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

by Charlotte Gordon

  But despite all this, Mary had expressed no desire to meet the great poet. To persuade her sister, Claire told Mary that Byron was interested in offering Shelley his assistance; she did not mention that she had wooed the poet into bed, and she made Byron promise not to mention their affair. For Mary, it must have been surprising to hear that Claire was on friendly terms with his lordship, but since Mary’s journal pages are missing from this period, it is impossible to know how Claire explained the situation. In later years, Claire would say that she and Byron had met through a mutual acquaintance, never revealing that she had been the one to make the first overture.

  Once the two principals had agreed, Claire set the time. She had some trepidation about Byron’s dependability, as he had a history of keeping her waiting, and urged him to be on time. However, Byron treated his appointment with Mary with far more respect than his assignations with Claire. He was interested in meeting this young woman, the daughter of such a famous mother and father. A few years earlier, Byron, an admirer of Political Justice, had donated some of his own earnings to the perpetually cash-strapped Godwin. He had long revered Wollstonecraft. Mary and Byron both counted Coleridge as a friend and both admired his poetry. Byron had urged Coleridge to publish Christabel, a supernatural poem Byron loved so much that he memorized it when he read it in manuscript version. Both Mary and Byron valued scholarship, beautiful language, and flights of the imagination, no matter how disturbing.

  At their first meeting, Mary was quiet, respectful, and serious. Byron was polite and expansive. Despite his wild life and the scandals he created, underneath it all, he had a deeply conventional streak. Mary’s good manners and composure pleased him. He did not try to flirt with her, nor she with him. From her earliest days, Mary had conversed with famous men, the great poets and intellectuals who came to the Godwin house. She was able to talk to Byron as though he were a friend or comrade, an unusual experience for the poet, who was used to young women either shrinking from him or attempting to seduce him. For Mary, Byron was fascinating not for his looks or his reputation as a lover, but solely because he was a brilliant writer and a rebel.

  Nevertheless, much as he had enjoyed meeting Mary, Byron’s interest in Claire continued to wane. She was not easily put off, however. When she discovered that Byron planned to spend part of his summer in Geneva, she begged to be taken along; when he refused, she used Mary once again, telling him that her stepsister yearned to write to him and wanted his address in Geneva: “Mary is delighted with you as I knew she would be.…She perpetually exclaims, ‘How mild he is! How gentle! So different from what I expected.’ ”

  Byron saw right through this. Having spent a long afternoon with the dignified Mary, Byron knew that Claire’s description of her stepsister’s feelings was a ploy. Such fulsome terms seemed unlikely to have come from such a reserved young lady. He was perfectly happy to sleep with Claire while he was still in London, but had no intention of taking her with him on his travels. As a last resort, Claire turned to Mary and Shelley, suggesting that they all take a trip to Geneva to be near Byron. Mary liked the idea of escaping the hostility of London and felt that three-month-old William would benefit from the clean air of Switzerland. For Shelley, Claire’s proposal came at just the right moment, since it dovetailed with a plan he had been brooding over for months, instigated by an unpleasant rejection from Godwin.

  In February, Shelley had attempted to make amends with Mary’s father, ringing the bell at Skinner Street hoping to see the philosopher. When Godwin sent the servants to turn him away, Shelley refused to leave and kept on ringing the bell. But Godwin remained adamant and Shelley was forced to leave, hurt and angry. The older man had won that round, but at great expense to his own future happiness. After the incident, Shelley sounded the first warning, writing Godwin that he was tempted to “desert my native country.” He was tired of suffering “the perpetual experience of neglect or enmity from almost everyone.”

  The impetus to leave was further compounded by the critics’ hostile reception of Alastor, which Shelley had published that winter. They ignored it so entirely that Shelley felt humiliated, confessing that he was “morbidly sensitive to…the injustice of neglect.” Until Claire’s suggestion, Shelley was not sure where he wanted to go. All he knew was that he wanted to spurn everyone who had rejected him. Geneva seemed as good a location as any, particularly since he was eager to meet the famous poet. And so, once the weather warmed, Shelley decided to make good on his threat of departure, taking Mary and baby William with him. It would be a temporary exile—but then again, maybe not. Perhaps they would never return.

  When Claire wrote to Byron of their plans, he was interested enough not to veto it out of hand. He did not want to encourage her, but he liked the idea of setting up camp with the younger poet and the daughter of Godwin and Wollstonecraft. At the end of April, when the legal proceedings faced by both men drew to a close, each household set forth for Switzerland.

  Claire attempted to mask her true intentions in a letter to her reluctant lover, telling him she expected him to have an affair with Mary that summer, not her:

  You will I dare say fall in love with her; she is very handsome & very amiable & you will no doubt be blest in your attachment; nothing can afforde me such pleasure as to see you happy in any of your attachments. If it should be so I will redouble my attentions to please her. I will do everything she tells me whether it be good or bad for I would not stand low in the affections of the person so beyond blest as to be beloved of you.

  An older Claire would never have written such a letter. But barely eighteen and used to men choosing Mary over herself, she did what she had always done—she diminished herself, in this case promising to be Mary’s slave—in order to curry favor with the man she wanted. The scars of the Godwin/Clairmont union had not faded; Shelley, Byron, and Godwin were largely interchangeable in the drama between the stepsisters. For Claire, it did not matter how unworthy Byron was of her adoration. He was an essential component in her struggle to win love and attention.

  MARY, SHELLEY, CLAIRE, AND baby William arrived in France in early May. They anticipated a pleasant journey through the mountains now that Shelley had the money for a private coach, but the expedition proved far more difficult than expected. Nicknamed “the year without a summer,” 1816 is a famous anomaly in climate history. A volcano had erupted in Indonesia the preceding April, the world’s largest explosion in over fifteen hundred years, spewing thick ash into the atmosphere and disrupting the normal weather patterns in Europe, Asia, and even North America. The Yangtze overflowed. Red snow fell in Italy. Famine swept from Moscow to New York. Grain froze and corn withered. Food prices soared and death rates doubled.

  Switzerland was hit particularly hard by the erratic weather patterns, and snow was still falling heavily when they arrived in the foothills of the Alps. The unseasonably cold weather had already hindered their progress through France, and they were impatient to begin their vacation on the lake. Foolish as always when it came to travel, Shelley insisted on starting the climb in early May, on an evening when a blizzard was causing a virtual whiteout. Fortunately, the locals intervened, urging him to hire ten strong men to accompany them in case they got stuck and needed to be shoveled out.

  Despite having a fussy infant on her lap, Mary recorded her impressions of their ascent in her journal, writing passages that she would later use to describe the wintry landscape in her novel Frankenstein:

  Never was a scene more awefully desolate. The trees in these regions are incredibly large, and stand in scattered clumps over the white wilderness; the vast expanse of snow was chequered only by those gigantic pines, and the poles that marked our road: no river or rock-encircled lawn relieved the eye.…

  It took them all night to achieve the summit, but as they began the descent, the snow melted slowly away, until at last they reached the green fields and well-tended orchards of the valley of Geneva. When they drove into town, the bad weather finally broke and the s
un came out, allowing them to see the quiet beauty of the lake that lay before them. The streets were empty, the parks deserted, as the season had yet to officially begin. They were staying at the imposing Hôtel d’Angleterre in the heart of the city, on the Quai du Mont Blanc, the conventional choice for well-to-do English tourists, where unmarried guests would not have been welcome. By now an expert in subterfuge, Shelley told the proprietor, Monsieur Dejean, that Mary was his wife and booked them a suite of rooms on the top floor with views over the lake, which Mary described as “blue as the heavens” and “sparkling with golden beams.” On clear afternoons, they could see the triumphant steeple of Mont Blanc rising majestically in the distance.

  Mary’s pleasure was diminished by her worry over William, who had suffered on the journey. Fortunately, once they settled into a regular schedule, he began to regain his strength, nursing at predictable intervals and napping in the morning and the afternoon, giving his mother a chance to rest—that is, when she could get away from Claire, who talked excitedly and continuously about what they—and she in particular—would do once Byron arrived. Yet, as the days passed, Claire grew increasingly apprehensive. Each afternoon, she paced the shores of the lake, restless with anticipation, while Mary and Shelley enjoyed the tranquillity of their new surroundings.

  The weather remained pleasant after they arrived and the sun shone almost every day.

  One of the first orders of practical business for the family was to find a reliable nurse for William, as this would allow Mary to spend time with Shelley and attend to her studies. When they met Elise Duvillard, a young Swiss woman, who also had a baby and no apparent husband, they knew they had found the right person. Elise was cheerful and bright-cheeked, and she loved small children. Mary gladly surrendered William to her arms, a tribute to Elise, as, after the loss of her first baby, Mary did not like being apart from her son.

  Delighted with their surroundings, Mary and Shelley happily embraced their new routine. Mary wrote:

  We do not enter society here, yet our time passes swiftly and delightfully. We read Italian and Latin during the heats of noon, and when the sun declines we walk in the garden of the hotel.…I feel as happy as a new-fledged bird, and hardly care what twig I fly to, so that I may try my new-found wings.

  In the evening they sailed across the lake—sometimes accompanied by Claire—and often did not return until the moon rose. Mary reveled in “the delightful scent of flowers and new mown grass, and the chirp of the grasshoppers, and the song of the evening birds.” They could see all the way to the bottom; now and then clouds of minnows floated by. These details stayed with Mary, and a few months later she would use them in her description of Frankenstein’s one afternoon of happiness, drifting on a lake with his new bride, who exclaims, “Look…at the innumerable fish that are swimming in the clear waters, where we can distinguish every pebble that lies at the bottom. What a divine day! How happy and serene all nature appears.”

  On May 25, two weeks after they arrived, a huge carriage came thundering down the alpine road in the middle of the night. Military blue with flashy red and gold stripes, this extraordinary conveyance was an exact replica of Napoleon’s imposing war carriage. From the imperial arms on the doors to the four iron candleholders screwed onto each corner, the resemblance was so close that if onlookers did not know better they might think the fallen conqueror had escaped from captivity on St. Helena and was now rolling into Geneva.

  Byron, who had this vehicle built at great expense, would have been delighted to cause a mix-up of this sort, as he was convinced that he and the emperor were almost the same person, or, at the very least, shared similar destinies. Both had risen to great heights and then fallen. Byron collected Napoleon memorabilia and owned an engraving of the emperor under which he sat to write his poems. He was fresh from a visit to Waterloo, where the grand pathos of Napoleon’s final surrender had moved him to tears. The extinction of greatness, the enormity of his hero’s ruin, tormented Byron. He and the emperor had “soar[ed]”; they had stood gigantic and singular; they “dazzled and dismay[ed].” They had both fought for the same cause—Liberty—although Byron had used art, not arms, to show the people that they deserved to be free. Now, like Napoleon, Byron was exiled. Or at least he felt as if he had been exiled. His fight to liberate his readers from the shackles of convention had inspired hatred, a fate shared by the heroes of his poetry—a point not lost on his contemporaries. When the novelist Walter Scott heard that Byron had left England, presumably for good, he declared the poet had “Childe Harolded himself, and outlawed himself, into too great a resemblance with the pictures of his imagination.” Byron had even adopted his defeated hero’s voice in a poem he had completed right before his arrival in Switzerland, Napoleon’s Farewell, in which Byron’s emperor says,

  Farewell to the Land where the gloom of my Glory

  Arose and o’ershadow’d the earth with her name—

  For all of his conviction that he was different from everyone else, Byron headed straight to the Hôtel d’Angleterre. Just like all the other Englishmen, he would not have dreamed of staying anywhere else. The racket of his entrance awoke the sleeping residents. Byron never traveled without his menagerie of “eight enormous dogs, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow, and a falcon.” Other times he traveled with peacocks, an Egyptian crane, geese, a heron, and a goat with a broken leg, all of which lived indoors with him. He did not care whom he inconvenienced. In college, he had even adopted a tame bear, installing the animal in his rooms to protest the college’s rule that he could not live with his dog, a huge Newfoundland named Boatswain.

  Claire went down to greet him, but Byron was exhausted, signing his age as 100 in the hotel register and sweeping off to his room before she could find him. The next day passed without Byron’s making any effort to contact Claire or Shelley. Having stayed up all night waiting for a message, Claire felt deeply injured, writing Byron a hurt, touchingly childish note the next morning: “I have been in this weary hotel this fortnight,” she scrawled angrily, “and it seems so unkind, so cruel of you to treat me with such marked indifference. Will you go straight up to the top of the house this evening at ½ past seven & I will infallibly be on the landing place and show you the room.”

  A little later that morning when Claire looked out her window, she saw Byron and his twenty-one-year-old personal physician, John Polidori, rowing on the lake. Dragging Mary and Shelley with her, Claire made them walk back and forth along the beach until Byron spotted the little party and came ashore. Shelley was stiff and silent, suddenly overtaken by a mix of admiration and jealousy. Mary was quietly polite, while Claire chattered and laughed. Polidori kept careful track of events. Fortunately for posterity—if not for Byron—Polidori was in the secret pay of John Murray, the publisher; his job was to provide the details of Byron’s personal life for the gossip columns.

  To the young doctor, Shelley appeared “bashful, shy, consumptive,” but he was also struck by the poet’s modern scientific outlook; Shelley asked Polidori to vaccinate baby William almost upon first meeting, and Polidori did so at once. Shelley thanked him with a gold chain and seal for his efforts. Mary, meanwhile, remained very much in the background until a few days later, when Shelley urged her to recite Coleridge’s A War Eclogue by heart, a rather savage poem for a properly brought-up young lady to have memorized. But Mary performed it with relish, particularly the section in which Fire, Famine, and Slaughter condemn Prime Minister Pitt to hell—and Polidori was instantly infatuated. An aspiring writer himself, he regarded Mary as beautiful and sophisticated, and over the next few months, instead of keeping as meticulous a record of Byron’s escapades as Murray would have liked, he listed his activities with Mary, which were plentiful: “Read Italian with Mrs. S”; “went into a boat with Mrs. S, and rowed all night till nine; tea’d together, chatted, etc.”

  The day after they met, Shelley and Byron dined together and discovered they shared similar obsessions: liberty, poetry, N
apoleon, the Greek poets, the hypocrisy of London, and, of course, themselves—their struggles with melancholy, the criticism they had endured, and their commitment to art. Together, they took a day trip to Plainpalais to pay homage to Rousseau, whose bust sat squarely in the middle of the park. Claire, frustrated that she did not have more time alone with Byron, volunteered to copy his most recent poems. But all this did was turn her into a secretary; she toiled, alone with his manuscripts, struggling with his handwriting, while Byron sailed, rowed, swam, and visited with the others. His fascination with the rise and fall of heroes, or, to be more precise, with his own rise and fall, may well have fired his poetic compositions with passion and originality, but it made him much too self-absorbed to be a good candidate for a love affair.

  The season was by now in full swing, giving a festive air to the evenings. When it was not raining, lanterns were hung from posts for outdoor suppers; dances were organized; English ladies and gentlemen spooned sorbet out of cut glass bowls, criticized each other’s dress and manners, compared the views from their rooms, and chatted about mutual acquaintances and London. Naturally, the Shelley entourage and Byron were not welcome at any of these soirees, although they did provide an engrossing topic of conversation.

  For the ordinary English tourist, staying in a hotel with his lordship was like living in close quarters with an ill-behaved rock star. In their letters home, people took pleasure in noting Byron’s shocking behavior. One Englishman who did not know the names of the Shelley trio referred to Claire as an actress, the nineteenth-century euphemism for a woman of ill repute. He wrote, “Our late great Arrival is Lord Byron, with the Actress and another family of very suspicious appearance. How many he has at his disposal out of the whole set I know not.…”

  In London, the newspapers began to refer to the friends as a “league of incest.” When either Mary or Claire entered the public rooms, they were greeted with silence and hostile stares. When they fled, they could hear whispering, like a wind at their back. Impatient with this ill treatment, Shelley rented a chalet called Maison Chapuis on the opposite side of the lake from the hotel. They arrived there on the first of June, and before long Byron and Polidori followed, moving to the beautiful Villa Diodati about fifty yards up the hillside. This grand stucco house with three stories, pillars, and a capacious front porch had plenty of room for Byron’s menagerie and extra guests. The entire party was delighted to learn that Milton had once stayed there, an astonishingly good omen for this group of young people who by now saw themselves as fallen angels, like Milton’s Satan: rebellious and misunderstood.