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

by Charlotte Gordon

  This was a tricky enterprise, since overseas trade meant skirting the British blockade against France. Clever and ambitious, Imlay came up with a plan in which his French customers would pay for the commodities he imported in Bourbon silver—an illegal currency in Britain, Austria, and Prussia, with whom France was at war, but perfectly legal in out-of-the-way Scandinavia, where Imlay established a contact: a merchant named Elias Backman, who was based in Gothenburg. Backman was happy to take French silver in exchange for the goods he had to sell, such as wheat, soap, and iron, or to convert the silver into currency that Imlay could use in Britain and America. As the middleman, Imlay hoped to become rich, very rich. If this happened, he told Mary, they could go to America.

  But Mary was disappointed that he had gone away and annoyed by his mercantile ambition. She did not like that he was so eager to advance himself in business. Where was his idealism? Why did he need to make so much money if they were going to become American farmers? Living alone in Saint-Germain-des-Prés was not what she had dreamed of during the summer. Also, she often felt “inclined to faint,” and that September, when she missed her period, she began to wonder if she was pregnant.

  Mary’s concerns about her own future were dwarfed, however, by the drama playing out in Paris. On October 1, the British army won an important victory at the French port of Toulon and declared the young Louis XVII king of France, which enraged the radical leader of the Jacobins, the stern, unbending Robespierre, who regarded the monarchy as one of the most pernicious evils of the ancien régime. A controversial figure even today—bloodthirsty dictator or an idealistic leader?—Robespierre urged his followers to stamp out counterrevolutionary forces, using violence if necessary, in order to protect liberty and the sovereignty of the people. At his instigation, revolutionary authorities searched the city for remaining British citizens and, between October 10 and 14, locked 250 of them into the Luxembourg, a palace that had been converted into a jail, not far from where Mary was living. Remaining Girondist leaders were also rounded up, and Condorcet, who had asked Mary to work on the plan for the education of women, was condemned to death. Mary witnessed the secret police moving through the city, kicking in doors and arresting people in public squares. At Robespierre’s insistence, workers removed all religious symbols (crucifixes, paintings, crosses) from Notre Dame Cathedral and converted it into a “Temple of Reason.” The French people no longer needed the corrupt Catholic Church, Robespierre declared; they needed to be weaned from their superstitious beliefs. The ancient medieval chapel not far from Mary’s house, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, was looted by an anti-Catholic mob. Mary’s imprisoned French friends were preparing to face the guillotine. Madame Roland spent her time in prison studying Plutarch to ready herself for martyrdom.

  Danger drew even nearer when Helen Maria Williams was thrown into prison. The odds were against the execution of a well-connected Englishwoman, and Helen Maria, who shared Mary’s belief that they were living through historic times of enormous import, was sanguine enough about her prospects to record her experiences in letters, which she would ultimately publish in England. And yet she was still terrified. At night she wept, feeling the blade of the guillotine trembling over her head and yearning “for the wings of a dove, that I might flee away and be at rest!” Fortunately, she and her family were rescued by wealthy friends and escaped to Switzerland in the spring of 1794. But the impact of Helen’s imprisonment left its mark on Mary, who would commemorate her friend’s ordeal in her next novel, naming her imprisoned heroine Maria.

  Back in England, people were horrified by the violence in France. Liberals lost their enthusiasm for the Revolution and conservatives nodded their heads sagely; the radicals had spun out of control, just as they had predicted. To many, even her erstwhile friends, Helen Maria was no longer a sympathetic figure, a Romantic heroine. Rather, her imprisonment seemed a just punishment, not only because of her support of the Revolution, but because she was a woman who had dared to involve herself in politics. In a review of volumes 3 and 4 of Helen Maria’s Letters from France, published while she was still in prison, a writer for the British Critic declared, “If this young lady now suffers captivity in France…her own fate is the best commentary on the wild doctrines she has vindicated.” Another critic condemned Helen Maria’s involvement in public life altogether: “politics are a study inapplicable to female powers by nature, and withheld from us by education.” Englishwomen were not the sole victims of these attacks. “Madame Roland,” one London critic intoned, “received a severe lesson of the dangers in which ambitious women involve themselves by undutifully aspiring to notoriety in troublesome times, and by interfering with what does not regard their sex.” None of this boded well for Mary, since she, like Madame Roland and Helen Maria Williams, felt a personal obligation to involve herself in politics, to speak out on behalf of reform.

  But soon there would be no place left to go, as the French attitude toward women was about to take a dramatic turn for the worse. On October 16, Robespierre executed Marie Antoinette, and with the death of the queen, a storm swept the country. The revolutionary leaders said that the queen had been governed by “uterine furies.” They wanted the new France to be like ancient Rome, where “each sex was in its place…men made the laws…and women, without allowing themselves to question it, agreed in everything.” One of Robespierre’s deputies, Jean-Baptiste Amar, speaking for the Committee on General Security, issued a definitive condemnation: “In general, women are not capable of elevated thoughts and serious meditations, and if, among ancient peoples, their natural timidity and modesty did not allow them to appear outside their families, then in the French Republic do you want them to be seen coming to the bar, to the tribune, and to political assemblies as men do?”

  Jacobin leaders, inspired by Rousseau’s vision of the ideal woman—the very same vision that Mary had protested in both of her Vindications—declared that women should be at home raising children. On October 30, they rescinded the rights women had won in the early days of the Revolution—divorce, inheritance, and legal representation—and barred women from joining revolutionary clubs and taking part in political demonstrations. Even the iconography of the Revolution underwent a change: the female figure of Liberty, the initial symbol of the new regime, was replaced with a heroic male figure, Justice. Only images of chaste young virgins were allowed to remain in the public sphere, representing virtuous republican domesticity rather than impassioned female leadership. Helen Maria said it best when she declared that force had defeated sensibility and the lust for power had triumphed over reason. She could easily have added that male ambition had utterly vanquished the women’s movement in France.

  Mary did not comment on the growing backlash against women; she knew it was too dangerous. On October 31, the Girondists who remained alive were put to death. When Mary heard the news, she fainted. On November 3, Robespierre’s minions guillotined Olympe de Gouges after first stripping her naked and examining her genitals, ostensibly to check her gender. This insult only further inflamed de Gouges; she went to her death refusing to recant, proclaiming, “My sentiments have not changed.” The authorities warned others against following her example and even called her sexuality into question. “Recall that virago,” they warned, “that man-woman, the impudent Olympe de Gouges, who was first to institute women’s societies, who abandoned the care of her household, who wished to play politics and committed crimes. [She has] been annihilated under the avenging sword of the laws.” Finally, on November 8, Madame Roland was executed; her final words—“O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”—would ring through the decades. In Scotland, twenty years later, the young Isabella Baxter would recite them for the benefit of her new friend who was visiting from England, fifteen-year-old Mary Godwin.

  Even as she mourned the loss of these courageous women, Mary discovered that her missed period was neither a fluke nor a response to the tensions of the day; her stays had become tight and she felt little flutters
inside her abdomen. In early November, around the time of Madame Roland’s execution, Mary wrote Gilbert:

  I have felt some gentle twitches, which make me begin to think, that I am nourishing a creature who will soon be sensible of my care—This thought has not only produced an overflowing of tenderness to you, but made me very attentive to calm my mind and take exercise, lest I should destroy an object, in whom we are to have a mutual interest, you know. Yesterday—do not smile!—finding that I had hurt myself by lifting precipitously a large log of wood I sat down in an agony, till I felt those said twitches again.

  One might think that Mary would feel trepidation at this new development—having a baby in a war-torn land, away from home and family—but she relished the prospect of motherhood. She had met with more adventures in the last eleven months than she could have dreamed of when Fuseli’s wife had pushed her out the door. Even though she was watching the rights of women disintegrate all around her, even as she heard the critics rising up against Helen Maria and knew that this was the antagonism she, too, would face when she published her history of the Revolution, Mary felt excited and proud. Her baby would be a testimony to the relationship she and Gilbert had forged, a product of true revolutionary values—trust, loyalty, and equality—rather than tyranny and slavish dependence. She would be putting her ideals into action, creating an equal partnership with a man, joining the ranks of mothers, and staking her life and her child’s life on the principles she believed in with all of her heart.

  CHAPTER 19

  MARY SHELLEY: MARLOW AND LONDON

  [ 1817–1818 ]

  debates about what to do with Allegra had exacerbated Shelley’s anxiety about his children with Harriet. That spring, the trial for their custody was reaching a dispiriting end. In a final, desperate attempt to win his children, Shelley went on the offensive. He was not the only sinner on trial, he said. Harriet might be dead, but she was not blameless: she had been pregnant when she killed herself. This fact prompted an unsavory debate about the unborn child’s paternity, a debate that Shelley capitalized on. Although there is a remote possibility that Shelley was the father—he had visited London without Mary a few months before they left for Geneva—what seems more likely is the story accepted by Harriet’s family and friends: she had become lovers with a soldier, and when he abandoned her she had tried to return to her family’s house, only to be rejected by her father. About six weeks before her death, she had disappeared. Some whispered that she had been living as a whore, the story Shelley presented to the court, declaring that Harriet had “descended the steps of prostitution until she lived with a groom of the name of Smith, who deserting her, she killed herself.”

  However, the court ignored Shelley’s accusations. In its final decision, the judges admonished him and refused his claim, an extremely unusual ruling in the nineteenth century, when a father’s rights were rarely questioned. There was no appeal process, no fighting the decision. Shelley’s friends managed to appoint a clergyman to talk him out of his wild kidnapping plans. The Westbrooks would keep Ianthe and Charles because of Shelley’s “immorality,” and neither child would ever see their father again.

  To Shelley, the court’s refusal to give him his children was evidence of how much London hated him, and so, in the spring of 1817, he moved Mary, William, Claire, and Allegra to a handsome property in Marlow, near the home of his old school friend Thomas Peacock. On the strength of the allowance he had begun receiving after his grandfather’s death, Shelley purchased a twenty-one-year lease on Albion House, an even more elegant residence than Bishopsgate, about thirty miles west of London. This rambling five-bedroom mansion with stables and a huge garden that pleased Mary with its flowers and stately trees had, as its best and most important feature, a cavernous library. When they moved in, they found two chipped statues of Apollo and Venus discarded by the previous tenants; to Shelley and Mary, it was as though the fates had left a calling card. Here were the god and goddess of Poetry and Love, Creation and Desire—their guiding principles. Shelley was delighted that they were just a short walk from the Thames. He bought a small rowboat and left it tied to the dock, ready for expeditions.

  Mary wrote to the Hunts, urging them to visit. She wanted to see them and she was eager to implement their plan for Allegra. If the Hunts came that summer, the children would blend together and no one would notice that Allegra actually belonged to Claire. Hunt, who was, as usual, strapped for money, instantly saw the economic advantages of living with the Shelleys. Emerging from his agoraphobia, he rented out his house and brought Bess, Marianne, and their four children to Marlow, arriving on April 6 and staying until June 25. Despite the length of this visit, the two families managed to preserve their enthusiasm for one another. Hunt enjoyed nineteen-year-old Mary, calling her “yon nymph of the sideways looks,” and introduced her to the opera, taking her to see Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in London. For the rest of her life, Mary would delight in music and would never miss an opportunity to attend a concert. But, reserved as always, she kept her excitement to herself; even Hunt had no idea how enthusiastic she was, seeing only “a sedate-faced young lady…with her great tablet of a forehead, and her white shoulders unconscious of a crimson gown.”

  The weather was mild that spring. The Hunt children played with William in the back garden or slid down dusty hills with Shelley, while little Allegra, or Alba, as they called her, looked on from her mother’s lap. Wilmouse “jumps about like a little squirrel—and stares at the baby with his great eyes,” Mary reported to Shelley when he was up in London, attending to the aftermath of the failed custody suit. They told everyone that Allegra was the Hunts’ newest child, but anyone who visited would have been able to see that Claire was the baby’s mother. Allegra clung to her, reaching out her arms whenever she left her sight.

  In this house full of guests, with six small children underfoot and a husband whose unpredictability was now fairly predictable, Mary finished what she called a “fair copy” of Frankenstein. It had taken her nine months to complete this final draft, from late June 1816 to March 1817, and then about six weeks to copy it into a document suitable for publishers. While she wrote the final paragraphs in March, she had been troubled by nightmares “of the dead being alive.” Her baby girl. Fanny. Her mother. And the most terrifying: Harriet, her hair streaming, floating up from the Thames, staring at the woman who had stolen her husband.

  The significance of the novel’s gestation was not lost on Mary, who was pregnant while writing the final draft, having conceived in December 1816. She frequently referred to the book as her “offspring” or “progeny.” In the 1831 introduction, she would describe the act of writing Frankenstein as a “dilat[ion].” She even linked the story to her own birth. The tale begins December 11, 17—, and ends in September 17—. (Although Mary did not provide the exact year, Walton sights the creature on Monday, July 31, and July 31 falls on a Monday in 1797.) Mary Wollstonecraft conceived in early December 1796, gave birth to Mary on August 30, 1797, and died on September 10, 1797.

  By connecting Frankenstein to her own genesis, Mary hints at the many ties she felt to her story. Like the creature, she felt abandoned by her creator. Like Frankenstein, she felt compelled to create. Her own birth had caused the death of her mother, but it had also brought life to her characters. Since the novel is framed by Walton’s letters to Margaret, whose initials were the same as Mary’s now that she had married Shelley (MWS), it is as though she wrote the tale for herself, becoming both author and audience, creator and created, mother and daughter, inventor and destroyer. For Frankenstein, however, Mary makes it clear that his attempt to manufacture a human being by artificial methods is doomed. No matter how hard he tries to appropriate the role of mothers and Nature, his story is still embedded in the nine-month gestational period of the human being.

  Although Shelley encouraged his wife’s work and made time to read the drafts she presented to him in the evening before bed, not once did he offer to help with domestic
obligations. As the resident genius, he wandered in and out of the house at any time of day or night. If he missed dinner, he sat at the kitchen table munching bread and raisins. He carved Greek poetry into the trees, made an altar to Pan with Peacock and Hogg, who came up from London on the weekends, and floated down the river in his boat, lying on the bottom reading, as Bess later recalled, “his face upwards to the sunshine.” He was aghast at the poverty he saw and gave away anything that was in his pockets, and, once, his own shoes. He talked Mary into taking in a village girl, Polly Rose, whose family was too poor to provide for her. Years later, Polly would remember that Shelley used to play games with her and all the children. Her favorite was when he lifted her onto a table with wheels and rolled her up and down the corridor. She also kept a small flowered plate that Mary had given her as a memento and recalled that Mary was “fair and very young” and would tuck her in at night, telling her about the discussions they had downstairs, “always winding up with, ‘And now, Polly, what do you think of this?’ ”

  The villagers adored Shelley, although they thought he was mad, but the country squires were appalled by his eccentricities and wanted nothing to do with either Shelley or Mary. To them, Albion House was incomprehensible—some kind of commune, with an uneven number of gentlemen and ladies, which made it impossible to tell who was married to whom. Shelley was frequently seen in the company of an attractive dark-haired woman (Claire) who was not, by any stretch of the imagination, Mary Godwin. And when the Hunts returned to their own home, leaving Claire and Allegra behind as the sole houseguests, the gossip became more pointed. Shelley was living in a harem; he had two wives. Even Godwin, once he and Mary-Jane had been told that Allegra was actually Claire’s child, believed that Shelley was the father.