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

by Charlotte Gordon

  My astonishment, and I will confess when I have been treated with most harshness and cruelty by you, my indignation has been extreme, that, knowing as you do my nature, any considerations should have prevailed on you to be thus harsh and cruel.

  Mary, meanwhile, sought to ease the pain of her father’s rejection by immersing herself in caring for her healthy new son. She did not resume her reading on slavery. Instead, she memorized Greek verbs, read her mother’s books, and wrote in her journal. The only hardship she experienced that spring was Shelley’s frequent absence; a year after his grandfather’s death, he was still battling his father’s lawyers about the status of his inheritance and had to go to London too frequently for Mary’s liking. Fortunately, the fight ended well for Shelley. Sir Timothy agreed to pay some of his debts and to continue his allowance of £1,000 a year. From his annual income, he gave £200 to Harriet—a stingy allotment for the mother of his two children, but Shelley had written her off as a traitor, telling himself that she would be able to live independently if she exercised restraint.

  Although the remaining £800 a year did not make Shelley a wealthy man, it did enable him to live comfortably. At a time when the annual income of skilled laborers ranged from only £50 to £90 and lawyers earned at most £450, members of the gentry could live on less than £500 a year if they were careful. On the other end of the spectrum, Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy had an annual income of £10,000, which made him an enormously wealthy man, the rough equivalent of a millionaire today.

  In March, Claire returned from exile to visit Mary. If she had given birth to a child, there was no evidence of this now. Perhaps she had given her baby away for adoption, had a miscarriage, or consulted a midwife to abort her pregnancy. But perhaps she had not been pregnant at all. Whatever the case, Claire and Mary soon fell back into their old uneasy camaraderie. There were no more outright battles. Mary could afford to be forgiving now that she had Shelley’s son, but she could still sense her stepsister’s jealousy, tempered though it was by rekindled affection and admiration.

  To Claire, once again, Mary appeared to have everything—a lover, a child, and a home. However, Mary’s life also seemed intolerably dull. Sitting by the fire with a baby, jiggling him up and down, or pushing him in his pram were entirely unsatisfactory activities for a lively eighteen-year-old like Claire. But if she had indeed just given up her own child, they would also have been heartbreaking. Before long, Claire was traveling back and forth to London, upsetting Mary by staying with Shelley in his temporary lodgings. Sometimes she visited her mother and Godwin at Skinner Street. Shelley and Mary hoped she could talk the Godwins into accepting them as a couple. But Claire had little interest in making her stepsister’s life easier. She was intent on another scheme, one inspired by her desire for the spotlight and her hunger for adventure, and yet destined to cause her so much pain that in later years she would wish she had paused and considered before plunging ahead.

  CHAPTER 12

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE FIRST VINDICATION

  [ 1787–1791]

  were comparatively new inventions when twenty-nine-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft began reviewing books for Johnson’s newly minted Analytical Review. Unlike the daily “rags,” where writers gossiped, preached, raged, and snarled about everything from what boots to buy to what members of Parliament to endorse, the Analytical Review was a high-minded affair that came out once a month and was over one hundred pages long, more like a book than a pamphlet. Johnson and Christie had serious philosophical and political aims. They called their reviewers “the HISTORIANS of the Republic of Letters,” and their mission was to create a well-informed public by highlighting important publications that would “add to the stock of human knowledge.” Conservatives viewed the new magazine as a dangerous mouthpiece for radicals, arguing that Johnson and Christie wanted to bring down the government. But the Analytical Review prided itself on its moderate and rational stands, advocating for the gradual reform of Parliament and opposing violence and factionalism in all their forms.

  Women were not meant to take part in serious debate of the kind endorsed by the Analytical Review. If a woman wanted to write, she was supposed to stick to gentle religious reflections, books of calming advice, brief homilies, or fanciful romances. Certainly she should not try to compose highly informed, intricate dissections of contemporary literature and politics. Nor should she form opinions that ran counter to the accepted truths of the day. True to form, Mary ignored these assumptions and jumped right into the literary fray, wielding her pen like a knife, skewering the books she did not like as ferociously as any of her male peers. The sentimental novels Johnson assigned her to review were “trash,” she wrote. They reinforced the pernicious ideas that women needed to be rescued by men and that women needed men to tell them what to do. This was destructive drivel, declared Mary. The “unnatural characters, improbable incidents, sad tales of woe rehearsed in an affected half-prose, half-poetical style, exquisite double-refined sensibility, dazzling beauty, and elegant drapery” were not only absurd, they were harmful to their female readers.

  It was not that she disliked novels—she, of course, had written one—it was the formulas employed by so many “scribbling women” that disturbed her. Fainting maidens, handsome suitors, fluttering ball gowns, forbidding castles, and black-cloaked villains “poison the minds of our young females,” she said. “Why is virtue to be always rewarded with a coach and six?” In her own novel, “Mary’s” mother, already a weak woman, is further enfeebled by reading such romances. This does not mean that Mary was against sentiment, having learned to pride herself on her highly refined feelings after reading Rousseau, but she rejected the idea that her feelings clouded her ability to make logical decisions. She believed that she was as capable of rational thought as any man and wanted to read and write books that were worthy of her intellect.

  As the months passed, Johnson’s prediction came true. Mary was earning more money than she could have dreamed of a year earlier. Rather than saving for her own future, however, she sent money to Paris for Everina’s upkeep, pushing her sister to extend her stay in France indefinitely. She found a better situation for Eliza at a school in Putney, where she could be a “parlour boarder”—a position in which one earned one’s board through teaching. Everything else—aside from the bare minimum—she gave to Fanny’s grieving family.

  Although these obligations depleted her purse, Mary still enjoyed a fast-paced literary life and entertained men in her apartment without a chaperone, unconventional though this was. Even more unconventional was her style as a hostess. She shocked acquaintances when she served wine to the visiting French politician Prince Talleyrand “indiscriminately from tea cups.” Mary, however, was loosening the knots that had bound her since she was a girl. No more frivolity or artificiality: one’s natural impulses mattered more than good manners; genius lay in the core of one’s being, not in the clink of fine crystal.

  During Mary’s first years in London, the topic on everyone’s mind was France. The country was in financial and political crisis. King Louis XVI had resisted the advice of his counselors for too long. The government was in dire need of funds, but if he raised taxes one more time, it seemed possible there might be a revolt. Already there were outbreaks of violence in Paris. French intellectuals published one furious pamphlet after another: the government was corrupt; the rich were too rich; the poor, too poor. From her work translating Louis XVI’s finance minister, Jacques Necker, Mary had become knowledgeable about the financial situation in France, and she was a significant contributor to the discussions about the unrest in Paris with Johnson and his friends. All of these men were progressive and agreed on basic tenets—the rights of the individual versus the state, the importance of freedom, and the inherent corruption of inherited position and property—but arguments still swept around the table: What was the best way to reform society? Should there be new laws? Were violent uprisings necessary? How effective were protest marches and petitions?
What were the rights of kings? Should France institute a parliamentary system? What about England? Should there even be a monarchy?

  To Mary’s delight, despite his failing health, Dr. Price, her hero from Newington Green, traveled into the city to lead some of these debates, praising the radicals and lambasting the French king. Citizens had the right to choose their rulers, he argued, citing Locke. Mary agreed with her old mentor and listened carefully to his points. Johnson was beginning to give her more important reviewing assignments, political works and histories rather than just romance novels, which allowed her to develop the revolutionary ideas she had been formulating at his table while also teaching her crucial lessons as a writer: how to create a public voice that lay outside the purview of “femininity”—how to offend, alienate, and strenuously disagree.

  Her task was made easier by the protections built into eighteenth-century journalism. Most writers signed their articles with their initials, and so, under the genderless guise of M.W., she could take leaps, assert views she knew would be unpopular, inveigh against writers she thought were fools, and preach on behalf of her favorite issues—the education of women, the virtues of freedom, and the evils of wealth—without fearing any personal assaults. Those who did oppose M.W. did so on an ideological basis, not because M.W. was female. Before long, she was lobbing insults with the best of them, calling her opponents at The Critical Review “timid, mean” and assessing one book as “an heterogeneous mass of folly, affectation and improbability.”

  In 1789, during Mary’s third summer in London, the news from France took a dramatic turn. The citizens of Paris had marched on the Bastille prison, overcome the king’s guards, and released the prisoners who had been rotting there for decades. To Mary, who had compared her sojourn with Lord and Lady Kingsborough to life in the Bastille, this triumph had a strangely personal feel. She was free; the French prisoners were free. Liberty had triumphed over aristocratic tyranny. Her friend the poet William Cowper, who often attended Johnson’s dinner parties, immediately penned an Address to the Bastille:

  Ye dungeons, and ye Cages of Despair!—

  There’s not an English heart that would not leap,

  To hear that ye were fall’n at last.

  In the New Annual Register, a young journalist named William Godwin rejoiced: “Advice is received from Paris, of a great revolution in France.” Conservatives, on the other hand, were alarmed. Revolutions were contagious and the ripples of the French Revolution could soon reach England. Already, the poor were restless. Between 1740 and 1779, the Enclosure Acts had taken thousands of acres of common land and placed them in the hands of wealthy landowners, increasing the gap between rich and poor. There had been many violent demonstrations in London; workers had taken to the streets, burning effigies of the king and rioting against the high price of bread. In fact, riots had become part of the fabric of English culture. As Ben Franklin put it, when he visited in 1769, “I have seen, within a year, riots in the country, about corn; riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers, riots of weavers, riots of coal-heavers; riots of sawyers.” The implications of this unrest were not lost on English aristocrats. Tensions had reached dangerous, potentially explosive levels.

  For Mary, the revolutionaries in France proclaimed the ideals she held most dear—the renunciation of tyranny and the redemption of the poor and oppressed; the new National Assembly had even sworn to uphold a “Declaration of the Rights of Man” inspired directly by Rousseau. The destruction of the Bastille was an event that “hailed the dawn of a new day,” she wrote, “and freedom, like a lion roused from his lair, rose with dignity, and calmly shook herself.”

  In her private life, Mary was also undergoing a transformation. That September, she had fallen into the habit of talking late into the night with one of Johnson’s closest friends, the forty-nine-year-old Swiss artist Henry Fuseli.

  Fuseli’s favorite topic was sex. His paintings featured imps nuzzling the bare pink breasts of fairies, naked Greek gods flexing their muscles, and lascivious witches. At first, it was difficult for Mary to accept the idea that sexuality could be a positive force. In Original Stories, she had warned young girls against giving way to their desires, preaching against sexual infatuation.

  But Fuseli was dedicated to the principle that no sex act should be taboo. He explained pleasures that were entirely new to her and told her about his liaisons with men and women, most notoriously with the niece of his erstwhile male lover, a Protestant priest. He thought women should be allowed to discover and express their sensuality. He said masturbation was important; human sexuality needed to be lifted out of the sewers and honored as the life force it was. He owned a large collection of explicit drawings that could never be shown in public, the most unusual of which were his sketches of women with “phallic coiffures.” Recent scholars have even suggested that he was having a secret affair with Johnson.

  Self-portrait of the Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. (illustration ill.15)

  By that summer, Fuseli had persuaded Mary to believe that sexual impulses should be acknowledged, even celebrated. However, learning about desire from a master had its drawbacks; it was becoming difficult to manage her feelings. Although Fuseli was not particularly handsome—he was short and bowlegged—his powers of seduction were legendary. Mary yearned to be closer to him, but after their late-night discussions, Fuseli always returned home to the bed of his wife, an ex-model who was extremely pretty, though far inferior to Mary intellectually. Mary struggled to accept the limitations of her relationship with this compelling man, telling herself that even if he was not in love with her, their explicit conversations were evidence that she had been accepted into an exclusive club of male intellectuals. But this was not much comfort when she yearned for more.

  Mary’s acknowledgment of her own sexuality was itself a courageous act. “Experts” of the time held that females who felt desire were trespassing into dangerously masculine territory. Women were believed to be so weak that they could easily be overwhelmed by passion and lose all capacity for reason. Mary was cautious, keeping her feelings to herself. She realized that if anyone from her previous life—her sisters or old friends—knew of the attraction she felt, she would be condemned. Merely being alone with a man went against the strict moral code; talking about sex with him, even if you never acted on it, was considered immoral and scandalous.

  Mary’s flirtation with Fuseli was just one of her many departures from the traditional road she had long ago forgone. She had strong opinions—“truths,” she would have said—that she wanted to express in what she called a “masculine” style: bold, honest, and eminently rational rather than trivial, weak, and flowery, the unfortunate list of adjectives attributed to “feminine” writing by most in the eighteenth century. She had a history now of reviewing books that would ordinarily have been the province of men—a book on boxing, an encyclopedia of music—and she was ready to take on new challenges, whatever they might be.

  At the same time, Mary, who had already been inspired by Rousseau, was now ready to embrace the new ideals of what would come to be called Romanticism, a literary movement that she would be one of the first to promote in England: the elevation of emotion over reason, passion over logic, spontaneity over restraint, and originality over tradition. Although she protested against those who said that women were too easily ruled by their feelings and had little capacity for logical thought, she also agreed with Fuseli and her new friends at Johnson’s table that emotions had been stigmatized by previous generations. Passion could be a driving force for reform in the world and should be revered. This departure from Enlightenment beliefs represented an important evolution in her thinking and now she wondered if it was possible to employ a direct, rational “male” style and yet still champion these new ideals.

  In her columns in the Analytical Review, Mary grappled with this contradiction, praising a new novel, Julia, by Helen Maria Williams, precisely because of its “artless energy of feeling.” Unlik
e the romances she had railed against, Williams’s fiction seemed to Mary to promote honesty rather than artificiality, Nature rather than society. If one viewed women’s capacity for passion as a strength rather than a weakness, then one could combat the assumptions of those critics who ridiculed women’s writing as overly emotional and irrational. In other words, far from being “merely” the province of women, there was nothing trivial about feelings. The Bastille had been won because the people had been ignited by their passions, and Mary could feel this truth in her own life; she felt alive, aware of her own capabilities. By connecting the freedom to express one’s passions with the freedom to protest against the state, the freedom of women with the freedom of the artist and intellectual, Mary was learning a significant lesson. No political issue was free of personal implications. No reasonable cause was free of emotions. Logical discourse was important, but passion was even more so. If dishonest sentimentality made for poor writing, so did dry reason. Reason and sentiment. Passion and logic. The two had to be combined.