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

by Charlotte Gordon

  One day Mary saw her father on the street and he turned away. Another afternoon, she knocked on the door of Skinner Street, and he would not allow the maid to let her inside. When Fanny dared to make a visit, she told the girls Godwin had forbidden her to talk to Mary. Initiating a pattern she would follow for the rest of her life, Mary turned to a disciplined program of study for comfort and began to learn ancient Greek. Shelley gave her lessons, and she practiced copying down verbs and declining nouns. All three continued to rely on the example of Wollstonecraft to sustain them, reading and rereading her books. That winter, they took lodgings near the girls’ old home in Somers Town to be near Wollstonecraft’s grave.

  Although Shelley did not like to see Mary suffer, he had never really enjoyed having a pregnant wife. During Harriet’s first pregnancy he had begun an affair with another woman, a rural schoolteacher whose life was ruined as a result. He had left Harriet for Mary during Harriet’s second pregnancy. Now, deprived of the attention he craved from the weak and exhausted Mary, he increasingly devoted himself to Claire. While in hiding from the bailiffs, he wrote her long letters, but only jotted short notes to Mary, for whom it was increasingly excruciating to watch Shelley turn toward her stepsister. She knew that Shelley wanted to live a life that was free of societal conventions, which meant that if they fell in love with other people, they were free to act on their feelings, but she had never dreamed that he might choose Claire over her. Instead of blaming him, however, she directed her anger at Claire, just as she had chosen to blame Mary-Jane for “stealing” her father’s affection.

  That November, Harriet had a son; Shelley was proud to have an heir, and his enthusiasm about the new baby annoyed Mary. She retreated into silence, always her default position, and wrote sardonic entries in their journal, muttering that this event “ought to be ushered in with ringing of bells &c. for it is the son of his wife.” At this point in her life, consumed with her own melancholy, Mary had no room for sympathy for Harriet. Instead, she hoped that when she had her baby, Shelley would show her tenderness once again. If he remained distant, she consoled herself by imagining a child whom she could love and who would love her in return. But later, when Mary too had suffered terrible losses, she grieved over the pain she had helped Shelley inflict on Harriet, whose plight as an abandoned wife in a judgmental age was a desperate one.

  As Mary’s pregnancy progressed, she felt worse rather than better. Shelley continued to disappear for hours with Claire, and most biographers assume that they became lovers, but neither Shelley nor Claire left a record of their feelings for each other during that winter. In fact, pages from both Claire’s and Mary’s journals during this crucial period have been torn out, indicating that they, or one of their Victorian descendants, tried to cover up what happened.

  Whether or not Shelley and Claire were actually romantically entangled, for Mary the result was the same: she felt desolate. In an attempt to fix matters, Shelley took the unconventional step of encouraging his friend Thomas Hogg, who had arrived in London that winter, to win Mary’s heart. He hoped an affair would distract Mary from her jealousy of Claire, as well as further his plans for a community based on free love. Hogg, who was familiar with his friend’s ideas, agreed to the plan; but though Mary tried to smile on Hogg’s suit, she was too in love with Shelley to want anyone else. She suffered acutely when Shelley and Claire went off on one of their adventures or giggled together in another room, but she did her best to please Shelley by getting to know his friend, discussing philosophical topics such as “the love of Wisdom and free Will”—the closest she could come to flirtation. But even as an intellectual companion, Hogg was inferior to Shelley. When they debated the principles of liberty, she thought his arguments were weak and confused. He was dull, his manners abrasive. Ultimately, she could not help confessing how much she loved Shelley to her new suitor. “I…love him so tenderly & entirely.…[My] life hangs on the beam of his eye and [my] whole soul is entirely wrapt up in him,” she declared.

  Prodded by Shelley, Hogg stepped up his campaign, setting up camp in their lodgings and spending the night on a regular basis, until finally in January Mary backpedaled, promising him (and Shelley) that she would consider a sexual relationship once the baby was born in April. This delay only served to heighten Hogg’s ardor. But events took a tragic turn. On February 22, Mary gave birth to a premature little girl. Born eight weeks too early, the baby survived for only thirteen days. On March 6, Mary wrote a tear-stained letter to Hogg describing what had happened:

  My baby is dead—will you come to me as soon as you can—I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I could not awake it—it was dead then but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—

  Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk—

  Whether Shelley was afraid for Mary or for himself is unclear, but another limitation of their relationship was becoming clear. Although Shelley turned to Mary for comfort and wisdom, she could not rely on him for reciprocal support. Plagued by his own phobias, he seemed unable to empathize with Mary. If she wanted solace, she would have to look elsewhere.

  Hogg did come, but he was little help. Never a quick-witted conversationalist at the best of times, he was at a complete loss when faced with his weeping friend. And so Mary mourned the loss of her baby alone. Night after night, she dreamed the baby lived, writing in her journal, “Dream that my little baby came to life again—that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived—I awake & find no baby—I think about the little thing all day.”

  Finally, in April, Shelley shook off his self-absorption and took Mary on a pleasure jaunt to Salt Hill, near Slough, about twenty miles west of London. They spent a few nights in a pretty country inn. The fruit trees were in bloom; bluebells carpeted the fields; the village gardens were alight with sweet peas, larkspur, and foxgloves. Without Claire, their romance reignited, and Mary felt herself coming back to life. Still, she was haunted by guilt. If she had done things differently, would the baby still be alive? Should she have fed the infant more frequently, or been more careful of her own health? But it was hard to be too miserable during this time alone with Shelley, their first since they had fled London ten months earlier. She wrote witty little notes to Hogg, who understood his cause was over and retreated sullenly to his own quarters. Shelley was feeling more optimistic himself, as his grandfather had died a few months earlier and, after much wrangling, he and his father had agreed he would receive an annual income of £1,000, as well as some additional sums to settle outstanding debts.

  All signs pointed toward a happier future, but when Mary and Shelley returned to London, Claire was furious at having been abandoned, believing that Shelley had only used her while Mary was pregnant. Which of them did he love more? She forgot about playing Rousseau’s Clara to Mary’s Julie. Now the jealousy that had always been between them flared into outright battles. There were screaming matches, and ever after, both Claire and Mary would look back on this period as one of the darkest in their lives. Still, it was a wonder that the tension had taken so long to come to a head. The girls had been bred to be rivals: Godwin favored Mary; Mary-Jane favored Claire; the parents competed, the girls competed, and Fanny stood on the sidelines, the only one not in the contest.

  By May, Mary was no longer even able to utter Claire’s name, an awkward situation since they were living together. She referred to her stepsister as Shelley’s “friend” and, terrified that she was going to become a “deserted thing no one cares for,” in her journal she kept obsessive track of the time the two of them spent together: Shelley walked with “his friend” or talked with “the lady.” Unable to pacify the two rivals, Shelley sought tranquillity in the Stoics, reading Seneca, until finally Claire made a sudden departure on May 13, traveling south to a little cottage Shelley rented f
or her in a small Devon village, as far off the beaten track as possible. Both sisters were relieved by the distance between them. Claire wrote to Fanny that she was glad to have some peace after living through “so much discontent, such violent scenes, such a turmoil of passion & hatred.…”

  This decision—to send Claire to a place where she knew no one—hints at the reality of a sexual relationship between Claire and Shelley. It also accounts for the sudden intensity of Mary and Claire’s battles. In general, young girls like Claire made rural retreats like this only when pregnant. If Claire had discovered she was going to have Shelley’s baby and announced this when Mary and Shelley returned from their weekend away, this would certainly help explain the ferocity of their struggle. It also suggests that Mary made an ultimatum to Shelley: He could be with either Claire or her, not both. Unfortunately, it is impossible to know exactly what happened, since these pages from Mary’s journal have disappeared. However, this attempt to conceal the course of events, combined with the young people’s endorsement of free love, makes it seem likely that Shelley and Claire had been lovers.

  Mary’s journal entries do not resume until after Claire’s departure, when she began a new diary. In an undated entry, Mary celebrated her “regeneration” with Shelley. She had won the battle for his love, at least for now. However, she had also discovered how tenuous their relationship actually was. She knew that Shelley missed her stepsister, and she kept a watchful eye on his moods in case he was secretly planning to leave her.

  A few weeks after Claire left, Mary began to feel tired and ill, and discovered she was pregnant again. Shelley, too, felt weak and listless, perhaps as a result of the vegetarian diet he had decided was the only ethical way to live. A visit to the doctor had turned up a diagnosis of consumption, and although this later proved false, it deeply worried Mary. Here was another threat to their happiness, more dangerous than Claire. She could lose him forever if he did not take care of his health. They could not stay in the city a moment longer, she decided. Shelley needed country air for his lungs.

  In June, with the money he had inherited from his grandfather, Shelley purchased a lease on a two-story red brick mansion with extensive gardens in Bishopsgate, near Eton, a mile from the town of Windsor and just a few steps from the eastern entrance to Windsor Great Park. Shelley loved this part of England. He had blissful memories of roaming the countryside as a schoolboy here and wanted to introduce Mary to its beauties.

  In their new home, Mary hired her first cook and a small cadre of servants so that instead of spending her mornings on domestic chores, she had time to read, write, and study Greek. Having inherited Godwin’s belief in routine, she adhered to the schedule she had learned from him—work in the morning, dine, then walk in the afternoon—structured behavior that helped steady the erratic Shelley, who flitted in and out of the house longing for inspiration. He had no awareness of mealtimes and ate only when hungry, which was not very often. When he did eat, he devoured loaves of bread and had a schoolboyish habit of rolling the bread up into pellets and shooting them at people. “Mary, have I dined?” he would sometimes ask. Mary did not mind his forgetfulness, attributing it to genius. She told the cook to make them the vegetarian meals he insisted on and to omit sugar from their puddings, so as not to support the slave plantations. Doing without sweets was a significant sacrifice for Shelley, who loved sugar. According to Hogg, one of his favorite dishes was one he made himself. He would tear several loaves of bread into a bowl, pour boiling water on top, let it steep for a while, then squeeze out the water, chop it up with a spoon, and sprinkle it with huge amounts of sugar and nutmeg. Hogg teased him that he gorged himself on this “pap” so voraciously that he was like a Valkyrie “lapping up the blood of the slain!”

  “ ‘Aye!’ [Shelley] shouted out, with grim delight, ‘I lap up the blood of the slain!’ ”

  Thereafter, to the astonishment of guests, whenever he was eating this sugary mixture, he would cry, “I am going to lap up the blood of the slain! To sup up the gore of murdered kings!”

  He also loved gingerbread and puddings of all kinds. But for now he had decided to give up all such treats. As long as there were slaves in the world, he refused to indulge in sugary delights.

  Gradually, their health improved. Shelley felt stronger after spending hours outside, and now that Mary had endured the initial months of pregnancy, her sickness passed. After breakfast, she worked and Shelley roamed about outside with his little notebook or a volume of poetry. In the early afternoon, he would usually reappear and they would ramble through Windsor Great Park or climb nearby Cooper’s Hill and explore the ruined abbeys, the ancient royal castle, Bishopsgate Heath, Chapel Wood, and the meadows of Windsor. Mary shared her mother’s belief in exercise as a curative for most ills, and now that she felt stronger, she insisted on hikes that lasted all afternoon. On particularly fine days, she and Shelley took their books into the park and read under the ancient oak trees. Sometimes deer would wander past or rabbits would rustle the dark green undergrowth while the two of them discussed art, philosophy, and their aspirations. Shelley respected what he called Mary’s “hereditary aristocracy,” her calm, quiet ways, and her intellectual acuity. He also relished her contempt for hypocrisy. Mary once again believed that they were living out her mother’s dream, establishing a union between equals in which both the man and the woman had important work to do—an idea that Shelley fully endorsed. But the question was, what was this work to be?

  WHEN SHELLEY MET MARY he was torn between pursuing philosophy and poetry. His first published poem, Queen Mab, was a strange amalgamation of both, as Shelley had added extensive notes to the poem, arguing the merits of vegetarianism, sexual liberation, and freedom. Mary had been trained by Godwin to think logically and did not hesitate when Shelley asked her what she thought he should do with his life. She urged him to embrace poetry as his true calling, citing her mother’s belief that poetry, not philosophy, was the apex of human achievement. Shelley believed that Mary must be right, not only because she was wise and learned, but because he felt she understood him more fully than anyone else. Poetry would be his life’s work, he declared, and once he had made that decision, he felt great relief, writing Hogg, “I never before felt the integrity of my nature.” To Mary, he wrote, “You alone reconcile me to myself & to my beloved hopes.”

  Having decided on a goal, Shelley set right to work. With another school friend, the writer Thomas Peacock, who lived nearby, and Hogg, who often came up from London to visit, he embarked on a rigorous study of the Greek and Italian poets. With Mary, he steeped himself in English poetry. They read Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, which inspired Mary to call Shelley her “elfin Knight.” Although they were thrilled by Spenser’s romance, with its thickets of epithets and glorious stanzas, neither Mary nor Shelley liked his preachy tone. Chastity, temperance, obedience—these were not the values they espoused. What about liberty? What about the imagination? That fall they read Paradise Lost and were awestruck by Milton’s vivid depiction of a rebellious Satan. Here was a poet unshackled by petty moralizing. Here was a poem worthy of emulation.

  The eventual impact of these discussions both on Mary’s and Shelley’s work and on that of future writers is incalculable. Shelley would give voice to the ideas they developed in his Defense of Poetry, praising Milton for allowing his imagination free rein and criticizing Spenser for his philosophical limitations. Most early-nineteenth-century readers admired Milton, but to place him above Spenser, who was considered the greatest of the English poets, was scandalous. Centuries later, however, Shelley and Mary’s ideas continue to exert their hold. Shelley’s Defense has been read by generations of college students and is still a staple in the classroom, shaping the perspective of countless scholars and writers. Now, Shelley and Mary’s belief that the imagination should be preeminent in literary endeavors, that the artist should not preach but should rely on vision and inspiration, is a literary commonplace; young writers are taught to show, not
tell, to convey their ideas through imagery and plot rather than lecturing or sermonizing. And though these tenets may no longer hold sway as much as they once did, Shelley’s Defense is undoubtedly one of the great Romantic manifestos, famous for overturning some of the most dearly held principles of English literature, as well as upending the Christian emphasis on literature as a tool of conversion.

  Yet Mary’s role in shaping Shelley’s revolutionary theories is rarely acknowledged. Rather, critical debate has centered on Shelley’s influence on Mary. In part, this is Mary’s own doing. In her version of events, Shelley was the great man and she the diminutive follower. But her representation of their relationship has more to do with her own complexities than with the actual partnership they formed in Bishopsgate. The proof of this lies in the dramatic shift Shelley’s work took that summer and fall. On the strength of the ideas they had developed together, Shelley began to compose Alastor, the first poem of significant length he had written since he had met Mary and generally considered his first mature literary endeavor. Instead of relying on long endnotes to express his ideas, as he had in Queen Mab, Shelley would employ simile, metaphor, allusions, and fresh imagery to infuse his thoughts with life. Even more important, for the first time, Shelley allowed himself to explore his own consciousness, to reveal what Mary called “a poet’s heart in solitude,” giving Alastor a psychological sophistication that is lacking in Queen Mab.

  While Shelley was coming to terms with his identity as a poet, Mary, too, was immersed in a literary apprenticeship, although she was not yet quite sure what she would write. She worked on her Greek and read assiduously, keeping a detailed list of the books, including the works of her parents as well as philosophy, science, classical literature, political theory, travel writing, history, and even a gothic novel or two. During the final months of her pregnancy, the issue that most gripped her was slavery. Although the Abolition Act of 1807 had outlawed trafficking on English soil, slavery was still thriving in the West Indies, Brazil, and Cuba as well as in North America. Deeply disturbed by the conditions of the slaves and the ill treatment they faced, Mary read firsthand accounts of the slave trade and researched its history until her first labor pains forced her to put aside her books. On January 24, 1816, she gave birth to a boy. She named him William after her father, hoping that this gesture might help bridge the gap between them. But Godwin did not soften. He still refused any contact with his daughter, although he continued to pester Shelley about a loan. Finally, Shelley lost his temper: