Vindication

by Lyndall Gordon

  He had ‘no doubts of the evils of marriage,–Mrs Wollstonecraft reasons too well for that’. It would have been from Shelley that Mary, five years younger, learnt her mother’s theory. Godwin was aghast at Shelley’s blithe proposal to make off with his teenage daughter. Godwin argued for marital fidelity, he thought convincingly, ever ready to believe that reason must carry the day. But the lovers, accompanied by Jane–Fanny was still in Wales–stole away at 5 a.m. on 28 July, and made for France. The girls wore black silk dresses, hoping to look grown-up, Mary in fact already pregnant and rather wan.

  After a stormy Channel crossing she saw ‘the sun rise broad, red, and cloudless over the pier’ at Calais, and stared at women in high bonnets with their hair pulled back. As they travelled on through France, they were appalled by the pillage of war: ‘a plague,’ Mary wrote, ‘which in his pride, man inflicts on his fellow’. Like her mother twenty years earlier, Mary Godwin observed brutalised faces as well as roofless houses, gardens covered with the white dust of torn-down cottages, and sullen, filthy lodgings. All this she set down in a History of a Six Weeks Tour, modelled on Mary Wollstonecraft’s Travels. Her party carried Wollstonecraft’s writings and Godwin’s Memoirs in their bags. As they travelled by boat along the Rhine from Basle to Baden, Shelley read the Travels aloud.

  ‘This is one of my very favorite Books,’ Jane enthused in her new journal on 30 August 1814. ‘The language is so very flowing & Eloquent & it is altogether a beautiful Poem…The Rhine was extremely rapid–the Waves borrowed the divine colours of the sky.’

  Mrs Godwin did not blame Jane for running away. She blamed Mary Godwin, in a moan to one of her authors, Lady Mount Cashell (as she continued to call her). From now on, Mrs Godwin set up Mary as the cause of everything that went wrong in her life and prime target for her rage. Jane, won over to the cause of free love, refused to go home, and to everyone outside that home became from this time ‘Clara’, ‘Clare’, ‘Clary’ and eventually ‘Claire’. Mrs Godwin was no match for Shelley’s high-flown eloquence backed by the starry shade of Mary Wollstonecraft. In truth, his self-righteousness over his susceptibility to a succession of women shows how far he mistook Wollstonecraft who never practised free love. Claire, aged seventeen, was a convert to this misapprehension when she approached Byron in the spring of 1816: she told him she believed in nature and detested marriage, reducing Wollstonecraft’s reseeding of women’s nature to an offer of guilt-free sex. ‘I shall ever remember the gentleness of your manners & the wild originality of your countenance,’ she wrote to her lover afterwards.

  In her sexual freedom did Claire model herself, not on the real Wollstonecraft, but on a dead celebrity distorted by report? What some see in Claire Clairmont is a perpetuation of a contemporary view of Wollstonecraft: a caricature of rash passion. Fanny, in contrast, had a deep-souled sense of her mother’s ‘superior being’. In 1816 Fanny Blood’s brother George returned to London after an absence of twenty-six years. ‘Everything he has told me of my mother has encreased my love and admiration of her memory,’ Fanny wrote to Mary and Shelley. ‘I have determined never to live to be a disgrace to such a mother.’ Only an inward ‘revolution’ could overcome her ‘faults’–her ‘torpor’–and so find beings ‘to love and esteem me’. Fanny’s depression is usually explained as an inheritance from her mother, though her status in the home is cause enough. This inferiority was reinforced by her exclusion from the Shelley party, underlined by her stepmother’s report that Fanny was their ‘laughing stock’–intended to detach Fanny further from her sister.

  Fanny did defend herself to Mary and Shelley, who had yielded to Claire’s wish to follow Byron to Geneva.

  ‘Mary gave a great deal of pain the day I parted from you,’ Fanny wrote on 29 May 1816, ‘believe my dear friend’s that my attatchment to you has grown out of your individual worth, and talents, & perhaps also because I found the world deserted you I loved you the more. What ever faults I may have I am not sordid or vulgar. I love you for yourselves alone[.] I endeavour to be as frank with you as possible that you may understand my real character.’

  Mary brushed off Fanny’s pain with another reproach. A silence preceded Fanny’s apology, on 29 July: ‘I plead guilty to the charge of having written in some degree in an ill humour.’ She offered a summary of current events–‘mixed up with as little spleen as possible’. Spleen. Indolence. Torpor. Ill-humour. These were the words for what Fanny called ‘the dreadful state of mind I generally labour under & which I in vain endeavour to get rid of’.

  Quickly, she shuts this off, and moves to the case for the unemployed in the riots following the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. She sees that talk of a change of ministers ‘can effect no good; it is a change of the whole system of things that is wanted’. She relays a conversation with Robert Owen, the Lanarkshire cotton manufacturer, factory reformer and pioneer trade unionist. ‘He told me the other day that he wished our mother were living[,] as he had never before met with a person who thought so exactly as he did–or who would have so warmly and zealously entered into his plans.’ Fanny was sceptical of Owen’s optimism. His expectation ‘to make the rich give up their possessions and live in a state of equality is too romantic to be believed’. Fanny takes a dim view of Owen’s rhetoric, and interjects with stuttering conviction: ‘I hate, and am am sick, at heart at the misery I see my fellow beings suffering–but I own I should not like to live to see the extinction of all genius, talent, and elevated generous feeling in great Britain, which I conceive to be the natural consequence of Mr Owens plan…’ Here, Fanny demonstrates her own more sophisticated grasp of Mary Wollstonecraft’s politics.

  Fanny’s letter slips in a covert plea to join her sister. ‘I had rather live all my life with the Genevese as you and Jane describe than live in London with the most bril[l]iant beings that exist.’ Contrite, Mary bought Fanny a Swiss watch. It was a gesture–no more; Mary did not offer Fanny a home despite the comfort Fanny could offer. (A year and a half before, in London, Mary’s first baby had died. While Claire and Shelley had skipped off as usual to town, Mary notes in her Journals, ‘Fanny comes, wet through; she dines, and stays the evening; talk about many things…’) So it happened that a caring sister was ousted by a careless stepsister who confessed to Byron: ‘I cannot say I had so great an affection for [Fanny] as might be expected.’ Though Claire and Mary quarrelled, Fanny was never preferred, for Shelley had come to need Claire, her vivacity and sense of adventure a complement to Mary’s kindred spirit. This jostling but (for Shelley) fertile unit of Mary and Claire was therefore closed to Fanny, who had been the focus of Shelley’s attention before and during his first visits to Skinner Street. Yet Fanny too continued to love poetry, and asked Shelley to send his work, saying in 1816, ‘It is only the poets who are eternal benefactors of their fellow-creatures’–a source for Shelley’s famous words in 1821: ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’

  Fanny continued to worry about Godwin’s poverty, and saw herself as an extra burden. Imlay never showed any wish to know her, and she remained as unaware as her mother of a flourishing clan of Imlays across the Atlantic. If this were a romance, the modest English girl would have arrived on the doorstep of the Imlay Mansion in Allentown, New Jersey, and lived happily ever after. In actuality a harder fate awaited. In the spring of 1816, when she was almost twenty-two, Aunt Everina proposed that Fanny join her and ‘Aunt Bishop’, by now in their fifties. Everina detailed her ‘sufferings’ and Aunt Bishop’s poor health. Hardly an enticing prospect, but Fanny expressed a suitable gratitude, and hoped, she added humbly, to deserve her aunt’s affection as long as she lived. Fanny could now contemplate, as she put it to Mary, ‘my unhappy life’ as her aunts’ drudge.

  The Wollstonecraft sisters arrived in London later in the summer, and it’s possible that by the time they departed on 24 September, it was settled that Fanny would leave Godwin’s household and join their schools in Dublin. Fanny may have met Shelley on a vis
it to London–if so, she would have relayed her aunts’ plans and her own reluctance. The Shelley party had its own troubles. During the second half of 1816, they were living in Bath to keep Claire’s pregnancy a secret from her London circle. In Bath she styled herself ‘Mrs Clairmont’. Unfortunately, Shelley’s withdrawal of financial help from Godwin in late September moved Fanny to write to Mary, on 3 October, to defend Godwin’s philosophy that those with means are obligated to support worthy ones who are in want.

  ‘Forgive me if I have expressed myself unkindly,’ she wrote. ‘My heart is warm in your cause–and I am anxious most anxious that papa should feel for you as I do both for your own, and his sake–I have written in a great hurry and have not had time to consider and round my sentences–But I am so direct in all my thoughts and opinions that I cannot but believe every one must like frankness as much as myself.’ The following day Mary received this ‘stupid letter from F’.

  Fanny was trapped between warring Godwins, their love conditional on her serving their wills. Four days later, on 8 October 1816, Fanny passed through Bath, on a westward journey. She had dressed carefully in a blue striped skirt and white bodice, with a brown pelisse and brown hat. She took the Swiss watch Mary had given her, and put a meagre eight shillings–not enough for a passage to Dublin–in her reticule. Next to her skin, she wore her mother’s stays.

  There’s a gap in what’s known when Fanny stops in Bath. What happens during that hour or two when she arrives by the morning mail in the fashionable spa where her mother had served long ago as a companion and where her sister is now living? She has wished to see Mary, for that very day Mary receives word from Fanny, presumably about her arrival. Godwin, who banned all contact, is too far away to know. But Mary can’t invite her sister to their lodgings because she can’t reveal that Claire is six months pregnant. And Mary may still be annoyed with ‘stupid’ Fanny whose compassion for Godwin can’t fail to touch a daughter who has also worshipped him–and who, in his eyes, is disgraced and banished. Fanny has taken her place as prime daughter. Not Mary, then, but Shelley–possibly–comes to see Fanny at the inn. There’s no invitation to join him, no alternative on offer. This would have been her last hope of rescue from the ‘sufferings’ Aunt Everina has invited her to share.

  From her next stop in Bristol, she sends warning notes to Shelley (to come and see her buried) and to Godwin (‘I depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove’), but she doesn’t say where she is. Both, alarmed, set out to trace her. Fanny, in the meantime, has taken a coach to Swansea. There, at the Mackworth Arms, she sips some tea. By now it is night, and she asks for her candle. By its dim light she writes:

  I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as

  Before she swallows the overdose of laudanum or before oblivion overtakes her, she thinks of those she loves, and to save further trouble, she tears off her name and lets the candle consume it.

  Next morning, Fanny’s body was discovered. It was not identified, not the stockings marked ‘G’, nor the stays marked ‘MW’. Godwin gave out that Fanny had gone to join her aunts in Dublin. Privately, he told Mrs Gisborne (who had looked after Fanny and baby Mary) ‘that the three girls were all equally in love with [Shelley] and that the eldest put an end to her existence owing to the preference given to her younger sister’. This has to be a simplification, distancing the suicide from any responsibility on Godwin’s part, though it may explain why he ‘half-expected it’.

  Shelley recalled their last meeting in ‘On Fanny Godwin’ (1816):

  Friend, had I known thy secret grief

  Her voice did quiver as we parted

  Yet knew I not that heart was broken

  From which it came–and I departed

  Heeding not the words then spoken–

  Misery, oh Misery,

  This world is all too wide for thee!

  On the back of the fragment is a sketch, maybe a design for a grave under a tree and surrounded by urns with flowers. On this Shelley has scrawled: ‘It is not my fault–it is not to be alluded to.’

  This was not the only casualty (in whatever sense) of Shelley’s and Mary’s union. Two months later Harriet Shelley, who thought her husband a ‘monster’, drowned herself and her unborn child in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Shelley was more distressed by Fanny’s death, he confided to Byron. Another poetic fragment pictures Fanny as the child reunited with Mary Wollstonecraft on her return to Gothenburg from Norway in the summer of 1795:

  Thy little footsteps on the sands

  Of a remote and lonely shore–…

  The laugh of mingled love & glee

  When one returned to gaze on thee

  These footsteps on the sands are fled

  Thine eyes are dark–thy hands are cold

  And she is dead–and thou art dead–

  Mary, her sister, dressed in mourning, reread their mother’s Rights of Woman, and continued to work on her novel Frankenstein. Did Fanny’s ‘unfortunate’ birth strike Mary and Claire, who were bearing children outside marriage? Mary, with a year-old son, William (‘Will-Mouse’)–called after her father, despite his refusal to see her–now wished to be married, and Shelley consented out of consideration for her, much as Godwin had consented, long ago, to marry Mary’s mother.

  Byron, who was married already (though separated from his wife), chose to believe that only a bad girl from a Godless background would have offered him her virginity.

  Claire protested, ‘I cannot pardon those who…believe because I have unloosed myself from the trammels of customs & opinion that I do not possess within[,] a severer monitor than either of these.’

  Byron dismissed Claire’s novel ‘The Ideot’, about a Robinson Crusoe sort of girl, isolated from social conditioning. Acting on impulses that arise from herself alone, Claire’s heroine flouts custom, yet is filled with affections and sympathies. The narrator, an old clergyman, attributes the girl’s errors to a neglected education, but sophisticated readers were expected to grasp what looks like a gender experiment in authenticity. Byron’s derision led Claire to kill her work as ‘that hateful novel thing I wrote’.

  Some of Byron’s women were of his own class, protected by money and privilege, and accustomed to casual adultery. Claire, by contrast, had been a virgin in love with a jaded Don Juan. Ten years later she looked back on herself as the ‘victim’ of ten minutes’ happy passion that had withered any other possibility.

  If passion withered, other kinds of love flourished. She had two near-perfect attachments, the first to Shelley who opened her mind to a freedom that breathed through his looks and manners with a beauty, she said, no picture could express. Claire lived out an unconventional scenario Wollstonecraft had conceived but could not put into practice: her plan to join the Fuselis. Claire’s triumph was her sustained closeness to a protector-genius without the drawbacks of being his wife. Mary was depleted by sick and dying children, and also had to bear Shelley’s romantic enthusiasms for other women, his irresponsibility, and the self-centredness that left Mary to her griefs, then blamed her for coldness. Mary saw herself rather as a person whose eager sympathies entangled her, and her love for women friends became intense in later years. Her letters have a beating pulse like her mother’s, a similar playfulness and candour, with a learned edge from her Godwinian education. Mary Shelley was always political, an opponent of tyranny and monarchy and a supporter of individual liberty, but she was also open to rarer influences: her mother’s ‘greatness of soul’ and Shelley’s search for knowledge.

  Shelley had encouraged her to expand her idea for Frankenstein, conceived on Lake Geneva when she was nineteen. Dr Frankenstein, a solitary scientist
, expects to invent a man, and finds that he’s made a monster. This killer is the unnatural son of an unnatural father, for Frankenstein has detached himself from domestic ties, relying on ingenuity alone. In dramatising this point, the young author confirms her mother’s case for parental nurture, together with Wollstonecraft’s attack on ‘the cold workings of the brain’. Frankenstein is an irresponsible creator who abandons his creature. The monster’s testimony is similar to that of the criminal Jemima in The Wrongs of Woman: deprived of domestic affections, Jemima perceives herself ‘an outcast from society’. ‘I hated mankind,’ she says. ‘Whoever acknowledged me to be a fellow-creature?’ It’s now thought that the primary pattern underlying feminist writing ‘is that of Frankenstein’, a world in which cerebral man and monster are one. The oneness of uncaring creator and killer-creature aims at ‘refashioning an entire sex’. The uncaring might of democracy corrupting its hideous progeny and the monster-Moslem who is careless of life, reflect each other’s fantasy of power, bearing out the continuing relevance of Mary Shelley’s fable where the natural alternative of maternal nurture has no public status. Its very absence from the political arena, the horrors its absence inflicts, call for an alternative order that can collapse the boundaries between the domestic and the cerebral–in a sense, the lost but retrievable possibilities of the Godwin–Wollstonecraft union.

  Claire owned to envy of Mary’s achievement, but found that envy ‘yields when I consider that she is a woman and will prove in time…an argument in our favour. How I delight in a lovely woman of strong & cultivated intellect.’

  Shelley praised the recessed stories and framing plot of exploration. They seemed to emanate from the buried nature of the author. ‘What art thou?’ he asks at the time she completes Frankenstein in 1817. ‘I know but dare not speak.’ It is something for the future to define. Her distinction burns ‘internally’, seen in eyes ‘deep and intricate from the workings of the mind’; in ‘thy gentle speech, a prophecy/ Is whispered’. This alertness, his wish to know women worth knowing, made Shelley irresistible–irreplaceable–to les Goddesses.