEY: “IT’S ALL OVER” (1822)

  1 “Had we been wrecked” MWS, “Notes on Poems of 1822,” in Hutchinson, ed., Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 670.

  2 “A sense of misfortune” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, August 15, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:244.

  3 “pale faced tragic villa” “Italy Revisited,” in Henry James, Collected Travel Writings (Library of America, 1877; reprint, 1993), 399.

  4 “wild & hateful” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, August 15, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:244.

  5 “The beauty yet strangeness” Ibid.

  6 on May 2 Dowden, Life of Shelley, 547. Mary Shelley gives a slightly different account in a letter to Maria Gisborne, writing that Claire had decided to return to Florence a few days after they arrived at the Casa Magni and so Shelley was forced to tell her. June 2, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:238.

  7 “She now seems” PBS to Byron, May 8, 1822, Letters PBS, 2:416.

  8 Byron’s banker Clarke, Shelley and Byron: A Tragic Friendship, 163.

  9 “She is grown tall and slight” PBS to MWS, August 15, 1821, in Dowden, Life of Shelley, 435.

  10 “Under the influence of the doctrine” Pforzheimer Collection, uncataloged manuscript, filed in Claire Clairmont to Lady Mountcashell, September 24, 1822. Published for the first time in Hay, Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation, 307–9.

  11 “cold neglect” “The Choice,” in Journals MWS, 491.

  12 “My heart was all thine own” Ibid.

  13 “I am proud” Jones, ed., Shelley’s Friends, 162.

  14 “While walking” Ibid., 147.

  15 “a golden key” PBS to Trelawny, June 18, 1822, Letters PBS, 2:433.

  16 “Then, what is life?” Holmes, The Pursuit, 724. See also Donald H. Reiman, Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life”: A Critical Study (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1965).

  17 “like cats” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, June 2, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:236.

  18 “You may imagine” Ibid.

  19 “She is a most beautiful boat” PBS to Captain Roberts, May 12, 1822, Letters PBS, 2:419.

  20 “took fire�
� MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, August 15, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:236. As a result, many biographers still refer to Shelley’s boat as the Don Juan.

  21 “My nerves” August 15, 1822, MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, Letters MWS, 1:236.

  22 “trembled exceedingly” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, August 15, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:245.

  23 “sail like a witch” May 15, 1822, Jones, ed., Shelley’s Friends, 149.

  24 “brandy, vinegar” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, August 15, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:244.

  25 “Shelley overruled them” Ibid.

  26 Mary heard Ibid.

  27 “in the most horrible” Ibid.

  28 “I wish I cd write more” MWS to Leigh Hunt, June 30, 1822, ibid., 1:238.

  29 “the paper fell from me” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, August 15, 1822, ibid., 1:247.

  30 “A desperate sort of courage” Ernest J. Lovell, ed., Lady Blessington’s Conversations with Lord Byron (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 53.

  31 “[She] looked” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, August 15, 1822, Letters MWS, 3:247.

  32 “our calamity” Ibid.

  33 “I felt the water” Ibid.

  34 “Thrown about” Ibid.

  35 Caterina, the maid Trelawny, Recollections, 126.

  36 “how inexpressibly happy” Thornton Hunt, quoted in Dowden, Life of Shelley, 564.

  37 They traveled to Pisa Ibid., 566.

  38 “He was looking better” Leigh Hunt, quoted in ibid.

  39 laughing so exuberantly Holmes, Pursuit, 728.

  40 Trelawny said he thought Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, 196.

  41 “a shrill voice” The Journal of Clarissa Trant (London, 1826; reprint, 1925), 198–99. For an overview of the different accounts of the accident, see Dowden, Life of Shelley, 2:534–36, and Holmes, Pursuit, 729 n56.

  42 “How are you my best Mary?” PBS to MWS, July 4, 1822, Letters PBS, 2:720.

  43 “three tons and a half” Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, 200.

  44 “partly drawn over the head” Trelawny, Recollections, 123.

  45 “I almost” MWS to Godwin, July 19, 1822. St. Clair, Godwins and the Shelleys, 555.

  46 to Trelawny her surrender was evidence Trelawny recorded his efforts in both of his memoirs, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author and Recollections of the Last Days of Byron and Shelley, the latter of which is an embellished version of his first account of the death of the poets. In both memoirs, Trelawny stresses his own importance in the poets’ lives, stretching the facts and fabricating stories to serve his purpose. However, some sections of his memoirs appear to be reliable, particularly details which are not self-serving, such as his description of the Ariel’s unseaworthiness. When he took over the funeral arrangements, however, he began a process of reinvention that would be harmful to Mary. As Seymour writes, “This was the moment at which Trelawny converted himself into a keeper of the shrine, an earnest defender of the man he had known for less than six months but towards whom he now felt a veneration which would in time rival and threaten Mary’s own dedicated love.” MS, 304–5. For more on the legacy of Shelley’s death, the myths that arose, and the contest among varying accounts, see Richard Holmes, “Death and Destiny,” Guardian, January 24, 2004, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jan/24/featuresreviews.guardianreview1.