A Fatal Likeness

by Lynn Shepherd

  MARY SHELLEY

  There is nothing to suggest that Mary accused Shelley of her first daughter’s death in the way I have imagined, and no details about exactly how she died, but it is clear that the atmosphere between Mary, Claire, and Shelley was electric with jealousy by that point. On 14 January 1815, Mary’s journal entry reads

  Three leaves are torn out immediately thereafter. In the days before and after the baby’s birth there are several more references to the fact that Shelley and Claire have been out together alone for hours, even though it’s clear that the baby was unwell from the outset. The day after the baby was found dead Mary records “a fuss” in her journal, which, as Daisy Hay points out, is usually her code-word for an argument with Shelley. Mary’s journal also records that Shelley and Claire took the baby’s body away for burial, no-one knows where, and the two of them continued their private excursions together in the days that followed. There is also an odd episode, much later, in 1821, when Claire amused herself in her diary by composing cartoon captions for both Byron and Shelley, and wrote under the latter “He looking very sweet & smiling A little child [deleted] Jesus Christ playing about the room. He says. Then grasping a small knife & looking mild, I will quietly murder that little child.”

  Whatever happened with the first, Mary certainly believed Shelley’s absorption with Claire contributed to the death of their second daughter. There are references to problems with feeding this baby, even before the Shelleys left England, and after her arrival at Este, Mary wrote to her friend Maria Gisborne that Clara was “reduced to be so thin in this short time that you would hardly know her again.” It does seem to have been reckless on both parents’ part to have taken such a sick child on that last journey into Venice, when a doctor was available in Padua. I have found no actual evidence that Mary harmed her children, knowingly or otherwise, but I would hardly have expected to. I do, however, think that some of the surviving records are suggestive, as are the silences. In August 1820 Shelley wrote to Godwin that “On one occasion … agitation of mind produced through [Mary] a disorder in [Percy], similar to that which destroyed our little girl two years ago.” And when Byron forbade Allegra from going to the Shelleys that same year he wrote, “I so totally disapprove of the mode of Children’s treatment in their family, that I should look upon the Child as going into a hospital … Have they reared one? … the Child shall not quit me again to perish of Starvation, and green fruit …”

  I also believe that aspects of Mary’s behaviour would seem to conform to what we know now of Münchausen syndrome. She certainly suffered from periods of deep depression throughout her life, something she believed she had inherited from her mother. At the same time she was both ferociously intelligent, and ferociously determined—Godwin did indeed say her “perseverance in everything she undertakes” was “almost invincible.” It is easy to see how the poisonous environment in which she and Claire competed for Shelley’s affection might have led her to desperate measures to keep Shelley to herself (and my account of that night of “horrors” in late 1814 is based on fact). But I think there are traces of the same attention-seeking behaviour long before she met him. Her mother died soon after she was born, and she thereafter developed what she herself called an “excessive & romantic attachment” to Godwin (it is interesting to note in this context that her later novel Mathilda dealt with the subject of a father’s incestuous love for his daughter—a subject that disgusted Godwin).

  After his second marriage, Godwin sent Mary away from the rest of the family for months at a time, telling her, as she left for Ramsgate at the age of thirteen, that there was still a chance of her becoming a wise and even happy woman, “in spite of unfavourable appearances.” We have no idea what he meant by this, or the nature of the “dreadful evil” that the Godwins feared in relation to the problem with her arm. That is still a mystery, even now, but it was serious enough to require the wearing of a sling, and, as Miranda Seymour observes, Mrs Godwin may have suspected her step-daughter of exaggerating it, perhaps in an effort to regain her central place in her father’s life. I have always found this whole episode very odd, especially when one adds the unexplained fire in the bookshop, and Mary’s later references to herself in letters to Shelley as “Pecksie” who is “a good girl” and “quite well again now.” I have tried to create a story that might explain it.

  The account of Mary threatening to kill herself if Shelley refused to marry her comes from one given by the second Mrs Godwin. Even though she is not always an entirely reliable witness, especially where Mary is concerned, that does not necessarily mean that she was wrong on this occasion. As for the possibility that Mary might have taken a lover, she did believe—at least in theory—in free love, and even if she baulked at inviting the unprepossessing Hogg to her bed, I can quite imagine she might have slept with a rather more attractive man, especially in an act of revenge.

  Mary was an accomplished liar when it suited her, both by omission and by commission: Her journals are full of eloquent silences, and later in life she helped a female friend obtain a false passport so that she could travel as the “husband” of another woman (there’s more on this extraordinary episode in the Seymour biography). As for the blackmail, there are two surviving letters in which Shelley instructs his bankers to make payments to an unidentified person bearing the initials A.B. This I have woven into my own story.

  Mary fiercely resisted all attempts to have a biography of her husband written during her lifetime, having been prevented from taking on this task herself by her father-in-law, Sir Timothy. As Charles discovers, the accounts written during Mary’s lifetime by Hogg and Medwin are almost as revealing in what they don’t—or can’t—say, as in what they do.

  Though there is no suggestion that Sir Percy and Lady Shelley ever employed anyone to investigate or acquire Claire’s papers, Lady Shelley certainly became the “keeper of the flame” as far as the poet’s reputation was concerned. She constructed what can only be called a shrine to him at the family house in Sussex (on which mine is based), and became ruthless in her determination to expunge or destroy anything she considered to be inappropriate, or which detracted from the ethereal image she was determined to bequeath to posterity. She was particularly sensitive to references to Harriet Shelley, or accounts of Shelley’s elopement with Mary (whom she called “Madre”) that cast him in a poor light. It’s almost certain that many letters and papers were destroyed as a result, and Lady Shelley was also implicated in the printing, if not the production, of at least one forged letter, supposedly from Shelley. This letter repeats the accusation that Harriet lived with a groom named Smith and “descended the steps of prostitution,” and has Shelley accusing “that beastly viper” Eliza Westbrook of murdering her sister, in order to lay hands on their father’s money, though how Eliza was supposed to have done this is unclear.

  Late in life Claire offered to sell some of her papers to Sir Percy through an intermediary, only for him to reply that she was “no relation of mine.” Relations between the Shelleys and Claire deteriorated markedly in the wake of the incident with her niece at Field Pace which I describe, and after Mary’s death on 1 February 1851, Jane had the coffins of Godwin and his first wife exhumed from the Pancras cemetery and re-buried with their daughter in Bournemouth. The second Mrs Godwin was left behind; one can only imagine what Claire would have thought of that.

  Mary did indeed have a sudden series of fits at the very end of her life which left her in a coma, but there is no suggestion that this was the result of receiving a letter. These fits took place in late January 1851, though I have this happening a little earlier, to fit the sequence of events in my own story.

  CLAIRE CLAIRMONT

  As far as we know, Claire never completed a memoir of her life, but Daisy Hay has recently discovered fragments of what may have been an attempt at one, written in old age, in which Claire attacked both Byron and Shelley for their lies, cruelty and treachery; there is more on this fascinating find in Hay’s
book. Claire certainly kept journals at certain periods throughout her life, some of which may have been lost. She did not die in 1851, though she did write to Sir Percy to say she thought she was dying. In fact she lived on until 1879, the last survivor of a doomed and extraordinary generation. By then she was living with her niece Pauline in Florence, and Henry James’ The Aspern Papers is famously inspired by the relationship she developed there with an American called Edward Silsbee, who was desperate to see her papers, and hear her first-hand account of Shelley, Byron, and the rest. The St John’s Wood sections of A Fatal Likeness are a deliberate echo of—and homage to—the Henry James story. Before Claire died she asked to be buried with a shawl Shelley had given her sixty years before, which I have her wearing in my own novel.

  There has long been speculation as to the true nature of Claire’s relationship with Shelley. Many people believe that they were indeed lovers, even if only for a short period. I am not the first to wonder whether Claire became pregnant by Shelley in the spring of 1815—I develop this from a suggestion by Miranda Seymour, who speculates that Claire’s otherwise rather mysterious departure for Lynmouth might be explained in this way. This period is an example of one of those all-too-frequent and extremely puzzling periods when pages have been deliberately torn out of the journal Mary and Shelley were keeping at this time, which may in itself be revealing. If there was such a pregnancy, it surely must have ended in miscarriage or stillbirth, since it’s hard to believe Claire would have abandoned her child, given the passionate devotion she later exhibited for Allegra. Needless to say there are no references to any of this in the records that remain, and I have, of course, invented the episode in which Mary discovers the pregnancy.

  The relationship between the two stepsisters was problematic from the start, and for the best part of forty-five years they alternated between periods of comparative calm and outbreaks of wild hatred and recrimination. Claire once went so far as to say that the sight of Mary made her feel as if “the sickening crawling motion of a Deathworm had replaced the usual flow of Blood in my veins,” and to compare her to a woman who would enjoy the spectacle of the killing of a child, and shake the hand of the executioner afterwards. What, I wondered, could possibly have provoked so horrifying an image …

  SHELLEY

  Shelley’s personality and childhood were every bit as disturbed and disturbing as I have described them. He was indeed followed by Home Office agents for a time, and everything I have the fictitious Sir Henry Pearson say is based on fact. Shelley also had what we would now see as an unhealthy fixation with young girls; he contemplated both adopting and indeed “purchasing” them at various points in his life, for the purposes of “education” (his friend Joseph Merle called the latter project, to involve two girls of four or five years old, “more than absurd … horrible”).

  The idea of pursuit, and of a dark anti-type or likeness of the self, pervades Shelley’s poetry from a very early stage; as Richard Holmes observes, “ghostly following-figures” were to “haunt Shelley both in his life and in his writing.” Shelley became obsessed with the idea that he was being pursued by Robert Leeson, as irrational as that notion was. He was said to have seen his pursuer as late as 1821, in Pisa.

  Shelley did indeed encounter two men called Maddocks in the course of his life—one in Wales and one in Marlow—and I have woven my own Maddox into what was clearly a genuine and strange obsession the poet had with names. Thomas Love Peacock recalls that Harriet claimed Shelley saw nothing in Mary “but that her name was Mary, and not only Mary but Mary Wollstonecraft.” Thomas Medwin, likewise, says there was “some magic in the name of Harriet.” As for the unusual name Ianthe, it appears first in Queen Mab, then as Shelley’s choice for his first daughter’s name, and lastly—and intriguingly—as the name of the innocent young girl in Polidori’s story The Vampyre—a girl who tells the hero “supernatural tales,” and whom he is unable to save from a terrible death.

  Polidori wrote that story after the famous night of ghost-raising at the Villa Diodati. At one point during that evening Shelley did indeed react so violently to Byron’s reading of Christabel that Polidori administered ether to him in an attempt to calm him down. Under that influence Shelley talked, among other things, of how he had looked at Mary and thought of a woman with eyes for nipples. I have added the reference to an unknown pursuer, and a terrifying memory relating to a young girl, as well as the fact that he intended to write a story based upon it, which I have Mary Shelley later destroying. We know Shelley did begin a story that summer, possibly based on his own past, but it has been lost and we do not know how or why that happened, or what it was about.

  I am very far from being the first to suggest that Shelley, not his wife, was the author of Frankenstein, and he did, of course, initially allow the publisher John Murray to believe it was his own work. Even the most passionate advocates of Mary’s authorship will probably concede that nothing she wrote thereafter can match it, and that Shelley played a significant role in its composition—Mary talks of them discussing it together, and the manuscripts that survive show signs of his extensive corrections and amendments. As for Mary’s famous preface, and the tale she tells of the book’s genesis, Miranda Seymour points out that Polidori makes no mention of her announcing one morning she had “thought of a story,” and by the time her preface was written in 1831, Shelley, Byron, and Polidori were all dead, and she must have thought she risked no contradiction. Polidori’s account of that summer was not published until 1911.

  Richard Holmes refers to the incident at Tremadoc as one of the two great biographical mysteries in Shelley’s career. It has never been adequately explained, and even now it is not absolutely clear what happened, or why. One of the original inspirations for A Fatal Likeness was to create a narrative that might account for this incident, and my fictional version of Shelley’s past does indeed explain two of the more mysterious aspects of that night: the assailant’s threat to rape Shelley’s sister when the woman in the house was his sister-in-law, and the fact that a good many people believed at the time that the second attack that night—if not the first—was merely a hallucination prompted by Shelley’s seeing his own reflection in the window. The manager of the Tremadoc works, John Williams, was summoned to the scene the following morning and many years later his wife recounted that Shelley claimed to have seen “a man’s face on the drawing room window,” a phenomenon that was by then being referred to as “Shelley’s Ghost.” I recommend Holmes’ account for a fascinating description of how the episode was reported by both Shelley and Harriet, and by others who later investigated it.

  Needless to say, Ianthe and her brother are my invention, and there is no evidence at all that Shelley was involved in the drowning of a young girl when he was still at Oxford. However, some sort of incident of this kind would certainly explain a good deal, not least that strange and clearly horrifying memory of the windmill against the sky, and his preoccupation with drawing boats in the pages of his notebooks—some of which are sailed by a lone figure silhouetted in black. Images of some of these (including a page with large disembodied eyes) can be seen on the Shelley’s Ghost exhibition website, http://​shelleys​ghost.​bodleian.​ox.​ac.​uk.

  However, there is no doubt that Shelley did suffer some sort of breakdown in early 1811, the severity of which seems out of proportion to the two events we know happened at this time—his expulsion from the university, and his enforced separation from his first love, Harriet Grove. After leaving Oxford he spent a lonely and miserable time in London, and then stayed for a few weeks at Cwm Elan in Wales. Here he suffered what he called a “short but violent nervous illness”; he wrote a number of poems filled with wild thoughts of remorse, suicide, and despair, and—intriguingly for me—the same notebook he used that summer contains the lines about a girl in a “yawning watery grave” which I include in the paper I have Maddox discovering in Harriet’s pocket after her death. Shelley also made a number of enigmatic references to the
fact that meeting Harriet Westbrook saved or distracted him from “bitter memories,” which I have likewise included in the paper found on her body. The lines beginning “Full many a mind” were apparently written by Harriet herself, but aside from the lines from Christabel, all the other poetry in the novel is written by Shelley. The blue beads I have Shelley giving to his own daughter Ianthe are of course my invention, and there is no proof he wished to give her the second name Mary.

  One interesting footnote: E. R. Lovell points out that sometime before 1812 Thomas Medwin must have run through an inheritance of as much as three thousand pounds (the equivalent of at least one hundred thousand pounds today). Lovell can find no explanation other than extravagance and gambling, but I have fed this small fact into the fabric of my own story: If Shelley had needed money to buy the Smiths’ silence, he might well have turned to his cousin to obtain it. It was always very hard for people to refuse Shelley, and Medwin was later to say that this period of his life was poisoned by regrets.

  THE SUICIDES

  My account of these two sad deaths is based almost entirely on the facts as we know them, though there are some contradictions both in the contemporary accounts, and the one given by Claire some sixty years later. That said, we do know there was indeed a William Alder who dragged the ponds in Hyde Park, lodged in the same house as Harriet, and gave evidence at her inquest. Likewise the Godwins did pass on to Shelley a scurrilous rumour that his wife had been consorting with a number of different men, including a groom (in their version) by the name of Smith. I have, however, invented the idea that someone resembling Shelley was seen near Harriet’s lodgings, and even if Mary did not hound her by letter as I suggest, she certainly believed herself culpable in Harriet’s death—in 1839 she wrote in her journal that she believed many of her own sorrows were the atonement Fate demanded for the death of “poor Harriet.” In my story I imagine a far more detailed and damning confession, which Jane Shelley burns.