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

by Charlotte Gordon

  47 “swept into the seas” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 190.

  48 “a dark and ghastly indigo color” Trelawny, Recollections, 133.

  49 “used [a skull] as a drinking cup” Ibid.

  50 He watched the air shiver Ibid., 134.

  51 “waves which had overpowered” Journals MWS, 423.

  52 “The scene of my existence” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, August 15, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:244–52.

  53 As an afterthought, he wrote to Mary Trelawny to MWS, April [date?], 1823: “I…removed his ashes to [the tomb], placed a stone over it, am now planting it, and have ordered a granite to be prepared for myself, which I shall place in this beautiful recess…for when I am dead.” Henry Buxton Forman, ed., Letters of Edward John Trelawny (London: Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press, 1910).

  54 Mary appeared unmoved Journals MWS, 440.

  55 When Mary asked The story of Shelley’s heart is famous. For an early summary of the story, see Dowden, Life of Shelley, 2:534.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A LITTLE PATIENCE” (1797)

  1 “Master William” MW to Godwin, June 6, 1797, Letters MW, 416–17.

  2 “You cannot imagine” Godwin to MW, June [date?], 1797, Wardle, Godwin and Mary, 89.

  3 “gone into the country” MW to Godwin, June 10, 1797, Letters MW, 420.

  4 “icy Philosophy” MW to Godwin, June 19, 1797, ibid., 421.

  5 “I am absurd” MW to Godwin, July 4, 1797, ibid., 428.

  6 “I would on no account” Godwin to MW, July 4, 1797, 115.

  7 “Miss Pinkerton” MW to Miss Pinkerton, August 9, 1797, Letters MW, 434.

  8 “incomprehensible conduct” Ibid., 434 n951.

  9 “I am sensible” Miss Pinkerton to MW, [date?], 1797, ibid., 434 n952.

  10 “I think you” Thomas Holcroft to Godwin and MW, April 6, 1797, Paul, Friends, 1:334.

  11 “playful, easy air” William Hazlitt, “My First Acquaintance with Poets,” Selected Essays, ed. George Sampson (1823; reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 7.

  12 “people of the imagination” Coleridge, quoted in ibid.

  13 “Little Fanny” MW to Maria Reveley, spring/summer, 1797, Letters MW, 425.

  14 “See how” Jebb, Mary Wollstonecraft, 291.

  15 “strange Star” “The Choice,” in Journals MWS, 491.

  16 “to regain” MW to James Marshall, August 21, 1797, Letters MW, 435.

  17 “true happiness” Godwin based his depiction of a widower’s grief on his own experience of losing Mary Wollstonecraft in the novel St. Leon: A Tale of the Sixteenth Century, ed. William Dean Brewer (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2006), 87.

  18 “I have” MW to Godwin, August 30, 1797, Letters MW, 436.

  19 “Never shall I” Godwin, St. Leon, 89.

  20 “despair…in” Godwin, Memoirs, 187.

  21 “was determined” Ibid., 182.

  22 “intreated her” Ibid., 189.

  23 “The attachment” Paul, Friends, 1:282.

  24 “to play with” Godwin, Memoirs, 189–90.

  25 “I know” Paul, Friends, 1:197.

  26 “the kindest” Ibid., 1:283.

  27 “it was highly improper” Godwin, Memoirs, 199.

  28 “What is man” Godwin, St. Leon, 297.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: MARY SHELLEY: “THE DEEPEST SOLITUDE” (1823–1828)

  1 “It is not true” October 2, 1822, Journals MWS, 429–30.

  2 “No one seems” October 21, 1822, ibid., 440–41.

  3 “It is only” MWS to Jane Williams, December 5, 1822, Letters MWS, 265.

  4 “The number” Marianne Hunt, October 7, 1822, “Unpublished Diary of Mrs. Leigh Hunt,” Bulletin and Review of the Keats-Shelley Memorial, Issues 1–2 (New York: Macmillan, 1910), 68.

  5 “Can anything be more absurd” Marianne Hunt, September 23, 1822, “Unpublished Diary,” 73.

  6 “Those about me have no idea” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, September 17, 1822, Letters MWS, 1:261.

  7 Mary thought that this was hypocritical behavior She wrote Jane, “I hate & despise the intrigues of married women, nor in my opinion can the chains which custom throws upon them justify…deceit.” December 5, 1822, ibid., 1:264.

  8 “estranged my son’s mind” Sir Timothy Shelley to Byron, February 6, 1823, in Doris Langley Moore, Accounts Rendered (London: John Murray, 1974), 404–5.

  9 “I should not live” MWS to Byron, February 25, 1823, Letters MWS, 1:315.

  10 “I think I could find my way better” MWS to Louisa Holcroft, October 2, 1823, ibid., 3:388.

  11 significant changes For a more comprehensive overview of the “new” London, see Porter, London, 200.

  12 “the monstrous Drama” Theatrical Observer, August 9, 1823. Miranda Seymour suggests that these “protesters” were hired by the theater to promote the play. MS, 334.

  13 “breathless eagerness” MWS to Leigh Hunt, September 9–11, 1823, Letters MWS, 1:378.

  14 Unfortunately, Mary earned no money Seymour writes, “playwrights were under no obligation to hand over money for their use of a book.” MS, 335.

  15 a Punch cartoonist November 4, 1843, Mr. Punch’s Victorian Era: An Illustrated Chronicle of the Reign of Her Majesty the Queen, vol. 1 (London: Bradbury, Agnew & Co., 1887), 23.

  16 “the old gentleman” For more on William Godwin, see Seymour, MS, 333.

  17 John Chalk Claris The Literary Gazette declared: “This wretched composition on the lamentable and appalling death of Shelley…is corrupt; its sentiments vapid, unintelligible or wicked; and its poetical demerits of the most obnoxious character.” September 21, 1822, no. 296, 591. For a complete listing of references to Shelley in the 1820s, see Karsten Klejs Engelberg, The Making of the Shelley Myth: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1822–60 (London: Mansell, 1988).

  18 Bess Kent Monthly Magazine, August 1, 1823, vol. 56, no. 385.

  19 However, this project was bigger For a comprehensive exegesis of Mary as editor, see Susan Wolfson, “Mary Shelley, Editor,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 193–210.

  20 She made the additions For a perceptive and careful analysis of Mary’s contributions to shaping Shelley’s work and literary legacy, see ibid., 191–210.

  21 Mary covered her tracks Wolfson points out that Mary inserted her authorial presence through her notes and her biographical additions, but to her contemporary audience, she posed as a humble wife, a helpful disciple. See ibid., 191–210. Wolfson writes, “By fragments and wholes, Mary Shelley produced ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley.’ ” Ibid., 197.

  22 “I am a tree” Mary Shelley, Last Man, 391.

  23 “law of nature” MWS to Teresa Guiccioli, May 16, 1824, Letters MWS, 1:422.

  24 “The Last Man!” May 14, 1824, Journals MWS, 476.

  25 “if you knew” MWS to Teresa Guiccioli, December 30, 1824, Letters MWS, 1:460.

  26 “I know now” January 30, 1825, Journals MWS, 489.

  27 “charm and fascination” Eliza Rennie, Traits of Character; Being Twenty-Five Years of Literary and Personal Recollections, 2 vols. (London: 1860), 2:207–8.

  28 deluging her with letters Doddy addresses Mary as “my Pretty” and “Meine Liebling.” She adds that five days apart cause her anguish. “Counting on my fingers last night in thy company like a child looking forward to its promised holiday, I felt something approaching to pain.…” Maria Diana Dods to MWS, n.d. (Oxford, Bodleian Library, Abinger Dep. c. 516/11).

  29 “I am not sure that male eyes” MWS to Jane Williams, July 28, 1826, Letters MWS, 1:556.

  30 “our pretty N——” MWS to Jane Williams, summer, 1826, ibid., 1:573. Later in life, Mary would reflect on this relationship to Trelawny, using a curious term, “tousy-mousy,” that does seem to suggest a sexual relationship: “Ten years ago I was so ready to give myself away—& being afraid of men, I was apt to get tousy-mousy for women
” (October 12, 1835, Letters MWS, 2:256). Betty Bennett, the editor of Mary Shelley’s letters and the scholar who discovered Doddy’s transvestite identity, writes a thorough explanation of the term “tousy-mousy” in the nineteenth century: “According to contemporary polite usage, ‘to touse and mouse’ meant ‘to pull around roughly.’ See Dictionary of Obsolete and Provincial English, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1851). A variant, ‘towsy-mousy,’ was also slang for the female pudendum. See Slang and Its Analogues, eds. J. S. Farmer and W. E. Henley (1st ed., 1890–1904; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1970),” in Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1994), 286 n18. The OED defines “tousy” or “towsy” as “disheveled, unkempt, tousled; shaggy, rough” and notes that it also occurs in combinations. However, despite these contemporary understandings of the term, Bennett rejects the idea that Mary Shelley was ever sexually attracted to women. I disagree. My interpretation of these letters is that Mary and Jane shared an important and close relationship that was at times sexual in nature.

  31 “the hope & consolation of my life” MWS to Leigh Hunt, June 27, 1825, Letters MWS, 1:491.

  32 “sickening repetition of horrors” Review of The Last Man, Literary Gazette, vol. 10 (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), 103; Google Books. For a comprehensive account of the reception and publication history of The Last Man, see Morton D. Paley, “The Last Man: Apocalypse Without Millennium,” in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 107–22.

  33 imagination was “diseased” This unsigned review in The Monthly Review linked Mary to Shelley, Godwin, and Wollstonecraft: “Mrs Shelley, true to the genius of her family, has found this breathing world and the operations and scenes which enliven it, so little worthy of her soaring fancy, that she once more ventures to create a world of her own, to people it with beings modelled by her own hand, and to govern it by laws drawn from the visionary theories which she has been so long taught to admire as the perfection of wisdom.…Her imagination appears to delight in inventions which have no foundation in ordinary occurrences, and no charm for the common sympathies of mankind.…The whole course of her ambiton has been to pourtray [sic] monsters which could have existed only in her own conceptions, and to involve them in scenes and events which are wholly unparalleled by any thing that the world has yet witnessed.…The whole appears to us to be the offspring of a diseased imagination, and of a most polluted taste.” Monthly Review, from January to April Inclusive, vol. 1, 1826 (London: R Griffiths, 1826), Google Books, 335.

  34 James Fenimore Cooper’s Morton Paley addresses the contrast between Mary’s work and that of her contemporaries. See “The Last Man: Apocalypse Without Millennium,” in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 107–22.

  35 “She is in truth” MWS to Leigh Hunt, August 12, 1826, Letters MWS, 1:528.

  36 Doddy knew that many people thought For more on the problematic issue of writing about transvestism and lesbian identity as a literary biographer, with a particular focus on the issues of Doddy’s gender identity, see Geraldine Friedman, “Pseudonymity, Passing, and Queer Biography: The Case of Mary Diana Dods,” Romanticism on the Net 23(2001), Michael Eberle-Sinatra, ed., Richard Sha, guest ed., doi: 10:7202/005985ar. Betty Bennett is the first to have discovered Doddy’s identity as a transvestite. She tells the story of her discovery and the evidence she found in Mary Diana Dods.

  37 “My friend” July 13, 1827, Journals MW, 502–3.

  38 Mary put a stop to it “Do not I earnestly pray you, allude to the past, or the changes which cannot be unchanged—” MWS to Jane Williams Hogg, June 5, 1828, Selected Letters MWS, 205.

  39 “how ardently I desire to see him” MWS to Jane Williams Hogg, June 5, 1828, Letters MWS, 2:42.

  40 an angry critique Mary would defend herself against Trelawny’s criticisms, writing him a long letter: “you are angry with me, you speak of evasions—What do you ask, what do I refuse? Let me write to you as to my own heart and do not show this letter to any one—You talk of writing Shelley’s life and ask me for materials—Shelley’s life as far as the public had to do with it consisted of very few events and these are publicly known—The private events were sad and tragical.” December 15, 1829, ibid., 2:94.

  41 “a share” CC to Trelawny, dated by Stocking to after 1828 because Claire refers to her time in Dresden earlier in the passage. Apparently, Claire had not yet condemned Shelley for his stance on free love, as she was still championing him as an ideal of virtue. Later in this same letter, she declares, “Would to God she [Mary] could perish without note or remembrance, so the brightness of his [Shelley’s] name might not be darkened by the corruptions she sheds upon it. What low ambition is that, that seeks for tinsil [sic] and gaudiness when the reality of all that is noble and worthy has passed away.” Journals CC, 432.

  42 She continued to have her work Mary Shelley wrote twenty-one stories for magazines and annuals between 1823 and 1839. Her heroines suffer at the hands of their enemies, and often die rather than conform to the demands of society. In many ways, these stories serve as Mary’s protest against the strictures of marriage and what Charlotte Sussman calls “the commodification” of women. Sussman writes: “Shelley’s critiques of the way women’s economic value is controlled by the marriage market arrive in a medium that helped construct another form of value within the domestic sphere: a medium that construed women not merely as marriageable bodies, but as readers and writers. If the images in the annuals offer a piece of femininity preserved in amber, the stories and poems within them undermine both that ideal of femininity, and that structure of economic value.” “Stories for the Keepsake,” in Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, 178.

  43 “A solitary woman” Mary Shelley, “Review, ‘The Loves of the Poets,’ ”Westminster Review 11, October 2, 1829 (London: 1829), 476.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE MEMOIR (1797–1801)

  1 “the first of her friends” Johnson to Godwin, September 12, 1797, Gerald P. Tyson, Joseph Johnson: A Liberal Publisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1979), 150–51.

  2 “not altogether” Mary Hays to Godwin, October 1797, Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.

  3 “sincere and earnest” Paul, Friends, 1:283.

  4 Already, glowing death notices Mary Hays had written a laudatory obituary in The Monthly Magazine, as well as a fifty-page biographical tribute in The Annual Necrology, in which she declared: “[Wollstonecraft’s] conceptions were bold and original, her freedom of thinking, and courage in stemming popular opinions, worthy of admiration. An obscure individual, unknown and unsupported, she raised herself by her own exertions to an eminence that excited, in an extraordinary degree, public attention, and afforded her a celebrity extending beyond the limits of the country which gave her birth. [She possessed] a feminine sensibility and tenderness united with masculine strength and fortitude, a combination as admirable as rare.…Her own sex has lost, in the premature fate of this extraordinary woman, an able champion; yet she has not labored in vain: the spirit of reform is silently pursuing its course. Who can mark its limits?” Mary Hays, The Annual Necrology for 1797–98; Including, also, Various Articles of Neglected Biography, vol. 1 (1798), 426.

  5 “It has always” Godwin, Memoirs, 1.

  6 “I should be glad” Godwin to Skeys, October [date?], 1797: Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8. See also a second note, Dep. b. 229/1(a) October 17, 1797.

  7 “When Eliza and I first learnt” Everina to Godwin, November 24, 1797. Abinger: Dep. c. 523.

  8 “To speak frankly” For the argument between Hays and Godwin, see their letters: October 5, 10, 22, and 27, 1797, Abinger: Dep. b. 227/8.

  9 flawed by “sentiments” Godwin, Memoirs, 81–83.

  10 “too contemptuous” of Burke Ibid., 76.

  11 “incompatible with the wri
ter’s essential character” Ibid., 81–83.

  12 Not until the 1970s The first full-scale biography to celebrate Wollstonecraft’s achievements was Claire Tomalin’s The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Penguin, 1974).

  13 “less vigorous” minds Mary Wollstonecraft, Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 4 vols. (London: 1798), 164.

  14 “scripture…for propagating whores” Anti-Jacobin Review and Magazine, or Monthly Political and Literary Censor 5 (1800), 25.

  15 “stripping his dead wife naked” Robert Southey to William Taylor, July 1, 1804, no. 958, in A Memoir of the Life and Writings of the Late William Taylor of Norwich, 2 vols. (London: 1843), 1:506. Also available online: The Collected Letters of Robert Southey, Part 3: 1804–1809, ed. Carol Bolton and Tim Fulford: A Romantic Circles Electronic Edition, February 17, 2014, http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/editions/southey_letters/Part_Three/HTML/letterEEd.26.958.html.