Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Mary could not resist slipping a few hints at the truth into her work. Disguise plays a large role in Perkin Warbeck, the novel she began writing after her return to England in 1828, and in the sentimental stories she produced for the ladies’ annuals. ‘Ferdinando Eboli’ (1829, for the 1830 Keepsake) puts the heroine into the costume of a page to escape seduction; ‘The False Rhyme’ (1829–30) presents a couple who exchange sex by their costumes. ‘Transformation’ (1830–1), with its story of a misshapen creature who gains possession of a handsome young man’s body, owes as much to the history of Miss Dods as to Byron’s drama, The Deformed Transformed, a work which Mary greatly admired. ‘Lift not the painted veil,’ Mary insisted in a quotation from her husband which appears countless times in her own work. This particular veil had, after all, been discreetly left in place; who would ever think of searching a lady’s annual of love stories for the truth about poor Miss Dods and her romance?

  *

  Letters kept Mary in touch with the world during her peaceful summer of exile at Hastings. Jane Hogg sent news of the Hunts’ latest disaster; Marianne had taken to drink and the whole family had left Highgate to live in penury near Windsor. Writing back, Mary envied Jane the arrival from abroad of a loving brother and the supportive presence of Hogg, ‘a dear Man person’. She had hopes of one herself, she admitted. ‘Trelawny in England! – Where – how ardently I desire to see him,’ had been her first response to Jane’s news of his return from the Continent.14 ‘I long, each day more to embrace the darling again,’ she wrote two weeks later on 20 June. ‘Tomorrow I hope to know my fate from Trelawny,’ she wrote eight days later, ‘– & I shall then finish this letter – God bless you, my pretty pet!’

  The fate Mary was referring to was no more than the news that Trelawny was prepared to leave London for Hastings to see her; she was sufficiently excited by the prospect not to care what conclusions Jane might draw from her excited notes. Trelawny let her down. He paid a call on Mr Godwin, to whom he became warmly attached. He assured Mary, from a distance, that he loved her: ‘my feelings and passions burn fierce as ever – and will – till they have consumed me.’15 They were not so consuming as to bring him to Hastings. Trelawny liked a handsome woman; having learned of Mary’s disfiguring attack of smallpox, he found excuses to stay away. Disappointed, Mary was obliged to comfort herself with the presence of quiet, affectionate Percy, and with visits by Julia Robinson’s father and her own.

  Mary had told Jane Hogg on 28 June that she hoped, in a few weeks, ‘not to be a fright’, although her hair was still cropped short and her skin sallow. Godwin was shocked by the change in his pretty daughter when he visited her on 10 August; his unfailing candour would probably have frightened her into staying in seclusion anyway, but events took the decision out of her hands. Julia became seriously ill during his visit. Typhus was suspected. Godwin returned home; Mary, having volunteered to care for Julia while she slowly recovered her health at the Robinsons’ Paddington home, gratefully accepted Mr Robinson’s suggestion that she should stay there for as long as she wished.

  Mary spent the rest of the year at Park Cottage with the Robinsons, working on Perkin Warbeck, helping Thomas Moore with his book on Byron and making only rare forays into London. Future visits to the Robinson home in the early summer of 1829 and the autumn of 1830 were made for the pleasure of living in semi-rural surroundings and in the company of this large, friendly family. In 1828, health and vanity were the reasons for her seclusion.

  *

  Six years had passed since Claire had set off from Italy to take up a lonely life as a governess in Russia. Mary, when she felt wretched about her own life, reminded herself that Claire’s must be even sadder, estranged from all she knew, struggling to please the demanding parents of her pupils, daring to confide in nobody about her past in case she lost her position. The affair with Trelawny had not survived their life in separate countries. She had, it seemed to Mary, little to live for. Since before going to Paris, she had been strenuously urging Claire to give up this drudge’s life and come home, if only for a visit. The news that Charles Clairmont and his Austrian wife Antonia had come to London in July 1828 provided Claire with an additional incentive for returning. On 17 October, for the first time since Mary’s elopement, the entire family was reunited for a meal at the Godwins’ home in Gower Place. Only William, who had fallen out both with his parents and with Mary for reasons which are not clear, was absent. It is possible that he was already involved with Emily Eldred, a young woman of whom all the family, for no known reason, strongly disapproved.

  Much of the talk at Gower Place that night must have been of the visitors’ lives abroad and of their plans for the future. Godwin, pleased to see his wife reunited with her children, wanted Charles to get work at the new university behind their home, as a professor of German literature and history. Already friendly with several of the academic staff, he could provide all the necessary introductions and recommendations. No such avenues were open to Mary or Claire as females, but Godwin was eager to be of help here also, although not for wholly altruistic reasons. Frederic Mansel Reynolds, an aspiring young writer whom he had met in March that year and who later dedicated his first novel to Godwin, was about to take over the editorship of the new Keepsake annual from Harrison Ainsworth. Moore was reported to have been offered a guinea a line for contributions to The Keepsake; one could keep a family – or a father, at least – on such generous pay! Smiling at Godwin’s incurable optimism, the visitors changed the subject to his own new project.

  Cloudesley, the novel on which Godwin began work nine days later, opens like Frankenstein with a journey to Russia; the account of life there was supplied from his conversations with Claire. Written from financial necessity, the overlong book was generally dismissed as the work of an old man whose imagination had lost its fire. The warmest appreciation appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in May 1830. Other reviewers complained that the novel was tedious; here, readers were urged to imagine that they were listening to some majestic work for the organ, designed to inspire ‘new and extraordinary emotions, while we sit soul-enchained by the wonders of his art’. The author of this rapturous account was Mary Shelley; under the cloak of anonymity, she proudly hailed her father as ‘one of the wisest men of this or any age’.

  Passionate in Godwin’s defence, unfailingly loyal in her efforts to support him, Mary had not yet resolved deep-seated feelings of guilt about her father. In Matilda, she had painfully described the death of a father and the remorse which drives Matilda to seek her own death. In ‘The Mourner’, a gloomy story which she wrote for The Keepsake in 1829, to accompany a Turner engraving of Virginia Water, Mary again presented a young woman who dies from grief after years of blaming herself for her father’s death. Here, Clarice is rescued from a shipwreck while her father is engulfed by the ‘murderous Atlantic’. It is possible that Mary’s guilt derived from the sense that Shelley had let Godwin down and that this was, in some way, her fault. It is certain that she remained troubled and unhappy about the years of estrangement from her father and that the unfailing devotion she now displayed was, in part, her atonement for the past.

  Half foreign as they were by birth, years abroad had completed the sense of alienation from England felt by both Charles and his sister Claire. Made unhappy by Mrs Godwin’s treatment of his wife and forced to support himself by taking in boarders from the new London university which declined, for no good reason, to give him a teaching post, Charles took Antonia back to Vienna in the spring of 1830.16 His relations with Mary were soured for years by the fact that he asked her to pay their travel expenses. Rich only in her distant expectations, Mary was forced to sell some of Shelley’s precious – to her – travelling library to raise the necessary sum. Assisting her father was one thing; she felt bitter at being expected to subsidize her step-brother and his wife.

  Claire had also had her fill of England by the end of a year. Fretful, ill and kitted out, as Trelawny noted to h
is disgust when they met, in worsted stockings against the damp English climate, she felt cold, lost and unloved. A New Year’s Day note from Trelawny, penned shortly before his departure for Italy in 1829, cannot have done much to raise her spirits. Priding himself on his outspokenness, Trelawny informed her that she had become ‘horridly prudish … fish-like – bloodless’, an ‘old Aunt’. This was a jeer at Claire’s obsession with her nephew, seen through her adoring eyes as the very image of Shelley.

  Claire’s enthusiasm for Percy stands in stark contrast to her reaction to Mary, who not only housed her for three months, but lent her the money in September 1829 to rejoin her Russian employers and her pupil at Dresden.17 Reviewing her thoughts about her stepsister in a private note, probably written at the end of that year, Claire began, glowingly enough, with a tribute to Mary’s hair. She described, not her clipped thin locks, but the sunny cloud it had once been, ‘so fine, one feared to disturb the beauty of its gauzy wavings with a breath lest the slightest breath should disturb the beauty of its gauzy wavings’.18 The repetition shows the speed at which Claire was writing; she had now run out of goodwill. Savagely, she berated Mary for having ‘given up every hope of imaginary excellence … sneaked in upon any terms she could get into the depraved condition of society’. The memory of Shelley – she made an oddly significant reference to ‘his ardent mouth’ – had been sacrificed to this hunger for ‘a share in the corruptions of society. Would to God she [Mary] could perish without note or remembrance,’ Claire wrote with a ferocity worthy of Shelley himself; but Claire was always volatile. A sentence later, she forgave Mary all her crimes for ‘the surpassing beauty of her mind; every sentiment of her’s is so glowing and beautiful, it is worth the actions of another person.’

  It is hard to guess what Mary had done to deserve such condemnation. Claire had learned enough about the Douglas business to pass it on to Charles a few years later; she would have wondered why Mary had not joined her lot to that of Fanny Wright in America. Claire would have done so, given half a chance; so, probably, would Mary Wollstonecraft. It was the sense that Mary had betrayed her glorious mother which seems to have fuelled her rage. She herself had taken pride in imparting Mary Wollstonecraft’s beliefs to her little Russian pupils; it was beyond her understanding why Mary did not follow her mother’s example and adopt a more public role. She had the intelligence, the literary ability, the skill; why did she not put her gifts to use? What was the value of helping oppressed women, if nobody knew about it or could profit from the example? What of the causes which Wollstonecraft and Shelley would have championed, the children being sent out to work themselves to death in mines and factories, the ongoing battle against colonial slavery, the injustice of the electoral system, the horrible conditions in which London’s poor were forced to live and die? Claire burned with the political zeal of a female Dickens. And Mary? Mary’s attitude seemed to be summed up in a line from one of her essays for the Westminster Review: ‘A solitary woman is the world’s victim, and there is heroism in her consecration.’19

  The cause for Claire’s rage against Mary lay deeper than this and it surfaced towards the end of her long private outburst. She had never been able to forgive Mary for maintaining her friendship with Byron after Allegra’s death. Shelley was excused: ‘it was his principle never to refuse his countenance even to the most guilty,’ Claire wrote understandingly. Mary was beyond forgiveness. Shockingly, Claire compared her behaviour to that of a woman who would hurry forward to shake hands with the executioner of a child. ‘I never saw her afterwards without feeling as if the sickening crawling motion of a Deathworm had replaced the usual flow of my Blood in my veins,’ Claire wrote.20

  Claire had never been good at hiding her thoughts. It is inconceivable that she could have spent three months under the same roof as her stepsister without showing her feelings. Writing to Trelawny several years later, in May 1836, Mary acknowledged as much. Claire, she told him dolefully, ‘still has the faculty of making me more uncomfortable than any human being – a faculty she, unconsciously perhaps, never fails to exert whenever I see her –’21 Giving Claire the money for her Dresden passage in 1829, Mary had, perhaps, thought it a small price to pay for getting rid of her stepsister and her reproaches.

  Reading Mary’s letters from abroad, Trelawny had been moved by her unending sense of bereavement, her devotion to Shelley’s memory. Meeting her at last in the autumn of 1828 and wishing to hear what she was doing to promote Shelley’s name, he did not hide his disgust at what seemed to him lassitude bordering on indifference. Why did she submit to Sir Timothy’s bullying restrictions? If she cared about Shelley’s reputation, she should fight for it. ‘You distorted my motives,’ Mary wrote to him wearily at his home in Florence the following year, ‘– did not understand my position, and altogether I lost in your eyes during your last visit – You were quite in the wrong.’

  Written on 27 July 1829, this was the second letter Mary had sent to explain why she could not comply with Trelawny’s request for materials to flesh out the grand tribute to Shelley which he intended to incorporate in his own autobiography. She did not say that a man who had known Shelley for less than six months was not equipped to write about him. She was all for a book about ‘the strange wild adventures you recount so well’. But a book of wild adventures was the last place in which she wished the world to read about her husband or herself.

  By 1829, Shelley’s reputation was just beginning to blossom, largely thanks to the new Galignani edition of his poems introduced by Redding, and to Mary’s skill at unobtrusively providing copies of his poems and selective details of his life to any other editor who would agree to conceal her assistance. Alfred Tennyson, who had read everything of Shelley’s he could find while he was still at school, began paying tributes to him in his own early works: ‘The Poet’, published in 1830, was his first homage to Shelley and was recognized as such. His university friend, Arthur Hallam, newly returned from Pisa with a privately published copy of Adonais in his baggage, began printing and distributing it to fellow enthusiasts in 1829. Richard Monckton Milnes, a future poet and influential literary figure, was among the band of Cambridge students who felt strongly enough to take the coach from Cambridge to Oxford on a frosty evening towards the end of the year, for the purpose of championing Shelley’s name at a debate on poetry. Young Edward Bulwer also declared his allegiance to Shelley and drew on him for a rebellious and sensitive young aristocrat in Pelham (1828), his first and immensely popular novel.

  Mary herself had quietly furnished details for the introduction to a Shelley anthology to be published the following year under the winsome title, The Beauties of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Trelawny would have been – and probably was – disgusted to see that this included ‘A Revised Edition of Queen Mab Free from All the Objectionable Passages’. Mary did not feel troubled by the omissions. If the objectionable aspects were excluded and the more contentious aspects of Shelley’s life were played down, then the poetry would thrive. Changing opinions was a slow and difficult business – and she still had to seem to comply with Sir Timothy’s washes. She would write Shelley’s biography herself one day, she told Trelawny in April 1829, but ‘it must not be published now – There are too many concerned to speak against him – it is still too sore a subject.’

  Trelawny, claiming never to have received an answer to his request, tried again. Mary stood her ground. She would not consent. She had, she told him in July, now decided not to publish anything personal about Shelley until after Percy’s death. She had no letters to give him since all early ones had been destroyed ‘by an unfortunate mistake’ and all later ones were ‘purely descriptive’. Trelawny, turning nasty, threatened to publicize the help she had given to Moore unless she did the same for him. In his rage and frustration, he even accused her of having shown more support to Thomas Medwin, who had recently deserted his rich wife after spending most of her fortune, than she was ready to give to him.

  ‘I have ever loved – I
do love you,’ Mary wrote back to Trelawny in a long defensive letter on 15 December. She reminded Trelawny that she had always disliked Shelley’s cousin and praised the kindness he claimed to have shown to poor, abandoned Mrs Medwin. On the subject of a biography, however, she was inflexible. Shelley’s private life had, she acknowledged, contained events which were ‘hardly for the rude cold world to handle’. His actions, if fully known, might serve as an excuse for ‘calumnies and give his enemies a voice’. She disliked Leigh Hunt’s approach of ‘slurring over the real truth’; silence was her preferred approach. Trelawny could, if he wished, attempt a life of Shelley which contained not a single reference to herself. But, she added with quiet triumph, ‘I do not see what you could make of his life without me.’

  Intending, perhaps, to inflict a little guilt on a man who was living comfortably in Florence and dining out on tales of his heroic deeds in Greece, Mary went on to remind Trelawny of the troubled situation he had left behind. Britain had not recovered since the crash of 1825; in 1829, economic unrest, unemployment and food shortages were causing riots: ‘some change some terrible event is expected,’ Mary wrote; ‘rents falling – money not to be got – every one poor and fearful.’ She added, like the good republican she was, a scornful reference to George IV, ‘fishing in Virginia Water and driving about in a pony phaeton – .’ Trelawny was not placated by fond messages from ‘the pretty Cottagers’ of Paddington or by inquiries after Zella, his little daughter by his Greek wife who was living with him in Florence.* Mary heard nothing more from him for almost a year.