Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

by Charlotte Gordon

  Copyright © 2015 by Charlotte Gordon

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Published in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson, a member of The Random House Group, London.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Gordon, Charlotte.

  Romantic outlaws : the extraordinary lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley / by Charlotte Gordon.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4000-6842-5

  eBook ISBN 978-0-8129-9651-7

  1. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759–1797. 2. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797–1851. I. Title.

  PR5841.W8Z716 2015 828.609—dc23

  [B] 2014014841

  www.atrandom.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman

  v3.1

  memory of my mother has always been the pride and delight of my life.

  —MARY SHELLEY

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1 A DEATH AND A BIRTH [1797–1801]

  CHAPTER 2 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE EARLY YEARS [1759–1774]

  CHAPTER 3 MARY GODWIN: CHILDHOOD AND A NEW FAMILY [1801–1812]

  CHAPTER 4 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: HOXTON AND BATH [1774–1782]

  CHAPTER 5 MARY GODWIN: SCOTLAND, AN “EYRY OF FREEDOM” [1810–1814]

  CHAPTER 6 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: INDEPENDENCE [1783–1785]

  CHAPTER 7 MARY GODWIN: “THE SUBLIME AND RAPTUROUS MOMENT” [1814]

  CHAPTER 8 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: ON THE EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS [1785–1787]

  CHAPTER 9 MARY GODWIN: THE BREAK [1814]

  CHAPTER 10 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: LONDON [1786–1787]

  CHAPTER 11 MARY GODWIN: LONDON AND BISHOPSGATE [1814–1815]

  CHAPTER 12 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE FIRST VINDICATION [1787–1791]

  CHAPTER 13 MARY GODWIN: “MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW” [1816]

  CHAPTER 14 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A REVOLUTION IN FEMALE MANNERS” [1791–1792]

  CHAPTER 15 MARY GODWIN: FITS OF FANTASY [1816]

  CHAPTER 16 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: PARIS [1792–1793]

  CHAPTER 17 MARY SHELLEY: RETRIBUTION [1816–1817]

  CHAPTER 18 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: IN LOVE [1792]

  CHAPTER 19 MARY SHELLEY: MARLOW AND LONDON [1817–1818]

  CHAPTER 20 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “MOTHERHOOD” [1793–1794]

  CHAPTER 21 MARY SHELLEY: ITALY, “THE HAPPY HOURS” [1818–1819]

  CHAPTER 22 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: ABANDONED [1794–1795]

  CHAPTER 23 MARY SHELLEY: “OUR LITTLE WILL” [1818–1819]

  CHAPTER 24 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “SURELY YOU WILL NOT FORGET ME” [1795]

  CHAPTER 25 MARY SHELLEY: “THE MIND OF A WOMAN” [1819]

  CHAPTER 26 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: RETURN HOME [1795–1796]

  CHAPTER 27 MARY SHELLEY: “WHEN WINTER COMES” [1819–1820]

  CHAPTER 28 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A HUMANE AND TENDER CONSIDERATION” [1796]

  CHAPTER 29 MARY SHELLEY: PISA [1820–1821]

  CHAPTER 30 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: IN LOVE AGAIN [1796]

  CHAPTER 31 MARY SHELLEY: “LEAGUE OF INCEST” [1821–1822]

  CHAPTER 32 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “I STILL MEAN TO BE INDEPENDENT” [1797]

  CHAPTER 33 MARY SHELLEY: “IT’S ALL OVER” [1822]

  CHAPTER 34 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A LITTLE PATIENCE” [1797]

  CHAPTER 35 MARY SHELLEY: “THE DEEPEST SOLITUDE” [1823–1828]

  CHAPTER 36 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE MEMOIR [1797–1801]

  CHAPTER 37 MARY SHELLEY: A WRITING LIFE [1832–1836]

  CHAPTER 38 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE WRONGS [1797–1798]

  CHAPTER 39 MARY SHELLEY: RAMBLINGS [1837–1848]

  CHAPTER 40 MARY AND MARY: HEROIC EXERTIONS

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE: PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY’S LETTERS

  SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

  IMAGE CREDITS

  OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  London, England, on August 30, 1797, a newborn baby fought for her life. Small and weak, she was not expected to survive. Her mother struggled to deliver the afterbirth, but she was so exhausted a doctor was called in to help. He cut away the placenta but had not washed his hands, unwittingly introducing the germs of one of the most dangerous diseases of the era—childbed or puerperal fever. Ten days later, the mother died, and, to the surprise of everyone, the baby lived. For the rest of her life, she would mourn her mother’s loss, dedicating herself to the preservation of her mother’s legacy and blaming herself for her death.

  This is one of the most famous birth stories in literary history. The dead woman’s name was Mary Wollstonecraft. Five years earlier, Wollstonecraft had scandalized the public by publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—a denunciation of the unfair laws and prejudices that restricted eighteenth-century women’s lives. The daughter she left behind would become the legendary Mary Shelley, the nineteen-year-old author of Frankenstein, a novel so famous it needs no introduction.

  Yet even those who are familiar with Wollstonecraft and Shelley are still sometimes startled to learn they were mother and daughter. For generations, Wollstonecraft’s premature death led many scholars to overlook her impact on Shelley; they viewed mother and daughter as unrelated figures representing different philosophical stances and literary movements. Shelley appears in the epilogues of biographies of Wollstonecraft, and Wollstonecraft in the introductory pages of lives of Shelley.

  Romantic Outlaws is the first full-length exploration of both women’s lives. But long overdue though it is, this book is deeply indebted to the work of earlier scholars. Without their efforts, it would have been impossible to explore Wollstonecraft’s contributions to Shelley’s life and work, or Shelley’s obsession with her mother.

  This might sound like an odd proposition. How could a mother who died ten days after she gave birth have had such an inordinate impact on her daughter? But strange though it may seem, Wollstonecraft’s influence on her daughter was profound. Her radical philosophy shaped Shelley, sparking her determination to be someone and to create a masterpiece in her own right. Throughout her life, Shelley read and reread her mother’s books, often learning their words by heart. A large portrait of Wollstonecraft hung on the wall of Mary Shelley’s childhood home. The girl studied it, comparing herself to her mother and hoping to find similarities. Mary Shelley’s father and his friends held up Wollstonecraft as a paragon of virtue and love, praising her genius, bravery, intelligence, and originality.

  Steeped as she was in her mother’s ideas, and raised by a father who never got over his loss, Mary Shelley yearned to live according to her mother’s principles, to fulfill her mother’s aspirations, and to reclaim Wollstonecraft from the shadows of history, becoming, if not Wollstonecraft herself, then her ideal daughter. Over and over again, she reimagined the past and recast the future in a doomed effort to resurrect the dead, gazing back at what she could never regain but sought to duplicate in very different times.

  As
for Wollstonecraft, though she shared only ten days with her child, she was profoundly influenced by the idea of children. She had directed most of her life’s work toward the next generation, dreaming of what life might be like for them and how she could help them inherit a more just world. Wollstonecraft’s earliest works, written before her famous Vindication, were education manuals, books about how to teach children, and what to teach children, especially daughters. Condemned by her own era, she turned to those who would come after, drawing inspiration from those who might read her books once she was dead, never once dreaming that one of her most important readers would turn out to be the daughter she left behind.

  Romantic Outlaws alternates between the lives of Wollstonecraft and Shelley, allowing readers to hear the echo of Wollstonecraft in Shelley’s letters, journals, and novels, and demonstrating how often Wollstonecraft addressed herself to the future, to the daughter she planned to raise. There are many comprehensive biographies of both women, written by some of the most distinguished literary scholars of the preceding generations, but Romantic Outlaws sheds new light on both Wollstonecraft and Shelley by exploring the intersections between their lives. And the intersections are many.

  Both mother and daughter attempted to free themselves from the stranglehold of polite society, and both struggled to balance their need for love and companionship with their need for independence. They braved the criticism of their peers to write works that took on the most volatile issues of the day. Brave, passionate, and visionary, they broke almost every rule there was to break. Both had children out of wedlock. Both fought against the injustices women faced and both wrote books that revolutionized history.

  Their achievements are all the more remarkable because they lived during a time when women were considered incapable of directing their own lives. Although it was a revolutionary era—Wollstonecraft was alive during both the American and French Revolutions, and Shelley came of age at the height of Romanticism—most of their contemporaries considered the concept of women’s rights to be as absurd as the rights of chimpanzees. In fact, chimpanzees (and other animals) would gain legal protection in 1824, twenty years before the first law was passed that limited, but did not prohibit, violence against women. Experts preached that women were irrational and weak. Girls were taught to submit to their brothers, fathers, and husbands. Wives could not own property. Except in very rare circumstances, they could not initiate divorce. Children were the father’s property. Not only was it legal for a husband to beat his wife, but men were encouraged to keep women in check, punishing any behavior they regarded as unruly. If a man failed in these duties, he was considered the subject of petticoat government, his manhood called into question. If a woman tried to escape from a cruel or violent husband, she was considered an outlaw, and her husband had the legal right to imprison her.

  Not surprisingly, in such a climate, critics derided the work of both mother and daughter. Their contemporaries ridiculed and abused them, calling them whores and worse. Even their own families rejected them. To their enemies, they were like bolts of lightning, destructive and unpredictable. Given the hostility they faced, their story is one of courage and inspiration. Wollstonecraft and Shelley weathered poverty, hatred, loneliness, and exile, as well as the slights of everyday life—the insults and gossip, the silences and turned backs—in order to write words they were not supposed to write and live lives they were not supposed to live. They sustained themselves by dreaming of the day, long after they were dead, when readers would agree with their ideas: that women are equal to men; that all people deserve the same rights; that human reason and the capacity for love can reform the world; that the great enemies of happiness are ignorance, poverty, cruelty, and tyranny; and that every person is entitled to justice and freedom. Particularly the last. To both mother and daughter, freedom was what mattered most, the key that would unlock the gates of change.

  “The epitaph on my mother’s tomb being my primer and my spelling book. I learned to read.” From Mrs. Leicester’s School, published by William Godwin. (illustration ill.1)

  CHAPTER 1

  A DEATH AND A BIRTH

  [ 1797–1801 ]

  a sunny afternoon in late August 1801, a few miles north of London, three-year-old Mary Godwin held her father’s hand as they walked through the gates of St. Pancras churchyard. They were on their way to visit her mother’s grave in a cemetery as familiar to Mary as her own home. She and her father, William, came here almost every day. The churchyard was more like a pasture than a burial ground. The grass grew in uneven clumps; old gravestones lay toppled on the ground, and a low rail separated the grounds from the open countryside.

  William Godwin did not think it was odd to teach his small daughter to read from her mother’s tombstone. And Mary was eager to learn anything her father had to teach. In her eyes, he was “greater, and wiser, and better…than any other being.” He was also all she had left.

  She began by tracing each letter with her fingers: “Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.” Except for the “Wollstonecraft,” this name was the same as hers: MARY GODWIN. One dead. One alive. This gravestone could be her own. She yearned to be reunited with her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, the woman she had never known, but whom she loved all the same.

  Mary Godwin had been born on August 30, 1797, at the end of a month when a comet had burned through the London skies. People all over England had speculated about its meaning. A happy omen, her parents had thought. They could not know that Wollstonecraft would die of childbed fever ten days later, leaving behind a daughter so small and weak it seemed likely she would soon join her mother. But under the care of Wollstonecraft’s dear friend Maria Reveley, Mary gradually grew stronger, and by the time she was a month old, though still undersized, she howled at all hours of the day and night. Her sweet-tempered half sister, three-year-old Fanny, Wollstonecraft’s illegitimate child by another man, tried to calm her tears, but there was nothing anyone could do. Mary would not be soothed.

  Godwin asked his friend William Nicholson, an expert in physiognomy, to measure Mary’s cranium and facial features, but the baby shrieked through the entire examination, leading an exasperated Nicholson to report, “The mouth was too much employed to be well observed.” However, he told Godwin he saw evidence of “considerable memory and intelligence” as well as a “quick sensibility.” The only potential negative, Nicholson said, noting her screams, was that she could be “petulant in resistance.”

  The Polygon, Somers Town, in 1850. (illustration ill.2)

  Godwin, Fanny, and Mary lived at No. 29 the Polygon, a semicircular block of tall Georgian homes in Somers Town, about two miles north of St. Paul’s.

  The Polygon has long since been torn down, and though a plaque on Werrington Street says that the Godwins once lived here, it is an act of the imagination to picture them behind St. Pancras today. Hospitals, new developments, and council estates have replaced the shops, rose gardens, and cow sheds of Mary’s childhood. In the early 1800s, her home was deep in the country. A dirt path led through a white turnstile into Clarendon Square, where thirty-two terraced buildings had been constructed as an early experiment in suburban living. No. 29 had a large parlor with a marble mantelpiece where Godwin received guests and where Mary and Fanny learned to be quiet during grown-up conversations. The family ate their suppers upstairs in the dining room and could stand outside on a wrought iron balcony to gaze out over the wild heaths, Hampstead and Highgate. From her bedroom window on the top floor, Mary could see the River Fleet and the narrow lane that led to her mother’s grave.

  Spacious and elegant, these homes were affordable because they were far from the fashionable West End, but for the Godwins and many like them, Somers Town was the ideal compromise, a modern realtor’s truism: the tranquillity of a small town within walking distance of the city, an “outleap” of London, as one contemporary called such developments. When Mary was old enough, she and Fanny toured the square with their nurse, gazing in the plate glass windo
ws of the apothecary, the toymaker, the mercer, the haberdasher, the saddler, and the milliner. Sometimes, they were allowed to pick out a ribbon, or drink a frothy syllabub, a delicious whipped cream confection, at the tea shop. A muffin seller whose nickname was the Mayor of Garratt circled the square, pushing his cart and ringing a handbell. Watchmakers and goldsmiths hunched over worktables, hammering precious metals or examining pocket watches with a magnifying glass. These men were refugees from the French Revolution, and if the girls were lucky, one might look up and salute them with a little bow, or say bonjour through the open door, an exotic experience.

  Godwin adhered to a routine that to his daughters seemed carved in stone, as unwavering as the steady tick of the clock. A renowned political philosopher and novelist, Godwin did not allow any interruptions when he was writing; ideas came first in the Godwin household. He worked until one, lunched, and then read to the girls.

  Together they enjoyed Perrault’s Mother Goose and La Fontaine’s Fables. On special days, Godwin chose the book their mother had written for Fanny before she died. Wollstonecraft’s warm, chatty style made it seem as though she were actually in the room: “When you were hungry, you began to cry,” she said, addressing Fanny directly. “You were seven months without teeth, always sucking. But after you got one, you began to gnaw a crust of bread. It was not long before another came pop. At ten months you had four pretty white teeth, and you used to bite me. Poor mamma!”

  Reminders of this loving mother were everywhere, from the portrait that hung in Godwin’s study to the books that lined the shelves. Godwin did his best to honor his dead wife, but he was not well suited for the education of small children. He had been a bachelor for most of his life, marrying Mary Wollstonecraft when he was forty-one. Raised by stern Calvinists, he could be excruciatingly reserved and was stingy with both time and money, carefully parceling out his hours to avoid losing any work time.