Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Mary saw, not a deserted, pregnant wife, but a woman who was living in comfortable security while they starved. Harriet had a sympathetic older sister in Eliza, a comfortable home with her parents at Chapel Street, the commiseration of all. Mary had none of these. She grew cross and uneasy when Shelley showed pleasure at the news that Harriet had given birth to a son, Charles. So Harriet had produced an heir, Mary noted in her journal on 30 November: ‘S[helley] writes a number of circular letters on an event which ought to be ushered in with ringing of bells &c. for it is the son of his wife.’6 What right did Harriet have to write letters signed ‘a deserted wife’? What did she know about feeling deserted?

  Mary was feeling painfully isolated; she had not expected to be so punished for following her great mother’s example. Sitting in the dingy lodgings at Church Terrace, St Pancras, into which they had moved at the beginning of October, she waited for visits from old neighbours and friends, from her dear Hannah Hopwood, from kindly Mrs Knapp, the landlady of their home at the Polygon, from anybody. Nobody came. Mrs de Boinville had the excuse that she had only just learned of her husband’s death and was in mourning; Margaret and Louisa Jones, who had kept up with Mary ever since the years when they had nursed her at the Polygon, had none. Even Mary’s former governess, Maria Smith, waited until the spring of 1815 to make a brief visit. Most hurtful of all was the silence from ‘Izy’, her beloved Isabella. Mary’s letter to her was answered by a scathing rebuke from David Booth; Isabella’s sister, Christy, rubbed salt into her wounds by sending expressions of regret at Mary’s reckless behaviour.

  Deprived of family and friends, Mary was reduced to the company of petulant Jane and the one young man who was prepared to risk being seen in Shelley’s company. (Hogg kept a disapproving distance in the autumn; the Hookhams met Shelley on a strictly business basis.)

  Thomas Love Peacock, more inclined in 1814 to become a poet than a novelist, was a narrow-shouldered, heavy-eyed young man with black hair and, when he dropped his reserved manner, a sharp sense of humour. Peacock was as capricious and ardent in his love-affairs as Shelley himself. Marianne de St Croix, a lady about whom little is known (Mary found her rather tiring and dreaded her occasional visits), was his current love; in January 1815, an expensive entanglement with a lady known to us only as ‘Charlotte’ landed Peacock in the debtors’ prison for a few days. Sympathetic towards Harriet, whose good name and amiable character he always defended, Peacock understood Shelley’s need for a more intellectual companion. The fact that Mary had been learning Greek and Latin since her return to England must have impressed a man who was himself a brilliant and self-taught classical scholar.

  Peacock, like Shelley, had a streak of endearing simplicity; some of the happiest days in these early months in England were spent walking north from St Pancras to one of the many little ponds beyond Primrose Hill, where Shelley, aided by Peacock, launched tiny fleets of paper boats. Strolling on, they laid leisurely plots with Mary and Jane to kidnap Shelley’s young sisters from school and carry them off to be reeducated, together with Peacock’s Marianne, in some pleasant refuge – Wales, perhaps, or the west of Ireland. Listening to the discussions, to Mary’s calm voice douching Shelley’s gleeful schemes, Peacock began to see how his friends might be shaped into the characters of the beautiful Cephalis Cranium (brainhead) and Mr Escot, the vegetarian deteriorationist who blames man’s downfall since the Golden Age on his carnivorous diet. (Shelley, unlike Peacock, was an ardent vegetarian.) He began work on Headlong Hall, his first conversation-novel, the following year.

  Peacock had a chance to demonstrate his friendship when the threat of imprisonment for debt forced Shelley into hiding towards the end of October. Mary and Jane stayed on at their drab lodgings in Church Terrace, while Peacock sheltered his friend from the bailiffs at the home in Southampton Buildings which he shared with his elderly mother. Hogg dropped in to crack tactless jokes about men who kept two ‘wives’.

  Writing her novel Lodore some thirty years later, Mary must have been grimly amused by the fact that the chapters which won the most praise were those which were the least imaginative.7 The realism so admired by reviewers was founded on her own vivid memory of life on the run in the autumn of 1814 and in particular of the miserable fortnight when Shelley and she had been forced into separation. It had been a time of intense anxiety, of hurried meetings in dark alleys and desolate squares, of plotting the secret delivery of letters, of endless fright that the bailiffs would somehow catch up with them. Lonely, apprehensive and so poor that she sometimes had only a piece of bread or a few biscuits for her day’s rations, Mary counted the slow hours until midnight on Saturday evening when, for a whole day, the law forbade arrests.

  The wait was sometimes unbearable. ‘About six Mary proposes that we should go for Shelley in a Coach,’ Jane noted on Saturday, 5 November. ‘We do so – He won’t come – Return home.’ She passed the time by writing a ‘very shocking’ scene for a never-completed play while Mary dozed on the sofa until past midnight, when Shelley finally knocked on the door. Jane was amazed that the two of them could choose to spend all their time in bed: ‘To sleep & talk – why this is merely vegetating.’ But Mary was happy: ‘Love in idleness’ was how she contentedly recorded their day together. She remembered it when she was writing Lodore.

  The dusky room showed them but half to each other, and the looks of each, beaming with tenderness, drank life from one another’s gaze. The soft shadows thrown on their countenances, gave a lamp-like lustre to their eyes, in which the purest spirit of affection sat, weaving such unity of sentiment, such strong bonds of attachment, as made all life dwindle to a point, and freighted the passing minute with the hopes and fears of their entire existence.8

  The scene records a rare moment of content in a period of which Mary’s memories were dark. In Lodore’s young Ethel Villiers, pleading with her high-principled husband to borrow from those who have the money to give, we catch an echo of Mary herself, begging Shelley to swallow his pride and seek help from his rich relations. Shelley did finally make such an appeal – it was rejected – to his great-uncle; in the novel, however, Ethel’s husband angrily refuses to ask for aid. Edward Villiers represents Shelley at his most extreme, carrying Godwin’s mistrust of gratitude to the point where it takes precedence over his wife’s hunger and poverty. ‘Ever since I knew what pecuniary obligations were,’ he tells Ethel, ‘I resolved to lay under such to no man, and this resolve was greater than my love for you; judge therefore of its force, and the violence you do me, when you would oblige me to act against it.’9 This was a difficulty with which Mary became wearily familiar; she had chosen a man who, like her father, put beliefs before relationships. Neither Shelley nor Godwin were easy men to live with in this respect.

  *

  Reading the journals and letters from this period of Mary’s life is a little like entering the traditional closing scene to the act of an opera buffa, when all the characters burst into song at once, converging, separating, contradicting, unifying. Godwin was, as always, keeping his laconic daily journal, compressing his own financial tribulations into a stiff list of names of possible benefactors, persistent creditors, never once mentioning his lost daughter; his wife was still keeping up a slanted account of recent events for the benefit of ‘Mrs Mason’, the name under which Lady Mountcashell had decided to start a new life abroad. (She took it from the kindly teacher in the stories which Mary Wollstonecrart had once written for her.) Mrs Godwin’s reports were inaccurate but persuasive; Mrs Mason wrote back to say that, while Jane was evidently in no way responsible, Mary had behaved with predictable selfishness.*

  In another corner of the stage stands Shelley, who in one revealing note described himself as ‘an harp responsive to every wind’.10 He was allowing his harpstrings to be vigorously plucked by Jane as she raised the pitch of her ‘horrors’ to full-blown theatrical performances, threw tantrums when she was excluded, and demanded all the attention, and more, that she had been
accustomed to receiving at home.

  Mary, at just seventeen, was precociously mature; Jane, only a few months younger, was still a child. It was this which made her so attractive and disarming to a man who loved to see himself in a teacher’s role. When he was not being thoughtful, patient, considerate – and there are many entries in the journal to show that he was often so with Jane – Shelley was intrigued by the way he could manipulate her. Like his younger sisters, Jane could be frightened half to death with a little skilful guidance. Fear was an emotion which fascinated Shelley. His skill at promoting it in such a susceptible mind sometimes had alarming results.

  Their conversation on the night of 7 October began with Shelley’s ghoulish description of how soldiers were punished by having squares of skin cut from their backs; a little later, he reminded Jane that they had reached ‘the witching hour’ of night; could she feel terror in the silence? She could; shortly after two, she found the look on his face so disturbing that she ran off to her room upstairs. Shelley had gone to his own room with a book and was bending down to kiss Mary goodnight when he heard footsteps in the passage.

  ‘Jane was there …’ Her face, Shelley noted excitedly, had been ashy, lined with terror, eyes bulging from the sockets; she had begged him to come to her room. Surely he had touched her pillow? It had moved, seemingly by itself, from the bed to a chair. Unable to resist such clear evidence of witchcraft, Shelley left his book for a further session of horrors in the parlour. He was well rewarded.

  Just as the dawn was struggling with moon light Jane remarked in me that unutterable expression which had affected her with so much horror before. She described it as expressing a mixture of deep sadness & conscious power over her … her horror & agony increased even to the most dreadful convulsions. She shr[i]eked & writhed on the floor.11

  This was rather more than he had bargained for. Mary was called in; it is worth noting that Jane’s convulsions promptly ceased. A week later, on 14 October, Shelley reproached Jane for her ‘insensibility & incapacity for the slightest degree of friendship’. By that evening, she was in tears; Shelley had to give up his place in Mary’s bed to her. Wonderful to relate, he noted the following morning – his tone was decidedly sceptical – ‘the chimney board in Janes room is found to have walked leisurely into the middle of the room, accompanied by the pillow; who being very sleepy tried to get back into bed again but fell down on his back.’12

  ‘How hateful it is to quarrel – to say a thousand unkind things – meaning none – things produced by the bitterness of disappointment,’ Jane wrote in her journal on the day of the chimneyboard’s mysterious stroll. An apology from Shelley for having said anything to upset her had given some comfort; ‘how I like good explaining people.’ Her spirits had sunk again by the evening: ‘(can’t think what the deuce is the matter with me – “I weep yet never know why – I sigh yet feel no pain.”)’13 But, if she really didn’t know what was the matter with her, why did she try so hard to scratch this entry out? It is hard not to see the chimneyboard’s outing as another attempt by Jane to attract the attention of a man who, as she knew, loved stories of ghostly happenings.

  Everything points towards the fact that Jane was in love with Shelley; did she sleep with him during this time? The possibility cannot be excluded, although her role was closer to that of a demanding younger sister. Shelley often found her infuriating and said so; he remained enchanted by her vivid imagination, her enthusiasm for his own beliefs, and her courage. He was furious when a (false) report that Mrs Godwin was dying lured her back to Skinner Street for a couple of nights. He was sympathetic when she announced that she would in future be known only by her first name, Clara (later changed to Clare, or Claire). He defended her against Mary’s charge of a lack of sisterly feelings. ‘I think that she has a sincere affection for you,’ he told Mary the day after Claire had crept into her bed.14 Mary’s response was indirect. And ‘I’, she told him, mocking his words, ‘have a very sincere affection for my own Shelley.’15

  The point was not taken up again.

  *

  ‘Natalie [Kaisaroff] has all my pity no situation can be so terrible so agonizing as hers – between a lover & a parent –’ Mary wrote to Claire about a young Russian girl in 1845. ‘Running away is a thing people may do – but no one can ever advise it.’16

  She knew what she was talking about. Claire, in the autumn of 1814, could rant about news of plots to have her locked up in a convent, or sent out as a lady companion, but she always had the option of returning home to Skinner Street, if she chose. Mary had been exiled. When Fanny paid the runaways a visit on 13 November, she told them that she did not dare talk to Mary; the letter of explanation which she had sent to Skinner Street had been rejected as ‘cold and indelicate’; ‘Papa’ had warned Fanny that if she saw Mary he would never speak to her again. When Mary called with Shelley at Skinner Street, the door was shut; if they met Godwin in the street, he walked past without a glance. Again and again, Mary read her way through her parents’ books, trying to understand why she was being punished for acting on their principles.

  She could not bear to see her father as her enemy. The decision to exclude her from the family was – it must be – the fault of her stepmother. Mrs Godwin ‘is a woman I shudder to think of –’ she wrote in her journal on 28 October, when Shelley was living with Peacock, ‘my poor father – if – but it will not do – read I dont know what – write to my love.’17 In a distraught letter to Shelley, she conjured up the image of a loving Godwin kept from them by a heartless wife.

  I detest Mrs Godwin she plagues my father out of his life & then – well no matter – why will not Godwin follow the obvious bent of his affections & be reconciled to us – his prejudices the world & she – do you not hate her my love – all these forbid it – what am I to do trust to time of course – for what else can I do[?]18

  The autumn passed with no sign that Godwin was going to give in to his affections; Mary continued to fret over the misery, not of her own situation, but his. She only grumbled once about the gloomy little lodgings at Church Terrace, when a blacksmith’s son in the attic above her bedroom celebrated his birthday by banging a tin kettle all night. She learnt to make her own dresses, ate little, spent nothing. But it tortured her to think of Godwin in poverty, of the bookshop stocks being sold to pay off a fat banker. This was the news which was filtering through to Church Terrace from Fanny and Charles Clairmont; Mary, better than Shelley, knew how much her father’s business meant to him. She could not hide her unhappiness.

  On 22 November, almost certainly at Mary’s request, Shelley visited Skinner Street, where he was encouraged to arrange a new post-obit deal against the estate which would raise money for Godwin’s fiercest creditor. The transaction was accepted; by Christmas, Shelley had disposed of a further £2,000 of his future inheritance to raise £700 for Godwin. Mary Jane thanked him; Godwin did not. Gratitude was not, he believed, appropriate, certainly not in the case of the man who had stolen away two of his daughters. Shelley had promised to maintain him for the rest of his days; Godwin intended to see that he kept his word.19 He saw nothing wrong with accepting money from the man he continued to view as the seducer of his daughter and was prepared to cut in the street. Neither, although he sometimes found Godwin’s demands unrealistic, did Shelley question that he had a duty to maintain the older man, as he had promised.

  Four letters and a fragment survive of Mary’s communications with Shelley during the two weeks when he was in hiding from his creditors. All were written from Church Terrace, in sight of the churchyard where Mary often went to sit and read by her mother’s grave. Love, and the misery of having to live apart, is of course the main topic of her letters; she knows Shelley will not sleep so well at Southampton Buildings as he would if he was wrapped in her arms; she laughs at the thought of him philosophizing with Peacock about love when it would be so easy for her to demonstrate it; she longs to be alone with him in the lovely Welsh cottage he has told her a
bout, ‘at a home you know love – with your own Mary nothing to disturb you …’20 (This may have been a little dig at Claire and her unwelcome intrusions; it certainly shows no desire for communal life.)

  More striking is the evidence, in Mary’s letter of 28 October, of her feelings of deprivation and fear. The lovers had been living apart for five days. Here, after begging Shelley to join in her feelings of hatred for Mrs Godwin, she asks him to take the place of her lost father and writes as a scolded, penitent child:

  indeed I will be a good girl & never vex you any more I will learn Greek and – but when shall we meet when I may tell you all this & you will so sweetly reward me – oh we must meet soon for this is a dreary life I am weary of it – a poor widowed deserted thing no one cares for her …21

  She had reached a low point. Shelley, although warm in his praises of Mary’s intelligence, her disciplined mind, her stimulating influence – ‘among women there is no mind equal to yours – and I possess this treasure’22 – had written to her in haste, while finding ample time for a long letter to her stepsister, addressed, as he explained to Mary, ‘in a feigned hand to surprise her’. Did Mary sometimes wonder if Shelley’s love for her was neither that of a lover nor a father, but of the possessor of a trophy, of Mary Wollstonecraft reborn? Did she compare his tenderness to Claire to the remote, tutorial tone he sometimes adopted with her? How, sitting alone at Church Terrace, did she feel when she read his comments on the letter to Skinner Street in which she had defended their relationship? ‘The simple & impressive language in which you clothed your argument – the full weight you gave to every part, the complete picture you exhibited of what you intended to describe – was more than I expected …’ He went on to pay tribute to her subtle and ‘exquisitely fashioned’ intelligence. ‘Yes!’ he concluded. ‘I am encouraged.’23 True, he also wrote most tenderly of ‘such sweet moments as we experienced last night’. He told her that, when she was away from him, his mind was dark as the river when the moon was down. He called her his beloved, his sweet Mary, his only love. And yet, lingering through the letters Shelley wrote during their separation is the sense of her value, not as a lover, but as a prize.