When John Mill stepped onto the scene, Harriet Taylor began to bloom. Friends and relations of the pair must have known that the growing attachment was more than mere friendship. And when Harriet finally told her husband that she was in love with another man, although he was devastated it could hardly have been a surprise. John Taylor asked his wife to give up her lover.
In the meantime, Harriet’s best friend, another lively young woman, Eliza Flower, was having relationship issues of her own. She and her sister Sarah were made the wards of William Johnson Fox, Harriet Taylor’s friend and the minister of her church. The sisters’ father, Benjamin Flower, had been an outspoken journalist and a friend of Fox’s. On Flower’s death, Fox became the guardian for both girls. Sarah, the elder sister, became a poet, married and more or less left the scene. Eliza was a musician and went on to become a reputable composer. After her sister left the Fox’s home, Eliza (known as Lizzie) became her guardian’s mistress. Fox still had a wife with whom he had children.
Fox and Lizzie attempted to keep their affair secret, at least within the confines of the family home. Mrs Fox was, understandably, very unhappy about the situation and moved into another part of the house. She also demanded Fox get a legal separation. Fox declined, stating that the process was too expensive. In desperation the poor woman went to her friends, who were also members of her husband’s congregation, and poured her heart out to them. The result was an enormous scandal. The church community divided between their minister, Fox, and his injured spouse. Harriet Taylor and John Mill took Fox’s side in the debate. It was thought that a clergyman accused of adultery (and with his ward) would have had a hard time to keep his post, but to the amazement of many of his friends Fox managed to keep his position. Fox and Lizzie found a new home, leaving his wife and children in the old one and, even though Fox said he couldn’t afford it, he had to pay them a settlement fee.
While Harriet and Mill had remained faithful supporters of Fox and Lizzie, they did not follow their friends’ example. Fox urged them to follow suit. If it was all right for him then why should they not do the same?
Mill may have been keen to set up house with Harriet but she didn’t feel she could just dump her loyal and loving husband. Perhaps for Harriet marriage was, after all, something more than a contract in which a woman lost all sense of self. She did care for her husband and she knew he was already hurting because she loved someone else. He was also a kind man and the couple had three children.
Harriet’s husband came up with a solution that may not have been the perfect answer but one that certainly gave them all a bit of relief. He had a house set up for Harriet in Kent, where she could live with her baby daughter; John Taylor and the two boys would visit her regularly. At other times, usually at the weekends, John Mill would visit her as well. Whether the two men were able to keep out of each other’s way is not known, but it must have worked to a reasonable extent.
Mill was not content. He wanted Harriet to himself and he wanted to show her off to his friends in society. Yet society would not tolerate it and their one excursion into the London social scene was not a success. While nothing was said during the party, the host pulled Mill aside afterwards and told him it was not done and would not be tolerated. Mill’s friendship with the host dissolved shortly afterwards. The couple did not try to go out again. Not only was it a social problem to been seen out and about with someone else’s wife, it was not in the best interests of an aspiring politician.
In 1838 Mill and Harriet were allowed a holiday together in Naples. Harriet’s husband had escorted her to Paris, supposedly to make it look like a respectable family vacation. After a short time in Paris with Harriet and young Helen (their daughter), John Taylor went home to his boys and business. The other John took up where the husband left off and he and Harriet, and Helen, spent three months together.
Mill always maintained that he and Harriet did not have a sexual relationship while she was still married to John Taylor. This may or may not have been the case. It does seem rather unlikely that the two of them, so in love and on their own, would not give in to a passion that had led to such odd living circumstances of the Taylor household. This way of living for the three of them went on for nearly twenty years and ended only with John Taylor’s death in 1849.
Harriet Taylor took two years to mourn her dead husband: leaving a respectable period before she married her lover was at least one last thing she could do for him. In 1851 Harriet threw aside her widow’s weeds and married John Mill. There were rumours flying around town that he had only stuck with Harriet for so long so that he could get his hands on the other man’s extensive wealth, but it seems he was really after Harriet, which, no doubt, John Taylor would have considered his most prized jewel.
The marriage made the pair respectable at last. They could, if they wanted to, appear at parties together, but they chose not to. They lived a very quiet life together, talking and writing, the kind of life Harriet had dreamed of. Her children certainly did not resent the marriage and became the couple’s only family, as all their other relatives had washed their hands of them.
In 1858 Harriet died. Mill lived on for at least a decade after her death, still writing and dedicating works to her. He did not marry again. Helen Taylor, Harriett’s daughter by her first husband, had always been a supporter of her mother and Mill and helped him with his work on women’s rights for fifteen years after her mother’s death, in fact until Mill’s death in 1873.
And what happened to Lizzie Flower and William Johnson Fox? They continued to live together until their deaths, which both occurred in 1846. It has been long said that the relationship was chaste, but this seems unlikely.
THE ROMANTIC POETS AND
A TALE OF TWO SISTERS
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Claire Clairmont were brought together when Mary’s widowed father married Claire’s mother who lived next door. The two girls were about the same age and both very young when their respective parents got together. What bound them together over the years was their mutual affection for the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. The friendship between the women waxed and waned. Claire was jealous of Mary’s and Shelley’s relationship, Mary was jealous of Claire spending time alone with Shelley. Claire wanted more attention: she wasn’t as pretty as Mary, she wasn’t as clever, and she was not the daughter of two revolutionary thinkers. The lives of these two sisters are inextricably entwined and to talk about one means including the other. As they were both mistresses of married men they are each suitably qualified to have their stories told here, but for the sake of clarity it will be told as one tale.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is probably most well known as the author of Frankenstein, she is probably next well known as the second wife of the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. She is also, as the first of her two names suggest, the daughter of the women’s rights advocate, Mary Wollstonecraft. As the daughter of Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, the radical philosopher, Mary was the heiress to some very avant-garde ideas and was brought up in an atmosphere of liberty and independence. Mary’s mother died shortly after her birth, leaving her and another daughter from a previous relationship, Fanny, for Godwin to bring up on his own. Despite Godwin’s ideals about love and marriage, he took a second wife, Mary Jane Vial, or Clairmont as she preferred to be called (it is unlikely that Mary Jane had ever been married to the man whose surname she used, although it may have belonged to one of her lovers). Mary Jane already had two children, a son and a daughter, both of whom were illegitimate. It is doubtful that Mary Jane was the wicked stepmother that Mary Godwin made her out to be; certainly Fanny Imlay, Mary’s half-sister on her mother’s side (and therefore unrelated by blood to either Godwin or Mary Jane) told her sister not to be cruel to their stepmother as she didn’t deserve it. Mary was the favourite child of her father, while his second wife was devoted to her own children. Poor Fanny was the one who was really left out, Godwin was not her natural father and Mary Jane was not her mother; Fanny wa
s the quietest and most conventional of the lot and the one who was left to look after both parents when Mary and Jane had disappeared with Shelley. As children, the three girls and Charles, the eldest of the two Clairmonts, got on very well together. Charles and Fanny (unrelated by blood) were so fond of Mary and Jane that when Godwin banned them from visiting the tainted Shelley household, the two of them would sneak out and do what they could to help their sisters.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
As a child and teenager Mary Godwin was precocious. She already had a published work by the time she was 12. She could travel long distances by herself and was at ease in new and mixed company. Growing up in her father’s house Mary was exposed to many of the philosophers, writers and leading thinkers of the day. She could converse just as happily with men older than her father or not much older than herself.
Jane Vial Clairmont – a name that she later changed to Claire Clairmont and became known by – was the illegitimate daughter of Mary Vial and an unknown man, that is until 2010 when it came to light that her natural father was John Lethbridge of Sandhill Park in Somerset (he was not, however, the father of Jane’s brother). Jane was an attractive girl, dark haired and buxom with a lovely singing voice. It would be unfair to say she was uneducated or dull, she was neither, but it may well be that her stepsister outshone her. Also, poor Jane did not have that one fascinating feature that Mary had: she was not the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had become an acquaintance of William Godwin while Mary was away in Scotland. Shelley and Godwin were busy hatching plans for accessing some of Shelley’s inheritance so that it could be lent to Godwin and relieve him of deep debt. When Godwin’s beautiful, clever, 16-year-old daughter burst onto the scene back in her father’s house in London, Shelley suddenly increased his visits.
Shelley had long been an admirer of Godwin’s work and, as an inexperienced teenager, he liked to let everyone know where he stood on the subject of marriage. To Shelley it was deemed an incarceration; it shackled couples together for a life sentence when all passion, if there ever had been any, had long since died. It is rather extraordinary then, that after having embarked on a steamy correspondence with Harriet Westbrook, a schoolmate of his sister – in response to her cries for help he had taken it upon his teenage self to rescue her – they eloped to Scotland and were married. England at the time would not allow a 16-year-old girl to marry without her parents’ permission.
On their way to the border, the young couple dropped in on Shelley’s friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg to ask for some money. During their month-long honeymoon in Edinburgh, Hogg discovered that against all the odds, Mr and Mrs Shelley seemed as though they might make excellent lifelong companions. Harriet was keen to impress her husband and knuckled down to a serious regime of study. They read, wrote, translated and talked. Shelley was keen for all his women to learn foreign languages: Greek, Latin, French, Italian and German. Harriet was no exception.
Back in England the repercussions of a hasty marriage on no income began to assert itself. Although Shelley would inherit handsomely on his father’s death, until that time he was as dependent on his father’s goodwill as any profligate son. He installed his new bride in lodgings and went off to Sussex to try to get access to some of his inheritance through the intervention of his uncle. During his absence Harriet was left in the care of Thomas Hogg who, as a friend of Shelley’s, also subscribed to his philosophy on free love. With Shelley conveniently out of the way Hogg made a move on Harriet, who was appalled. On Shelley’s return she told him what had happened. Shelley, preferring to take his new bride’s side, wrote to Hogg chastising him for trying to seduce Harriet, telling his friend he thought his actions to be sneaky and underhand.
In order that the couple’s first child, a daughter, Ianthe, should be considered legitimate, Shelley and Harriet underwent a second marriage in case their Scottish vows were not considered legal. For a man who didn’t believe in marriage, marrying once seemed a bit hypocritical, but then to marry the same woman a second time, so that their daughter should be legitimate, seems extra hypocritical. Shelley’s supposed disgust at marriage was for those very social reasons that he was now giving in to: social status and acceptance.
Just prior to his second marriage to Harriet, Shelley had met Mary Godwin. For Shelley it was love at first sight and may well have been for Mary as well. In contrast to the bright young, intellectual attractions of Mary Godwin was the deadening pall of marriage and fatherhood. Shelley was tiring of his young wife and her demands for attention and stability. Shelley saw this as a stifling of his creative faculties and began to resent Harriet and Ianthe. However, the Godwin’s were not very happy with the state of affairs when it became obvious that Mary was falling for Shelley, and vice versa.
The Godwins were liberal thinkers. William and Mary had explored ideas about marriage and what it meant for women’s rights and the freedom of the individual. However, when it became known to Godwin that his favourite offspring was falling in love with a man who was not only married but had one child and another on the way, his thoughts on free love began to waiver. It was one thing to talk about these things and another to witness the realities that accompanied them. While Shelley and Mary Godwin were relishing their new and profound love, Harriet, the abandoned pregnant spouse, was suffering extremely from hurt and fear of being left alone with two children to provide for. Without being too judgemental towards Shelley and Mary Godwin, it is hard not to think that by following one’s own passions at the cost of another’s the rights of that other person are diminished. In short, William Godwin forbade his daughter to continue relations with Shelley, and the young poet was banned from visiting the Godwin household.
Trying to put an embargo on Mary was futile. She, aided by her stepsister Jane Clairmont (later known as Claire Clairmont), connived to see Shelley frequently outside the house. One of their favourite trysting places was the graveyard of the Old St Pancras Church where Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Godwin’s mother, was buried. It is suggested that it was in the shade of her mother’s grave that Mary lost her virginity to Shelley and conceived their first child. Jane was the lookout as well as the supposed chaperone. It has long been speculated as to what young Jane got out of the adventure. It is possible that she was in love with Shelley herself, or that she longed for a similar grand passion. Perhaps she was just bored or lonely. Whichever it was, Jane Clairmont became an almost permanent attachment to Mary and Shelley throughout their lives.
Mary Shelley
In 1814, towards the end of July, the two sisters eloped with Shelley. He had a hackney coach wait at the end of the street at about 5 a.m. Two cloaked figures slipped out of the house in Skinner Street and boarded the vehicle with the waiting Shelley inside. He had left his wife, pregnant with their second child, and had arranged for himself, Mary and Jane to flee to Dover so they could take a boat to Calais, well out of reach of angry fathers or abandoned spouses. When Jane was an old lady she wrote that she had gone with Mary and Shelley only because she was tricked into it and had been very reluctant to continue with the journey when she discovered what they were truly about. This seems highly unlikely and the story would appear to be Jane’s attempts to bring a semblance of respectability to her own youth.
Shelley’s constant problem was lack of money and he certainly had none to spare when he ran away with the Godwin girls. On arriving in Dover he had to break it to them that he couldn’t afford a proper passage for them to travel to Calais and the three of them ended up making the crossing in an open boat. Mary was seasick, which Shelley found touching and revelled in holding her in his arms for the entire journey. It is possible that she was already pregnant by this time and the seasickness was compounded by morning sickness.
The trio hadn’t been in Calais for a day before they’d been tracked down by a furious Mrs Godwin in pursuit of her errant daughter Jane. Mary had made her own bed and could stay in it at far as Jane�
��s mother was concerned; the two had never got along. But Jane was not going to be allowed to sink off the social pages through her sister’s indiscretions. Jane at first agreed to go home with her mother, and perhaps she should have, it might well have prevented a life of heartache to come. Before they left for Dover Jane had changed her mind more than once. In the end she stayed with Mary and Shelley (which rather gives the lie to her later claim that she had been duped into the trip) while Mrs Godwin returned home a very angry and bitter woman.
Claire Clairmont
When the elopement was discovered in England Harriet was absolutely distraught. Shelley answered her pleading letters with self-righteous ones full of indignation and blame. He claimed Harriet was being clingy and selfish, denying him the happiness of being with his one true love. She should, knowing his views on marriage and free love, be pleased for him. Harriet soon gave up on getting him back and moved home to her father with her two children, a boy and a girl.
Other Women Page 10