At the Baxters’ house, Isabella and Mary shared a room, often staying up late exchanging secrets and stories, many of which featured David, whom both girls admired. Isabella even dreamed of trading places with her sister. On one of their visits, they scratched their initials into a windowpane with a diamond ring, never dreaming that one day Mary would have fans who would travel thousands of miles to see her wobbly MWG; the cottage became a pilgrimage site until the window was stolen from the house in the 1970s.
Occasionally, the Baxters visited Dundee. Isabella had memorized reams of poetry and loved Dundee’s legends and ghost stories. At the end of Guthrie Street, there was a small hill where hundreds of women had been burned as witches and where the locals said their spirits still walked. Behind the town rose a bald basalt hill called the Law. According to local folklore, if a virgin climbed to the top and made a wish, it would come true. Whether or not Mary and Isabella actually did this, both girls had plenty of wishes. Neither wanted to be ordinary; they dreamed of huge operatic lives with tragedies and sacrifices, glory and fame. It helped that they looked like heroines: Mary with her startlingly white skin and halo of reddish-gold hair, Isabella with her vivid dark eyes and unruly curls. In the only surviving portrait of Isabella she is dressed in costume as Lady Jane Grey, the tragic young queen famed for her scholarship and her beauty, who ruled England for only nine days before she was executed.
With each passing week, Mary grew healthier and stronger, and the eczema disappeared. But Godwin and the Baxters had agreed on only a short visit—five months—and even though Mary wanted to stay longer, she returned to England in November. Back at Skinner Street, it was as though she had never left. Old quarrels flared, new ones arose. Mary-Jane was as intransigent as ever. Godwin shut himself into his study, complaining about the noise. Fanny retreated even further into the shadows. Jane trailed after Mary like a puppy. Mary herself was resentful and quarrelsome. Fortunately, the Baxters wrote to invite her for another stay, and as soon as the weather broke in June 1813, Godwin packed Mary back to Scotland.
She arrived near the end of a mild spring, her heart rising as she traveled north to Dundee. The air was damp, the land was green. The chestnut forests bloomed and the blue hills promised mystery and romance. But when she reached The Cottage, she found its inhabitants in mourning. Margaret, Isabella’s sister and David Booth’s wife, had died. Although this was painful for the family, it did raise an interesting quandary. David Booth was now free to remarry. At first, he flirted with Mary, but although she was flattered, Mary wanted to be swept off her feet by someone impossibly romantic. Booth had just turned forty-eight years old; he was short and barrel-chested. Doctrinaire and stern, he was hardly the ideal suitor.
When David Booth realized that Mary was not interested in him, he quickly changed course. A few weeks later, he declared himself in love with Isabella—a thoroughly sinful choice as far as the local church was concerned, since it was against ecclesiastical law for a man to marry his wife’s sister.
But the shocking nature of Booth’s proposal was exactly what Isabella had always wanted: a rule to break, a taboo to embrace. Besides, she had always been slightly jealous of her older sister. Mary encouraged Isabella from the sidelines. To her, the uproar made the relationship seem all the more exciting. If the couple loved each other, which she was sure they did, then the more than thirty-year age difference should not be a stumbling block, nor should the church’s disapproval.
Like Mary, Isabella’s father believed that love should triumph over all. He knew that there would be an outcry, but he remained loyal to his daughter, even when the entire family was excommunicated after the couple announced their engagement that fall. To Mary, this was a satisfying conclusion to the story. The Baxter family had championed love and freedom over old-fashioned rules and restrictions.
In March 1814, it was time for Mary to sail back to England. She said goodbye to the Baxters with sorrow, dreaming of a time when she and Isabella would be reunited to cut a swath through the world together, twin heroines united in their dedication to romance.
When Mary arrived back home, clutching the tartan she had bought to remind herself of Scotland, she was ready for her own grand love affair, preferably with the same ingredients as Isabella’s: rebellion, exile, and scandal. She was sure her father would support her in her choice of partner even if the entire world disapproved. Isabella’s father, after all, was a Godwin disciple, and he had blessed his daughter’s unorthodox union.
But in actuality, her father was as remote as ever, desperately trying to avert the financial ruin always hovering on the horizon. Their best hope for solvency, he said, was a young nobleman he had met while she was in Scotland. With curly brown hair and huge blue eyes, Percy Shelley was rich, wild, and charming. He had a wicked sense of humor, radical political views, and a propensity for shocking people. Shelley had been expelled from Oxford, along with his best friend, Thomas Hogg, for publishing a diatribe against religion; his renegade behavior recommended him to the Godwin household. He had read Political Justice, and now, at age twenty-one, inspired by Godwin’s philosophy of freedom, had rushed off to Ireland to help organize the protests against British rule. In return for Godwin’s advice, he promised to help him financially. Shelley had visited the family frequently while Mary was away, where he talked so gently and quietly to Fanny and laughed so uproariously at Jane’s giddiness that both girls fell a little in love with him, or so said the Godwins many years later. Unfortunately, he already had a wife. Nineteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook impressed both Fanny and Jane with her fashionable dresses and her beauty.
It was important for Mary to join the family in trying to please this young man, Godwin said. When Shelley came to visit, she should be on her best behavior. If he would give them a loan, then Godwin would be able to right the ship. If not, all could be lost.
What Godwin did not realize was that Shelley’s ability to raise funds rested entirely on a precarious future inheritance controlled by Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy, who had stopped speaking to his son when he was expelled from Oxford. Each penny the younger Shelley wrested from his family’s estate was the result of long, bitter legal proceedings, or from an archaic borrowing system known as post-obit loans. These “post-death” payments stipulated that when Shelley became Sir Percy, he would have to pay as much as four times the amount of the loan in interest. Shelley, who viewed his family estate as a funding source for his favorite revolutionary projects, had promised Godwin that he was next on his list of beneficiaries.
Godwin was also unaware that Shelley, who had always been at the mercy of fluctuating moods, was in a particularly volatile state that spring. He had left Harriet six months earlier, and though he did not want to live with his wife, he was lonely without her. Originally, Shelley had viewed his marriage as a glorious rescue mission; he had freed sixteen-year-old Harriet Westbrook from her stifling and conventional home, or so Shelley believed—Harriet gave no sign of feeling trapped until she met Shelley—and they had run away to the north, getting married only because she insisted on it. Shelley himself was against marriage, having read Mary Wollstonecraft’s condemnation of the institution in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as well as Godwin’s early thoughts on the subject. In the unrevised first edition of Political Justice, Godwin had declared:
Marriage, as now understood, is a monopoly, and the worst of monopolies. So long as two human beings are forbidden, by positive institution, to follow the dictates of their own mind, prejudice will be alive and vigorous.
Godwin had long since reversed his opinion on the matter, but Shelley, unaware of his mentor’s change of heart, believed that Godwin still supported the idea of free love.
Enraptured as she was with Shelley, Harriet had underestimated his resistance to their vows. She followed him to Ireland and then to Wales, where Shelley dreamed up new ideas for inciting protests, including throwing bottles with incendiary messages into the sea. But everything changed in 1813, wh
en Harriet gave birth to a daughter, Ianthe, and overnight (or so it seemed to Shelley) began nagging him about money and their frequent moves. He was disillusioned. What about philosophy? The Irish rebellion? Did she no longer care about the grand ideal of freedom? Now he regretted their elopement, viewing it as a calamity and “a rash and heartless union.” Most troubling of all, if Harriet was not who he thought she was, then their union was predicated on falsehood, poisoning his dream of dedicating himself to the truth at all costs, of living a philosopher’s life. He was haunted by a guilty sense of his own hypocrisy. A few months later, he would describe this sensation to his friend Hogg: “I felt as if a dead & living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion.”
Soon after Shelley left Harriet, she discovered she was pregnant again and begged him to come back, but he shuddered at the idea; living with Harriet once more would feel like a step backward. He wanted to be liberated from his old life and was on the lookout for an omen—a hawk, an eclipse, a dream—anything to show him what path to take next.
Mary, too, was watching for a sign of transformation that spring. The quiet blue-green landscape of the Scottish countryside seemed a lost dream amid the noise and dirt of the city. Gone were the silent hours alone in the fields. Gone, too, were the long tramps in the hills. Instead, there were enforced tea times with Mary-Jane, Fanny, Jane, and her half brother, William. In the crowded rooms of the house on Skinner Street, privacy was impossible. Mary was lonely. She missed her soul mate, Isabella.
As her mother had observed, there were few choices for young women in Mary’s position. Godwin’s debts and notoriety made her future unpromising: no suitor would want a bride without a dowry; and if she did not want to be a teacher, governess, or lady’s companion, Mary would have to wait on customers in the bookshop and perhaps write children’s books to boost the family’s income. The life she dreamed of, filled with love and passion, seemed impossible, a glorious adventure that happened to other people, not to her.
CHAPTER 6
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: INDEPENDENCE
[ 1783–1785 ]
August 1783, the twenty-four-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft became an aunt. Less than a year after nineteen-year-old Eliza married Meredith Bishop, she gave birth to a little girl whom she named Elizabeth Mary Frances Bishop, in homage to her mother, her eldest sister, and Fanny Blood. At first, Mary reveled in the happy news. A healthy baby. A little girl. A namesake. But that November, a few months after little Mary (as they called her) was baptized, an urgent letter came from Eliza’s husband. Eliza had gone mad, he wrote; he begged Mary to come help.
When Mary arrived at her sister and brother-in-law’s large house in Bermondsey, a middle-class enclave south of the Thames, Eliza was having what Mary called “fits of phrensy.” Her eyes rolled back in her head; she shook as though she had a fever. She muttered to herself and did not recognize her sister. The rest of the household was in chaos, but Eliza did not seem to notice anything or anyone; she had retreated far inside herself and could not be reached. As Mary put it, she did not have “the least tincture of reason.”
Mary had intended to stay in Bermondsey for only a day or two, but her sister’s plight was so extreme that Mary felt she could not leave her. She did her best to reach Eliza, sitting with her for hours every day, cradling her in her arms, reading to her, praying with her, and taking her for drives in a coach. After a few weeks, Mary wrote Everina that the fits had stopped but that Eliza was not any more rational. “Her ideas are all disjointed and a number of wild whims float on her imagination and uncorrected fall from her.”
To Mary, it seemed likely that Eliza’s delusions stemmed from the trauma of childbirth, and that with careful nursing she would recover. The term “postpartum depression” had not yet been invented, and yet the time after birth was still widely known as a dangerous one for women, both physically and emotionally. In a famous case a few decades later, the writer William Thackeray’s wife grew so despondent after her second child that she had to be institutionalized. At first this theory seemed correct, as after a month or so under Mary’s watchful eye Eliza slowly grew more coherent. Then came a new development. Mary noted that her sister shuddered whenever Bishop approached, crying and accusing him of cruelty. Was this evidence of further derangement, or was it the root cause of Eliza’s breakdown? Mary was not sure. Had the affable-seeming Bishop been harsh to her sister? He seemed heartbroken by her illness. During the first days of the crisis, Mary had listened sympathetically to Bishop’s feelings, but after noticing Eliza’s fear in his presence, she became increasingly suspicious. Having witnessed her father’s dangerous fluctuations in mood, she knew that good humor in public did not preclude violent tirades at home, and she felt even more worried when one of Bishop’s friends told her that Bishop could be either a “lion or a spannial”—it was a phrase that could easily have described Edward Wollstonecraft.
During these weeks of indecision, Mary wrote many letters, trying to sort through her feelings, reflecting on her own state of mind as well as her sister’s. In one revealing letter to Everina she describes how confused she felt: “I don’t know what to do—Poor Eliza’s situation almost turns my brain—I can’t stay and see this continual misery—and to leave her to bear it by herself without any one to comfort her is still more distressing—I would do anything to rescue her from her present situation.”
There was an added urgency, since whether or not Bishop was right and Eliza had lost her mind, he had the legal authority to send her to an asylum. Institutionalization was a common enough solution for wives who were troublesome, as English law granted husbands absolute power in marriage. A wife was not allowed to own anything. She had no legal rights of any kind. Later, Mary would say “a wife being as much a man’s property as his horse, or his ass, she has nothing she can call her own.” Without legal protection, women were vulnerable to all sorts of abuse. Husbands could beat their wives and declare them insane. If a woman tried to flee, her husband had the right to bring her back by force. A man could starve his wife and keep her locked indoors. He could also prevent her from seeking medical care, or from having visitors who might help ease her suffering. For most women, death and desertion were the only ways to escape a miserable marriage. To get a divorce, one had to go through the lengthy and prohibitively expensive process of petitioning Parliament; only 132 such cases were granted before 1800, and the plaintiffs were all men. In the eighteenth century, only four women managed to win a legal separation. Not until the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act could both sexes initiate divorce proceedings.
The injustice of this legal system stayed with Mary, shaping the arguments in her most famous work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and it was still with her, many years later, in her final novel, Maria, in which she would depict the suffering that occurs when an evil husband imprisons his virtuous (and perfectly sane) wife in a mental asylum with the full sanction of the law.
In December, Eliza began to have moments of lucidity, but she was still unable to describe what Bishop had done to her other than repeating that she had been “ill-used.” The best that Mary could surmise was that Bishop could not refrain from “gratification,” Mary’s word for nonconsensual sex, since there was no term for marital rape. In fact, rape within marriage was not recognized as a crime in Great Britain until 1991. Whether Bishop had acted out of insensitivity or outright aggression was not important. What mattered to Mary was that Eliza was terrified. Bishop, too, was beginning to expose his true colors. He angrily denied Eliza’s accusations, and Mary was struck by how unsympathetic he was. If just once Bishop had expressed any empathy for his frightened young wife, Mary might not have sided against him, but now that Eliza was saner, he resorted to what Mary called despotism, trying to force Eliza back into the marriage. He was so impatient that Mary worried about what might happen if she was not there to protect her sister. To Everina, Mary wrote, “I can’t help pitying B but misery must be his portion at any rate till he
alters himself—and that would be a miracle.”
To Mary, it was now clear that Eliza’s suffering had not come solely from the difficult experience of childbirth. She tried repeatedly to talk to Bishop, asking him to try to understand Eliza’s fears. But Bishop refused to listen, insisting that there was nothing wrong, Mary wrote Everina, “even tho’ the contrary is as clear as the noon day.” By early January, Mary had made up her mind. She was not going to let Eliza continue to live with Bishop. She asked Ned if Eliza could seek refuge with him, but Ned refused, undoubtedly hoping to avoid a scandal, since it was illegal for wives to leave their husbands. This was an unfortunate turn of events, since if Eliza could have lived with their brother, she could have brought her baby along on what could have been called an extended family visit. Otherwise, she would have to leave little Mary behind, as eighteenth-century English mothers had no rights to their children. The baby was now five months old and could smile, nestle into loving arms, and even lift her head, but she was technically Bishop’s property.
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley Page 7