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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Now, on the night of Johnson’s dinner party, this famous revolutionary sat quietly swallowing his potatoes. Both Godwin and Mary were on tenterhooks: What inspirational words might Paine utter? But Paine seemed content simply to eat and listen. And the person he listened to most was Mary, not Godwin. This was not just because Mary was a passionate talker; it was also because at dinner parties such as this one, Godwin tended to observe from the sidelines, although occasionally startling others with barks of laughter.

  This is not to say that Godwin did not have opinions; in fact, he had intransigent opinions about most things, and when he had a chance, he expressed these opinions with the sharp-edged righteousness of a trained evangelical minister. But dressed in a decidedly unfashionable black coat, due at that time to parsimoniousness, not poverty, laboring under a set of self-imposed rules—five hours of writing every day, two hours of reading, and a one-hour walk—with a downturned mouth, a receding hairline, and a stiff back, he looked as uncomfortable as he usually felt. Later in life, he described his feelings of social awkwardness:

  I can scarcely begin a conversation where I have no preconceived subject to talk of; in these cases I have recourse to topics the most trite and barren, and my memory often refuses to furnish even these. I have met a man in the street who was liable to the same infirmity; we have stood looking at each other for the space of a minute each listening for what the other would say, and have parted without either uttering a word.

  He did not want to offend people, but he was all too well aware that people often found him abrasive:

  I have a singular want of foresight on some occasions as to the effect what I shall say will have on the person to whom it is addressed. I therefore often appear rude, though no man can be freer from rudeness of intention and often get a character for harshness that my heart disowns.

  Mary, on the other hand, having been told to be silent all her life, had no patience with the sidelines. On this evening, she was eager to tell Paine her views on liberty, education, justice, and just about anything else that occurred to her. Paine listened meekly, while the other guests swallowed their ale (and their own thoughts) and spooned down Johnson’s cod stew. The more she talked, the more resentful Godwin grew. When he attempted to interject, praising Voltaire’s atheism, Mary cut him off: Godwin’s words, she sniffed, “could do no credit either to the commended or the commender.” She did not hold with the policies of the Church of England, but she was still a believer and was “provoked” by Godwin’s radical dismissal of religion.

  Humiliated, Godwin was at a disadvantage. He could not keep up with Mary’s rapid zigzagging, and in fact disapproved of her conversational style altogether. He preferred to set his ideas in order before he spoke (or wrote), and he felt dinner parties should proceed the same way he organized his books.

  Nothing could have been more antithetical to Mary’s approach. She believed sudden inspiration was more valuable than adherence to any one system of ideas: “It is wandering from my present subject, perhaps, to make a political remark; but as it was produced naturally by the train of my reflections, I shall not pass it silently over,” she declared in Rights of Woman. In person and on the page, she sailed from idea to idea as quickly as they appeared on the horizon. On this particular night, vanquished by Mary’s speed and forcefulness, Godwin subsided, but he noted somewhat grumpily that no matter the topic—art, politics, France, America, or King George—Mary found the “gloomy side” and only seemed content when “bestowing censure.” No doubt Mary would have given a different account, but since she did not record her thoughts, we have only Godwin’s; and to a man who had not yet given up his belief that the ideal female had “the delicate frame of the bird that warbles unmolested in its native groves,” Mary seemed brash and markedly “unfeminine.”

  Although some modern critics have assumed that the differences between Mary and Godwin are the differences between a woman and a man, a female writer and a male writer, Mary would have dismissed such a view, and she would have been right. The differences between Mary and Godwin cannot be reduced to gender stereotypes. They were both committed to thinking, speaking, and writing about social justice; both considered themselves philosophers. The contrast in their styles lies in their attitudes about accessibility and audience. Mary, by now an experienced journalist, had trained herself to catch and engage her readers, just as she liked to rally opinions back and forth across a table. She let cracks appear in her authorial armor on purpose, inviting readers to engage with her, just as she welcomed a good sparring match at a party. Godwin, on the other hand, did not view himself as a journalist trying to interest a general audience, but exclusively as a dispenser of ideas to learned readers, a pure intellectual. It followed, then, that Godwin, who preferred conversations to proceed by logical steps, would rather speak about sincerity while Mary prided herself on speaking with sincerity. By the end of the evening, he felt annoyed and tired. Never could he have imagined that one day he would fall in love with this opinionated, dominating woman—passionately so.

  THE MONTHS THAT FOLLOWED the publication of Rights of Woman seemed empty to Mary. For the first time since Fanny died, she did not have a specific book to work on. By April, she felt adrift. She had spent the last few years driving herself to finish two books, both of which had been greeted with mockery and cruel jabs at her intellectual abilities, her appearance, and her marital status. Of course, she had earned acclaim as well, but now that the excitement had subsided, she was left with the haunting sense that Rights of Woman was not quite what she had wanted to write. “Had I allowed myself more time I could have written a better book,” she confessed to a friend.

  In May, after Paine published the second part of his Rights of Man, King George declared him a criminal, charging him with sedition and banning his work. Hate mobs chased Paine out of the country to France, where he was instantly hailed as a hero. Angry at this treatment of her friend and inspired by his example, Mary longed to join him there. By the end of June she had talked Johnson and Fuseli into crossing the Channel with her. Fuseli, always interested in diversion and fascinated by the unfolding drama in Paris, was happy to indulge Mary, although he brought his wife along.

  The strangely mismatched quartet set out for Dover in early August, but just as they were to embark, frightening news arrived: the Tuileries Palace had been attacked, the French royal family thrown into the Temple prison, the Legislative Assembly dissolved, and Lafayette, the moderate leader of the National Guard, driven out of the country by radicals who had seized control of the Revolution. Mary wanted to continue, but she was outvoted. They turned back to London, and though Mary spent a few weeks in the country with Johnson, her spirits were low. There seemed nothing to look forward to. She longed to be in Paris; how could she be a true reformer if she did not witness the Revolution?

  Without a project to occupy her mind, Mary’s focus on Fuseli intensified. She assured him her passion was platonic, since he was married and adultery was against her principles. Had she not just written an entire book about the dangers women faced when they indulged in illicit affairs? “If I thought my passion criminal, I would conquer it, or die in the attempt,” she declared. All she wanted, she wrote, was “to unite [myself] to [your] mind.” He had helped her learn to enjoy herself. Before their relationship, she had consigned herself to an ascetic life:

  [I] read no book for mere amusement, not even poetry, but studied those works only which are addressed to the understanding; [I] scarcely tasted animal food, or allowed [myself] the necessaries of life, that [I] might be able to pursue some romantic schemes of benevolence; seldom went to any amusements…and [my] clothes were scarcely decent.

  These words are pieced together from the few fragments that remain of Mary’s letters to Fuseli, but Mary’s point is still clear: Fuseli had introduced her to new pleasures. After she encountered his “grandeur of soul” and “lively sympathy,” he had become essential to her happiness. It was not about sex, she protested.
“For immodesty in my eyes is ugliness; my soul turns with disgust from pleasure tricked out in charms which shun the light of heaven.”

  The harder she pushed, the more Fuseli withdrew. By October, she was writing Johnson that she “was in an agony. My nerves [are] in such a painful state of irritation—I suff[er] more than I can express.…I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution.…There is certainly a great defect in my mind—my wayward heart creates its own misery—Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child—.” What happened next is unclear. According to Fuseli, Mary decided to take matters into her own hands. She arrived at his house, banged on the front door, and when his wife, Sophia, appeared, announced, “I find that I cannot live without the satisfaction of seeing and conversing with [your husband] daily.” Before the startled Mrs. Fuseli could stop her, she explained that she would like to move in with the Fuselis. There would be no threat to the Fuselis’ marriage, as her “passion” was spiritual; she did not want to share their marital bed; she simply wanted Fuseli as her constant companion. Alarmed, Mrs. Fuseli banished Mary from the house, forbidding her husband to see Mary again. Fuseli did nothing to challenge his wife’s edict, he said later, because Mary’s attachment had become something of an embarrassment. In fact, he would never speak to her again.

  But in 1883, Godwin’s biographer, C. Kegan Paul, questioned the story of Fuseli’s wife throwing Mary out, arguing that Mary’s enemies had spread this rumor as part of a campaign to discredit her as a desperate, love-starved spinster. Paul was one of the last to see the remaining correspondence between Fuseli and Mary before it was destroyed by Mary’s descendants, giving his words an authority lacking in the Fuseli account. Furthermore, Fuseli was notorious for spreading malicious gossip about both friends and enemies. After Mary died, he declared that she had been relentless in her pursuit of him, regaling his friends with the story in large part to taunt Godwin about Mary’s attachment to him.

  At any rate, since Mary’s version of events is missing, it is impossible to know what really happened in this stage of their relationship. What is clear is that if she was heartbroken, she managed to recover quickly. By November she was able to write to her friend William Roscoe, who had commissioned her portrait the previous year, that she was through with Fuseli: “I intend no longer to struggle with a rational desire.…I am still a Spinster on the wing.” With Johnson, she came up with a new plan for her future: she would go to France, where she would write up her observations and send them home for publication in the Analytical Review. The proceeds from these articles would fund her trip. She would be, for all intents and purposes, a foreign correspondent.

  It was a dangerous undertaking. If consulted, most of her friends would have advised Mary to stay home. The violence in Paris had escalated that autumn. Twelve thousand political prisoners had been murdered in their cells; women were being raped and men tortured in full view of an applauding mob. One of the most horrifying events occurred when Marie Antoinette’s close friend and reputed lesbian lover, the Princesse de Lamballe, was stripped naked and dragged through the city streets, “her breasts and vulva cut off—the latter worn as a moustache.” She was beheaded and her head mounted on a pike outside the queen’s window. English visitors fled, alarmed by these atrocities and afraid of meeting the fate of those tourists who had already been murdered in their beds. But if anything, these reports whetted Mary’s appetite. She packed her bags and gave away her cat, even as the rumors flew: “I shall not now halt at Dover, I promise you,” she wrote Roscoe, “for as I go alone, neck or nothing is the word.”

  CHAPTER 15

  MARY GODWIN: FITS OF FANTASY

  [ 1816 ]

  a week of being shut indoors by the steady rain, Byron amused himself by suggesting that the lovesick Polidori demonstrate his chivalry by jumping off the porch—an eight-foot drop—to offer Mary assistance as she made her way up the wet, slippery path. Polidori was too naïve to know what Byron knew instinctively, that a man who took such extraordinary measures would appear foolish. Sure enough, when the smitten Polidori took his lordship’s advice and leapt, Mary was startled but certainly not impressed. Even more embarrassing, Polidori sprained his ankle upon landing, with the result that when he and Mary made their way to the house, the young knight had to lean on his lady’s shoulder rather than the other way around. Wincing, irritable, and out of sorts, he retired indoors, fully aware that he had been ridiculous.

  Confined to the couch for the rest of the week, Polidori brooded over Mary’s perfections—her slanting sidelong looks, her air of hidden secrets—until he could bear it no longer.

  He confessed his love, hoping Mary would welcome his advances; after all, she had scorned the social code by living openly with Shelley and bearing his children. Perhaps she would welcome a new suitor. But he was quickly disabused of this notion when Mary told him she thought of him as a little brother and that she was in love exclusively with Shelley. This was a humbling moment for the ambitious young man who, although he was a physician, wanted to be a writer and believed his literary talents rivaled those of Byron.

  This portrait of a young woman is traditionally identified as Mary Shelley at age nineteen. (illustration ill.19)

  If June 15, the day of his infamous jump, loomed large as one of the most humiliating episodes in Polidori’s short and troubled life—he would commit suicide only five years later—it has also become notable in literary history for the chain of events that began later that evening. To cheer up the injured young doctor, the group agreed to hear him read the first draft of his new play. Although no one thought highly of this work—they said it was “worth nothing,” he recorded dolefully in his journal—it did spark a conversation that would have important ramifications for all assembled, so important that literary scholars are still trying to piece together exactly what happened that night.

  Creation and human nature—these were the topics on the table. They were themes that had long preoccupied Byron, Shelley, and Mary. Polidori volunteered to read his notes from a series of lectures he had attended in London given by the renowned anatomist William Lawrence. Both Mary and Shelley knew Lawrence, as Shelley had selected him as his physician precisely because of the doctor’s avant-garde theories that the origins of life were based in Nature, not divine will. Lawrence argued there was no such thing as a “super-added” force like the soul, and that human beings were made of bone, muscle, blood, and nothing more. The public’s response to these lectures had been hostile:

  [W]hat is it that Mr. Lawrence…requires us all to believe? That there is no difference between a man and an oyster.…Mr. Lawrence considers that man…is nothing more than an orang-outang or an ape, with “more ample cerebral hemispheres”! Mr. Lawrence strives with all his powers to prove that men have no souls!

  But, not surprisingly, the residents of the Villa Diodati had the opposite response. Lawrence’s ideas fascinated them. If the doctor was right and God was not the creator of life, then this restored power to human beings—a Promethean theme that had long obsessed Shelley and would inspire him to write Prometheus Unbound a few years later. In fact, argued Shelley, if God did not create human beings, was there not a good chance that human beings created God and that Christianity was a sham? Byron, too, explored this theme in a poem about the powers of human creation, Manfred. He did not go as far as Shelley—he had more inherent respect for religion than the younger man—but he embraced the principle that Nature was the generative force of the universe.

  Before long the conversation turned to electricity and “the experiments of Dr. Darwin,” Charles Darwin’s grandfather, who had dined with Mary’s mother long ago at Joseph Johnson’s table. Byron and Shelley particularly liked the story about how Darwin had applied an electrical charge to “a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion.” But though Shelley rejoiced in the idea o
f human beings creating life, Mary would later say, in a preface to her revised edition of Frankenstein, that she found the principle “supremely frightful,” confessing that she worried about “the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.”

  Mary’s doubts stemmed from her deep reservations about the ability of human beings to improve themselves or the world. Evil, she felt, was lodged too deeply inside the human heart. Even those men who appeared to have the highest possible aims—truth, knowledge, liberty—seemed to her to be motivated by the desire for power and recognition, an insight gained, perhaps, from her life with Godwin and now Shelley.

  The next night, June 16, was even wilder. As lightning flashed and the rain poured down, the little party huddled by the fire at the Villa Diodati. To while away the hours, Byron read aloud from an old volume of ghost stories that he had found in the villa. Although everyone else was agreeably frightened by these tales, Byron grew frustrated. At last he threw the book down. They needed something new, something more terrible, he declared: everyone should write a ghost story, and then they would select a winner. He was confident that he could easily triumph over Shelley; he never considered the talents of Polidori or the two women.

  That night everyone slept at the Villa Diodati; it was too stormy for the Shelley party to venture back down the path. When they returned home the next day, Mary tried to focus on writing her story while Elise watched William, but whether she had immediate success is not clear, as there is so much mythology about what happened next.