Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

by Janet Todd

We don’t know for sure.

  An Oxford pal is roped in for Mary. But, despite being born of two great libertarian philosophers, when it comes to the crunch, she favours the monogamy scorned by her lover as tantamount to prison.

  Mary Wollstonecraft also believed in monogamy. Both Marys think it better for babies. But, as Harriet’s experience showed, Shelley isn’t much interested in babies as people. (Fortunately, Mary follows her dead mother’s advice and breastfeeds.)

  Eight days after Clara’s birth, they move lodgings to avoid being fleeced by the landlady. Four days later, Mary finds the baby dead.

  She grieves in dreams: in one her baby wakes, it had been cold and needed only rubbing and warming by the fire to live again. This heartbreaking plea for attention and proper care goes unheeded by Shelley and her stepsister.

  Name-sharing when the elder sibling dies is commonplace. So, when the next girl is born on 2 September 1817, she too is ‘Clara’. Circumstances are more propitious. With his wife Harriet drowned in the Serpentine, Shelley, arch hater of marriage, is free to marry again and make Godwin, famous fulminator against shackling matrimony, the happy father-in-law of a baronet’s heir. (How he crowed!) For Shelley, the new child, the fifth he’s sired (a boy, William, precedes the second Clara), hardly impinged. No more than with the first Clara does he see the new baby as an impediment to moving where and when he will.

  ‘I read an anecdote,’ says Annie to Rachel. ‘Shelley leaps over a wailing toddler, a friend asks whose child it is; Shelley, its father, replies, “Don’t know.”’

  It should be stated here that the stepsister, daughter of the second Mrs Godwin, had arrived in the Godwin family as plain Jane. Not to be outdone by a mother who transformed herself from a serial fornicator into a respectable widow to marry the famous bereaved philosopher, Jane recasts herself as a romantic heroine with a French tinge: Claire.

  Jane is a good name, remarks Jane Austen, though I’m not vulgar enough to display it on the cover of my books. I am a Lady and an Author before I am ‘Jane Austen’ – anonymity has its power. Of course, I tried other titles: I might imagine myself ‘Mrs George Crabbe’, I admire clever poets.

  But Jane’s a sturdy English name. I gave it to my secretive beauty in Emma, Jane Fairfax, who does her own hair with skill and plays the piano brilliantly. Plain Jane she is not.

  Fran notes her Author’s occasional prolixity.

  Claire dislikes being outshone by beautiful, clever, interestingly born Mary. She may share a bed with her sister’s lover – remember, we don’t know what they did there, not at this stage – but she’ll never be the poet’s wife. She equalizes by nabbing the most famous author of all.

  Aged just eighteen, she’s impregnated by Lord Byron.

  He’s scandalised England with his cruelty to his wife and rumours of incest with a half-sister; he’s about to leave the country for good and doesn’t care what he does for recreation in those final dreary weeks. He won’t resist a teenager flinging herself at him: he never pretends to care for her.

  Shelley’s impressed by Claire’s ingenuity. The link with Byron excites him. But, if he has been donating his sperm to both stepsisters, then who exactly is fathering her foetus? With no available DNA, speculation’s pointless.

  Move on a little and we reach the stepsisters as mothers of three living children: William born to Mary in 1816, the second Clara born in 1817 – and Allegra born to Claire the same year, and, we have to assume for purposes of narrative, Lord Byron.

  ‘Frankenstein says a lot about a mother’s feeling for dead children and unsanctioned childbirth,’ remarks Fran.

  ‘Or fears for the living,’ adds Rachel. ‘What’s meant by the Creature murdering his little ‘uncle’ William?’

  William! Her father and her child.

  Do Byron and Shelley ever share truth, simple factual truth? Shelley paints a winsome picture of the children: Claire’s Allegra and his William are ‘fast friends’, making a secret language; they puzzle over the ‘stranger’ (Clara) ‘whom they consider very stupid for not coming to play with them on the floor’. Mary writes: William won’t go near Allegra and if she approaches him ‘he utters a fretful cry untill she is removed! – but he kisses Clara – strokes her arms & feet and laughs to find them so soft and pretty’.

  Despite her wildness, Claire understands the stain of illegitimacy ‘unbleached by nobility’ – she may or may not be aware of her own dubious birth. Baby Allegra needs protection. Byron does a deal: he’ll acknowledge and pay to raise the child – so long as he never meets the mother. Allegra must be brought to Italy.

  ‘To give him his due,’ adds Rachel, ‘Shelley’s troubled, knowing about – though not always appreciating – mother-love.’

  A fine country for holidays, for good food and frescoes, Italy in high summer is no place for pale English babies before vaccines and antibiotics. All three children – Clara, Allegra and William – will die there.

  The sun bothers Annie, whose Virginia-Woolf hat is more decorative than functional. She moves her chair. Fran in the floppy reversible National Trust sort feels the sun only on her back. Tamsin is a little apart working through her phone and intermittently watching passers-by. Rachel and Thomas sit in shade, their energy in narrative mode.

  What exactly do we know, Rachel?

  According to agreement, once in Italy a nurse delivers Allegra to Byron. The rest of the extended ‘family’ settles in the spa town of Bagni di Lucca near Livorno. It bustles with English expatriates and fashionable visitors, the most illustrious being Princess Pauline Bonaparte.

  The rented house, ‘Casa Bertini’, is rural and Shelley’s as excited by nearby streams, waterfalls, and transparent pools as he’d once been in Elan Valley. Loves the shifting, transforming light.

  Despite his attraction to women, he never finds their company enough. As with Harriet, so with Mary, so – he realises – it will always be. Besides, Claire is sulky and complaining without her daughter.

  Away in the Venetian palazzo, the Byron bastard is caressed and indulged. She’s enchanting, but soon spoilt.

  Thomas interrupts to intrude new information from Anna-Maria. To curb these faults, Byron will later dispatch the child to a convent, to be raised conservatively as an Italian girl. ‘I’d followed the line that this was cruelty from a voluptuous father tiring of a toy. But Anna-Maria, who was born close to the convent, says the place had an excellent reputation. And listen to this,’ Thomas drains his third double-espresso as Fran watches impressed – she’d levitate if she drank as much – ‘all documents and personal belongings of Allegra’s were taken shortly after her death – despite the nuns’ reluctance – to Florence by an English Lady. Who was she? Claire, later the prey of trophy hunters – and Henry James? Anyone else?’

  Jane Austen intervenes. Spoiling’s no problem where there’s quickness to support it. My Emma learns some sense and marries a man not universally liked by posterity but a worthy spouse for the times.

  Please be quiet, Fran whispers back. This is Shelley’s day, or rather, Clara’s – ‘little Ca’ they called her.

  ‘We didn’t come for Allegra, but we can’t help knowing her fate in Harrow churchyard, Thomas. Despite Byron’s instructions, she was buried in an unmarked grave.’ Nobility doesn’t always bleach the stain; it seems, whatever snobby Emma thinks. (The snub’s been counteracted by the Byron Society – so much more populous than the Shelley one. Both of course dwarfed by the Jane Austen …)

  ‘Who?’ says Tamsin. She’s been preoccupied but now can’t help smiling: the night was athletic.

  Back to 1818. The nurse who takes Allegra to Byron tells disturbing tales. She hints that Byron is raising the child to debauch her. Actually, she’s more concerned with herself – has the famous Lord swooped on her, as was his custom with servants, then ignored her, abandoned her? No knowing.

  Claire’s alive only to Allegra: she must rush to Venice. Shelley needs little persuading – that old tug between men. Acro
ss two hundred miles.

  So, leaving Mary alone with servants and infants, Shelley and Claire depart from Casa Bertini for Padua, then Venice. They hope to persuade Byron to let Claire see her daughter regularly.

  How could they expect it, especially without cover of wifely Mary – this pair of possible lovers so indecorous in licentious Byron’s traditional eyes?

  They enjoy the trip. Then, failing to understand the depths of Byron’s aversion to Claire, they take a gondola and arrive in Venice – in a storm at midnight.

  ‘Such children!’ exclaims Fran.

  Annie regards her. Something about this pair’s affecting Fran. What?

  Next day Shelley goes to Byron alone. The talk’s good-humoured; Byron offers Allegra back, then agrees she may visit her mother. There’s a rub: he assumes Mary is here, that Shelley and Claire aren’t scandalously alone. He invites Shelley to settle his entourage in his own villa outside Este in the Euganean Hills forty or so miles from Venice.

  ‘You know,’ adds Rachel, who’d rather spend a week with Claire than a month with Mary, ‘years later, when the men are dead, Claire fantasizes a harem-commune where sexes are reversed.’

  Mary’s idea of heaven is a garden and absentia Clariae.

  Entranced as usual with each other, on this first Italian meeting the two poets are rowed to the Lido to ride and talk. The experience is so riveting Shelley forgets Claire waits for news. Maybe he’s beginning to compose his celebrated ‘Julian and Maddalo’.

  Back in Casa Bertini Mary is lonely and uneasy, but her life is dominated by little ones. She writes to Shelley: Clara is ‘well and gets very pretty’; she ‘already replies to her nurse’s caresses by smiles – and Willy kisses her with great tenderness’.

  Too pathetic to read these letters, knowing the axe will soon fall.

  Shelley returns to Claire from his exhilarating time with Byron. The deception must stop. He writes that Mary and their children should leave Casa Bertini ‘instantly’ for Este – where he and Claire stay – together. (Did Mary’s heart sink, or wasn’t there time?)

  Fran interrupts again. ‘Poor Mary trying so hard to keep a father for her children.’

  Rachel touches Fran’s hand where it lies on the table. Fran looks up, surprised.

  August is the hottest month of the year in Italy; baby Clara’s teething, and the travelling will take at least five gruelling days. Shelley knows this, but Claire must be indulged and Byron soothed.

  ‘I travelled from Nigeria alone with a teething child,’ says Fran; ‘people were annoyed by the crying.’

  Mary protests, the child is sick. Shelley is adamant. (We aren’t yet out of patriarchy, however sexually liberated these clever women seem.) ‘You can pack up directly you get this letter, and employ the next day in that,’ he commands. Mary must organise departure, settle the household, sort out rent on the villa, pay debts and servants, travel and manage everything. Alone.

  Instructions are imperious and detailed. Shelley will send money to the post office in Florence.

  ‘He could have gone to meet her. It’s abuse,’ Rachel adds, turning away.

  ‘Word’s overused,’ says Fran. ‘When I was young it meant being very rude, now half the time it’s sexual assault on a child or just some husband preventing his wife going …’

  Rachel glares so fiercely Fran stops. ‘Would kicking a pregnant girlfriend down marble stairs fit your criteria?’ She sniffs to dampen her words. ‘Some things are indelible.’

  Fran’s silenced – in part because she heard ‘inedible’ and is pondering whether the inedible would be ineditable. She hears Jane Austen muttering sotto voce about people with their pushy misery.

  The day after packing up the house, Mary (and the children) must ‘get up at four o’clock, & go post to Lucca’ to arrive at six. She will use another three days to get to Este. The peremptory tone softens with a little tenderness for his abandoned family, but baby Clara ‘cant recollect me’, he writes.

  ‘True but she can suffer for him.’

  The packing and journeying will take ten days in all. Meanwhile, in Byron’s villa, Shelley and Claire (with Allegra) enjoy the sun and its golden magnificence. Probably they enjoy the sex too.

  We don’t know …

  Mary obeys, packs, closes the house, gathers the beloved children, bouncy William and pretty Clara. On 30 August, her twenty-first birthday, the day when in 1797 her mother Mary Wollstonecraft began her ten days of dying, Mary is ready to leave Bagni di Lucca. Three days after receiving her commands, she’s in Florence to pick up money – and passports: Italy is much regulated under Austrian rule.

  Florence to Bologna is seventy miles and can take over sixteen hours on the road; Bologna to Este near one hundred, requiring more than thirty-three hours by mule-drawn coach over rough mountainous terrain. As Shelley well knows, his little family must stay at inns where lice and bedbugs wait to attack a human body.

  Jane Austen shakes her head. This emotional telling is too raw. She wouldn’t narrate the tale this way. She’d be more austere, avoiding redundancy – or just tell another story on the edge. She mentions this to Fran – in a kindly way.

  Rachel knows the tale is almost too painful. You don’t have to be a mother or sense impending doom to wish to avoid detail. She’d never allow such affect into a short story. The genre controls the author.

  Unlike Rachel and Fran, Annie and Thomas are more interested in verification than particulars. Tamsin studies the reaction of the older women. Snowflakes.

  Poor Mary grows increasingly distressed on the arduous journey, the teething baby no doubt wailing and little William whiny and wondering why, why.

  ‘This is just story-telling,’ snaps Thomas, surprising himself, ‘we need to get on.’

  Just?

  After four days and three probably sleepless nights journeying from Florence, on Saturday 5 September, almost exactly one year after Clara’s birth, Mary arrives at Byron’s villa. On the way the little girl has picked up dysentery or typhoid. Shelley’s concerned – but more so for Claire, who’s ill with something – we can only wonder, perhaps crudely – and has doctors’ appointments to keep. As ever he’s also much taken with his own ailments. He’s suffering from food-poisoning: blamed on ‘Italian cakes’.

  On 13 September, he writes to Byron from Este that his little girl has been dangerously ill – so he’s ‘detained an anxious prisoner here, for four or five days longer. She is now better, & I hope to be able to see you at the end of the week.’

  Alarmed yes, but also disappointed he can’t be with Byron – living with one’s family isn’t commonly described as being a ‘prisoner’.

  Especially in such a charming villa.

  Clara is not ‘better’.

  Nor apparently is Claire. On 24 September an appointment is made for her to visit her doctor in Padua at 8 o’clock. Mary

  should chaperone her and bring little Clara so Shelley can meet them and take them on to consult Byron’s doctor in Venice. (How the constant care and chivalry for Claire will have racked Mary!) ‘You must therefore arrange matters so that you should come to the Stella d’Oro a little before that hour,’ he writes to his wife, ‘a thing only to be accomplished by setting out at ½ past 3 in the morning’.

  As well as the sick child, Mary is to bring manuscript pages of his new poem.

  ‘It’s breathtaking,’ Rachel comments. ‘It is, isn’t it?’

  Thomas exhales loudly. ‘Shelley couldn’t know how sick the baby was. He’s a visionary, not a clairvoyant. The point is to travel in the cool of the night.’

  ‘Off to get fags,’ says Tamsin, ‘you guys carry on.’

  He knows the child’s been ailing for weeks. Does he remember his first Clara dead after a house-move?

  ‘If you say he was a marvellous poet, Thomas, I may do damage,’ says Rachel. She gives a mordant chuckle.

  (The adjective is Fran’s. It derives from Latin ‘biting’ but she can’t uncouple it from ‘death’
in comic mode. What is it about Rachel? The pregnant girlfriend – a novel, a memory?)

  Clara is now so thin that, according to her mother, friends in Bagni di Lucca wouldn’t know her. By the time Claire, Mary and Clara reach Padua, she’s critically ill. Claire returns to Este while Shelley carries Mary and Clara on to Venice down the Brenta river. Rest, quiet and stillness would have been more healing for the little mite.

  Fran looks away, brushing aside the gentle warnings of Jane Austen. If she isn’t telling the tale, she’s taking it on the chin, swallowing it whole. Each hears the story in different keys.

  Late afternoon, they arrive in Fusina, ready to cross to Venice. The child – what did they expect? – is convulsing.

  Austrian soldiers stop them going further; Shelley’s forgotten the passports. Ever the patrician when dealing with the lower orders, he’s forceful: the soldiers retreat before ‘his flashing eyes and vehement eager manner’ – and perhaps the child’s obvious sickness. In the gondola crossing the lagoon (a whole hour), Clara deteriorates. Shelley deposits Mary and the baby in the hallway of an inn.

  Which inn? The Danieli? Or the Hotel or Albergo Grande Bretagne? It doesn’t matter – but why not Palazzo Mocenigo? Shelley spends most of his time there anyway, why can’t Mary stay? Must she keep away because Claire is exiled?

  Shelley sets out to find Byron’s doctor. He’s not at home. By the time he returns, Clara’s ‘in the most dreadful distress’. Inn servants have found a local medic, who says what any onlooker could say, that there’s no hope for the little girl. ‘In about an hour,’ Shelley writes, ‘she died – silently, without pain, and she is now buried.’

  How does he know what pain the child suffered and had suffered in those excruciating days?

  Mary writes in her diary, ‘This is the Journal book of misfortunes.’ Reticence is Mary Shelley’s hallmark.

  But there must be secret blame. On whom should it fall? Probably on all, herself as well as Shelley and Claire. A mother’s business is to keep a child alive.