Confronted with such a tangle of truth and deception, it would be easy to regard Shelley as a libertine who wanted to take advantage of Mary’s naïveté. But that was not what Mary ever believed, even when she was older and could see Shelley, and the details of their situation, with more perspective. In fact, she never faulted Shelley for his tales, understanding that he usually believed the stories he wove. Certainly, Shelley felt his stories were true. Harriet may not have been unfaithful to him with a lover, but she had betrayed him by changing after she had a baby. In his mind, philosophical infidelity was a far graver offense than any sexual dalliance could ever be. His father may not have literally put him in an asylum, but to the young Shelley it felt as though he had. After Shelley’s atheistic declarations at Oxford, Sir Timothy had prevented the young man from having any contact with his beloved mother and younger sisters, telling the family that Percy was insane. Cruel and punitive, Sir Timothy had tried to stop his son’s allowance, even when it meant that Percy might go to debtors’ prison. For Percy, it was an easy next step to believe his father wanted to see him imprisoned.
At any rate, Mary was not suspicious by nature, and did not waste time trying to sift through Shelley’s tales for the truth. Driven by her own agenda, she yearned to live up to her mother’s legacy and get out from under her stepmother’s thumb. Later, Harriet, who had an understandably bitter take on what happened, wrote, “Mary was determined to seduce him. She is to blame. She heated his imagination by talking of her mother and going to her grave with him every day, till at last she told him she was dying of love for him.” In truth, Mary would never have denied the role she played in initiating her relationship with Shelley. She was proud of it. Having assumed her father would give his blessing to their affair, she was shocked to discover the opposite was true. When she and Shelley announced their love to the Godwins in early July, her horrified father ordered Mary to the schoolroom and banished Shelley from the house. Godwin, however, had underestimated the lovers. Incipient writers that they were, they immediately applied themselves to composing long epistles that Jane delivered, delighted at being an insurrectionary go-between.
As the days passed, the drama escalated. Harriet, alerted by rumors, had set up residence in her father’s London house, and on July 14, Shelley called a formal meeting with her, telling her their marriage was over. He reported this event to Godwin, thinking it would win the older man’s approval. But Godwin, appalled at Shelley’s behavior, rushed to Harriet the next day reassuring her he would argue her case with Shelley and Mary. That afternoon, he lectured his daughter on the dire consequences of her actions, until Mary reluctantly promised she would stop encouraging Shelley’s affections.
But Godwin’s efforts to put a stop to the affair were undercut by his own financial desperation. Even as he was trying to separate the two young lovers, he was still seeking to finalize a loan from Shelley; during the third week of July, he met with Shelley each afternoon to discuss financial affairs. But if Godwin could carry on these conversations as though nothing were amiss, Shelley could not, and finally the young man snapped. In the last week of July, he hammered on the door at Skinner Street, rushed past the maid, shoved Mrs. Godwin out of the way, and charged up the stairs to Mary. By the time Mary-Jane caught up with him, he had a pistol out and was waving it around with a wild look on his face, shouting that he could not live without Mary. He pulled out a bottle of laudanum and shook it, declaring that if Mary swallowed the drugs, he would shoot himself and they would be together in death like Romeo and Juliet, or Tristan and Isolde. Mary-Jane screamed in horror. Godwin might have been able to soothe Shelley’s frayed sensibilities, but he was not there, and so Mary, with tears streaming down her cheeks, pleaded with her lover to calm down and go back home. She swore she would never love another man, and declared that he must not kill himself.
Shelley left, but later that week his landlord banged on the Godwins’ door, shouting that Shelley had swallowed a large dose of laudanum. By the time Godwin and Mary-Jane reached Shelley’s rooms, a doctor was already there tending to the overwrought patient. Mrs. Godwin stayed with Shelley the next day, nursing him until he felt better.
While Shelley was recovering, Mary brooded upstairs in the schoolroom, rereading his letters and studying his long poem Queen Mab. In a note at the end of the poem he declared that any law that required husband and wife to live together “after the decay of their affection, would be a most intolerable tyranny.” Here was Shelley’s rationale for ending his relationship with Harriet and beginning his affair with Mary. To say that a person was forever bound by his marital vows was an infringement of that person’s natural rights, he declared. Mary agreed, of course. These were the same ideas her parents had espoused—that is, before Godwin’s retraction. To Mary, it seemed clear that marriage was an absurd institution. Who could control the heart? One should not stay with someone simply because of society’s rules. One must always be true to one’s passions. As her lover declared, “Love is free,” and “to promise for ever to love the same woman is not less absurd than to promise to believe the same creed.”
She scrawled her own note in the back of the precious volume:
This book is sacred to me and as no other creature shall ever look into it I may write in it what I please—yet what shall I write that I love the author beyond all powers of expression and that I am parted from him.
Dearest and only love by that love we have promised to each other although I may not be your[s] I can never be another’s
But I am thine exclusively thine—by the kiss of love
Mary may have thought Shelley would never read these words. Forced to remain at home, it seemed possible she would not see him again; so she wrote down his last words to her, as reverentially as though he had uttered them on his deathbed:
I remember your words, you are now
Mary going to mix with many and for a
Moment I shall depart but in the solitude of
Your chamber I shall be with you—yes you
Are ever with me sacred vision.
But if self-abnegation came easily to Mary, it did not to Shelley. While she read and reread his poetry, locked away on the top floor like Rapunzel, Shelley raged at his helplessness. Nothing raised his ire more than being prevented from doing what he wanted; his goal in life was to free himself (and others, to be sure) from oppression. His delight in carrying off Harriet had largely stemmed from his triumph over Mr. Westbrook and his own father rather than from any deep romantic feelings. He had even dreamed of kidnapping his own sisters and taking them along to further undermine his father’s authority. Thus Godwin’s attempts to block his access to Mary, rather than thwarting his desire, stirred Shelley further, inspiring him to take drastic action.
Of course, Shelley’s definition of oppression was somewhat idiosyncratic. As a little boy, he had shrugged off the limits his father tried to place on him, reasonable though they may have been (no snakes in the house; no playing with fire). He ran away when he was disciplined, chopped down his father’s precious fir trees, poked holes in the ceiling to find fairies, used gunpowder to blow up the playground fence and his schoolroom desk, accidentally set the butler on fire, and terrorized his sisters with ghost stories and experiments. His younger sister Hellen remembered how he would “collect” his little sisters and “plac[e]” them “hand-in-hand around the nursery table to be electrified.” One night, while tinkering with electricity, he ignited his parents’ baronial estate. The flames were put out, but the young Shelley, rather than being chastened, was disappointed he had not destroyed the house.
By the time Shelley met Mary, his enthusiasm for his “experiments” had grown, not lessened with age as his father had hoped. Like most intellectuals of the era, Shelley regarded science as a branch of philosophy, or sometimes as an offshoot of the occult. He searched for spirits as avidly as he stared through his solar microscope, studied chemistry even as he sought to summon the devil. One night, he sneaked into a
church to spend the night in the burial vault, hoping to see ghosts. Shelley’s scientific explorations were of great interest to Mary, since she, too, was intrigued by the idea that electricity, or electrical fire, could spark birth, animate the inanimate, and bring the dead back from the grave. Not that she truly believed such things were possible, but it was a compelling idea: the power of natural forces over human life.
For Shelley, such “explorations” remained linked to his father. In his mind, scientific inquiry, apparitions, explosions, fire balloons, ghouls, individual freedom, justice, love, and rebellion were all jumbled together. And so, while Mary sat quietly in her garret, reading and writing, Shelley applied his powers of invention to coming up with a plan of escape that would free his love from her prison, and better yet, would assert his will over Godwin’s. It would be a grand adventure, a thrilling new innovation, to run away with Mary Godwin. The world needed to be stirred up, enlivened, and turned upside down, and he was the one to do it.
CHAPTER 8
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: ON THE EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS
[ 1785–1787 ]
heartbroken Mary Wollstonecraft sailed to England from Portugal in December 1785. Fanny Blood’s death made it seem impossible to go forward. When she arrived in Newington Green, the days were dark; the water had frozen in the washbasins; her sisters acted aggrieved and put upon. The school was limping along, but only barely; many students had dropped out and more were planning to leave. But without Fanny, Mary no longer cared. And so when Mrs. Burgh decided they should close at the end of the academic year, Mary didn’t protest. “I can scarcely find a name for the apathy that has seized on me—I am sick of everything under the sun,” she wrote Fanny’s brother George. She blamed herself for Fanny’s loss. If only she had not encouraged her friend to marry Hugh, then Fanny would still be with her; the students would be flourishing, and she would not have to worry about what would become of her younger sisters, or herself. “My hopes of happiness are extinct,” she said.
By spring, the last student was gone. Although Mrs. Burgh had provided much of the financial backing for the school, Mary had borrowed money to cover her own expenses and those of her sisters. Now creditors were demanding payment, chasing her like “furies.” One night she had a dream that Fanny beckoned to her, telling Mary to come join her in heaven. Her friends saw her despair and were worried. What had happened to Mary’s grand ideas and conviction? Where was the energetic young woman who had arrived two years earlier? In her place was a bleak and dispirited twenty-six-year-old, as lost as she had once been sure.
Fortunately, John Hewlett, the friend who had taken her to meet Samuel Johnson, had an inspiration. Five years younger than Mary, Hewlett had admired Mary’s fiery idealism when they first met at the Newington dinners. An intellectual and a mathematician, he agreed with her ideas about education and, more to the point, felt confident he could help her overcome her grief. Mary should write a book, he said. The world needed to hear her ideas.
A devout Christian, Hewlett told Mary that she had lessons to learn from Fanny’s loss: if she could remember the transience of human life, that the pleasures of this world are fleeting, then she could devote herself to the true path of virtue, which was “the diligent improvement” of her “intellectual powers.” Indeed, according to Hewlett, this is what God was: pure intellect, a perfect brain without human weaknesses. Grief-stricken though Mary was, she liked the idea that it was her God-given duty to devote herself to her studies. When Hewlett suggested that it was her Christian obligation to go back to work and that Fanny herself would want Mary to continue her mission to reform education, she listened.
And so, once the last student had gone, Mary began writing. She wanted to show the world how difficult it was for single women to support themselves. In her heart, she linked this problem to Fanny. If Fanny had been able to make more money, if she could have supported her family financially, she might not have felt the need to marry, and if she had not married, she would still be alive.
Fueled by her sense of injustice, Mary felt her energy return. It was not fair that unmarried women like herself and her sisters had so few choices. She asked herself why women’s options were so restricted. Not only was this bad for women, it was bad for the world. Within a few weeks, she had produced forty-nine pages, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the More Important Duties of Life. As the length of this title indicates, Mary wanted to be taken seriously. Not only was she writing to give advice, she was writing to assert her rights as a rational being. With Fanny, her sisters, and herself in mind, she composed a chapter called “[The] Unfortunate Situation of Females, fashionably educated, and left without a fortune.” The chapter begins:
Few are the modes of earning a subsistence [for the single woman], and those very humiliating.…Painfully sensible of unkindness, she is alive to every thing, and many sarcasms reach her.…She is alone, shut out…dependent on the caprice of a fellow creature.
For the time, Mary’s ideas were highly original, as was her voice. In 1786, no one else had detailed the suffering of young women seeking independence, except to warn against the dangers of prostitution. Unlike other writers, who relied on formal pronouncements to convey their authority, Mary used a colloquial voice to express her sense of outrage. She wrote to survive, emotionally and financially—her debts were mounting—and she was able to write quickly because over the course of the previous two years, she had discussed her ideas on childrearing, schools, women, education, and marriage with her friends and at the Newington supper meetings until they were fully developed, ready to pour onto the page. Who was the ideal woman? Mary asked. Was she a fainting maiden, easily fatigued and naïve? No! She was a resourceful intelligent human being.
Mary, as usual, was alone with her ideas, a single candle in the darkness. Despite the popularity of advice manuals on the “education” of women, written by comparatively enlightened authors, the tone of these purported experts was absurdly patronizing, even though many were women themselves. The poet Anna Barbauld, herself an accomplished writer and schoolmistress, declared girls too “delicate” to be independent from men, even as she took care of her mentally ill husband and was her family’s sole provider. For Barbauld, females were created “for pleasure and delight alone,” and, therefore, teachers should focus on teaching girls how to please. The bluestocking Hannah More believed that parents and teachers should drive the “bold, independent, enterprising spirit” out of girls while nurturing it in boys—a philosophy based on the principle that women should be subordinate to men and learn to obey, not lead. Mary found these ideas intolerable. Although she reserved judgment about just how strong the female mind would prove to be when educated—she argued that until women’s talents were cultivated, no one would know their true capabilities—she was certain that training girls to be simpering society misses was not only bad for the girls, but bad for everyone. It created a generation of silly young women, unable to support their husbands in times of crisis, raise their children, or contribute to their communities.
Hewlett raced the finished manuscript to a friend, Joseph Johnson. One of the most famous publishers in London, Johnson was committed to the cause of reform. His authors were among the most radical of the era—Benjamin Franklin, William Blake, Erasmus Darwin (the grandfather of the famous Charles), Joseph Priestley, and William Cowper. Bringing such writers before the public eye was a dangerous business in the late eighteenth century. Publishers could face charges of treason if their writers criticized the government, which almost all of Johnson’s authors did. But Johnson felt a personal and ethical obligation to his authors. In 1799, he would land in prison for bringing out a pamphlet that lambasted Parliament.
Johnson instantly understood that Mary’s book had commercial potential and invited her to come to the city to discuss the possibility of publication. In the late eighteenth century, reformers and their opponents had become increasingly preoccupied with the question
of women’s education. The experts agreed with Mary that a mother who had been educated improperly could wreak havoc on society by raising selfish, spoiled children. But debate raged about what the proper curriculum for young women should be. If women were weaker than men, as the medical professionals decreed, then one had to be careful not to overly tax a female’s brain. Mary’s cogent arguments for improving women’s education and expanding opportunities for women to earn a living spoke directly to these concerns. Moreover, her writing style was uniquely accessible. She wrote the way she spoke, directly and without any unnecessary flourishes, a conscious decision on Mary’s part, as she hated the flowery style of other authors, both female and male. Eager to meet such a distinguished personage, Mary promptly took the coach to Johnson’s offices near St. Paul’s.
At age forty-eight, Johnson was short and plainly dressed with simple manners that put Mary at ease. When he offered her ten pounds for her manuscript, Mary was astonished. Although she was a literary novice, she knew enough to realize that Johnson’s endorsement was extraordinary, and she was even more taken aback when Johnson upped the ante, making an unusual offer: if she sent him any new work, he would consider publishing it. By the time she left his offices, Mary had glimpsed a new and different path, one out of the reach of most people, let alone a twenty-seven-year-old spinster—the path to a real literary career.
With this new dream, the future suddenly seemed more appealing, though there was still the money problem. Ten pounds was a significant amount—the equivalent of £1,500 today—but it would not cover what she owed. In addition, she had her sisters to provide for, and she wanted to help the Bloods, who were also suffering financially. She needed a job, one that would support her until she could earn a living from her writing. Her friends put the word out, and early that summer an offer came through Dr. Price. Robert and Caroline King, Lord and Lady Kingsborough of Mitchelstown, Ireland, needed a governess. They liked the sound of Mary; she was the correct age and she was an experienced schoolmistress. They were willing to pay £40 for a year’s service, a far more generous salary than Mary had anticipated. She estimated (inaccurately, as it would turn out) that £20 would pay off her debts, and the other £20 could help her and her sisters start a new life.
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley Page 10