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

by Charlotte Gordon

  The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

  And on the pedestal these words appear—

  ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

  Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’

  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

  Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

  The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

  These were the last words that a slighted Shelley would write on English soil. His meaning was clear: all tyrants die; all empires crumble. England herself would one day be forgotten. Only the work of the true artist would endure.

  Early in the morning of March 11, they rolled out of London, a party of eight, with Claire, Alba, William, Clara, and their two nursemaids, Elise and Milly Shields, a young girl they had hired in Marlow. It was time to break free, to live in the land of the Romans and the Roman gods. No one could know that of this group only Mary, Claire, and Milly would return to England. Shelley would never see his native land again, and neither would his children.

  CHAPTER 20

  MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “MOTHERHOOD”

  [ 1793–1794 ]

  all of Mary Wollstonecraft’s acquaintances in Paris shared her excitement over her pregnancy. Some contented themselves with whispering behind her back, but others turned away from her in public, expressing shock when her stomach began to protrude. After one such encounter, she exclaimed in a letter to Imlay: “I told them simply that I was with child: and let them stare!…all the world, may know it for aught I care!”

  Fortunately for Mary, her friend Ruth Barlow was happy to hear her news. Often, the two women met for breakfast to “chat as long as we please.” Usually, they went to Ruth’s favorite place, the Chinese Baths, a new restaurant and spa that was popular with Americans. Mary never tired of hearing Ruth’s stories about the United States and was curious about what it would be like to live there with Imlay. Ruth assured Mary that America was every bit as beautiful as Gilbert said and that they could reside in peace with other freedom lovers on the frontier.

  But November came and went and Imlay still had not returned home, leaving Mary anxious and angry. She tried to reassure herself with visions of him sitting by the fire, reading aloud to her while she snuggled their baby, but when the autumn rain beat against the windows, flooding the roads and making it difficult to go outside and see friends, she felt increasingly melancholy. To console herself she wrote Gilbert long letters. Sometimes she lamented his departure: “I have been following you all along the road [in] this comfortless weather; for when I am absent from those I love, my imagination is as lively, as if my senses had never been gratified by their presence—I was going to say caresses—and why should I not?” Other times she complained: “Of late we are always separating—Crack!—crack!—and away you go.” She tried “to write cheerfully” but then would start to weep. She worried that Gilbert would stray; he was too susceptible to other women’s charms. She was not tempted by anyone else; why could he not be more like her? “I can find food for love in the same object, much longer than you can,” she declared; “the way to my senses is through my heart; but, forgive me! I think there is sometimes a shorter cut to yours.”

  As the weeks drew on, she began to blame his absence on his preoccupation with money and told him she did not like his “money-getting face.” His time away was making her sick: “My head aches, and my heart is heavy.” She was depressed—“ ‘I am fallen,’ as Milton said, ‘on evil days’ ”—and it was all because of his neglect. During the summer, she had thought she lived in paradise, but now, “The world appears an ‘unweeded garden’ where ‘things rank and vile’ flourish best.”

  Imlay tried to keep up with Mary’s steady flow of letters but often fell short. He reassured Mary that he “loved [her] like a goddess,” but instead of being mollified by his words, she threatened to throw his slippers out the window, complaining that she did not want to be worshipped but would rather “be necessary to you.” She also decried the ease with which he dealt with their separation, and she assumed the stance of a moral philosopher by criticizing men in general, not just Imlay: “When men get immersed in the world, they seem to lose all sensations, excepting those necessary to continue or produce life!”

  But her moods shifted quickly; only a week later she pleaded with him: “I intreat you,—Do not turn from me, for indeed I love you fondly, and have been very wretched.” She could feel her independence draining from her, writing, “You perceive that sorrow has almost made a child of me” and “My own happiness wholly depends on you.” At last, Imlay relented, inviting her to come to stay with him at Le Havre, and Mary jumped at the opportunity. On January 11, she apologized for her doubt in him and rejoiced in the domestic tranquillity he promised would soon be theirs:

  What a picture you have sketched of our fire-side! My love! my fancy was instantly at work, and I found my head on your shoulder, whilst my eyes were fixed on the little creatures that were clinging about your knees. I did not absolutely determine there should be six—if you have not set your heart on this round number.

  Mary bade farewell to those friends who were still in Paris. Helen Maria Williams, who had just been released from jail and was planning her own escape from the city, begged Mary to burn the pages she had written on the Revolution before leaving, as she was certain they would land Mary in prison. But Mary considered her new work too important to destroy and swept past the guards at the city’s gates with her manuscript in tow, even though she knew her “life would not have been worth much, had it been found.” Soon she was in a coach headed west, her heart full of anticipation and her luggage full of unfinished chapters.

  The port city of Le Havre was the commercial center of revolutionary France, inhabited by almost twenty-five thousand people. A fifteen-foot seawall separated the town from the harbor, crowding its inhabitants together in a densely packed warren of houses and narrow streets. Le Havre was every bit as radical as Paris, although its residents were dedicated to trade, not politics. Did one have capital to invest? What about a loan? These were the questions people asked here. Not: Do you support Robespierre or the Girondists? Englishmen, revolutionaries, and other indeterminate sorts gathered in the pubs, exchanging get-rich-quick schemes and ways to evade the English embargo. This was the perfect environment for Gilbert. Even though he had sold himself to Mary as an idealist, he was far more pragmatic than he’d initially let on. He had come to France to make his fortune, not to record his thoughts for posterity like Mary and her friends. Mary, on the other hand, felt “quite out of the world.” She could not get the Parisian newspapers here. She had left many of her books behind, as well as her friends. And yet she was happy, living at long last with Gilbert. She holed up at her desk, trying to finish her treatise on the Revolution before the baby came.

  As ambitious as ever, Mary returned to the great questions of political philosophy she had asked in both of her Vindications: What was the origin of society? What are the natural rights of men and women? What role should government play in the life of individuals? Rather than starting her book with the fall of the Bastille, or the National Convention, or for that matter, any time in the eighteenth century, Mary began in ancient Rome. Her goal was to demonstrate how the Revolution fit into the overall arc of human history, and so she traveled briskly through the Middle Ages, Louis XIV, and Louis XV before she arrived at current events. Humankind, she said, had progressed from tribes to nations, from monarchies to republics. The goal of government should be to protect the weak. The American constitution, founded as it was “on the basis of reason and equality,” should be an inspiration to other countries. To Mary, “liberty with maternal wing seems to be soaring to regions promising to shelter all mankind.” Of course, it was no accident that she would characterize freedom as a mother, not a father.

  Across the ocean, John Adams would read An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution twice—once in 1796, when he was vice president, and again more than te
n years later. He disagreed with many of Mary’s points and yet they sparked his own ideas. He wrote more than ten thousand words in the margins of his copy, which is in the safekeeping of the Boston Public Library and can still be viewed today. Although he scoffed at Mary’s naïveté about government and disagreed with her about the natural goodness of the human heart—Mary believed people were good and governments corrupt, while Adams believed the opposite—he shared her underlying hope for a better future. “Amen and Amen! Glorious era come quickly!” wrote Adams in the margin when Mary waxed utopian.

  But for Adams, perhaps the book’s single most arresting point—maybe because it reminded him of his own wife’s ideas—was its discussion of how women’s rights and domestic affairs are directly related to the political and public realms. If men could learn to value “family affections” more than power, money, and land, Mary said, despotism would come to an end. She conflated the tyranny of the king, priest, and husband: What reasonable person, she demanded, believes “that a king can do no wrong?” Or that a priest who cheats a dying man is right just because he is a priest? What misguided person would stand in the way of a woman who leaves an abusive husband? Here Mary brought out all her firepower: Why should the unhappy wife be “treated as an outcast by society…because her revolting heart turns from the man, whom, a husband only in name, and by the tyrannical power he has over her person and property, she can neither love or respect, to find comfort in a more congenial or humane bosom?” Years later, her daughter and future son-in-law would read this passage with great interest, applying it to their own situation.

  A page from John Adams’s marked-up copy of Wollstonecraft’s An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution. Next to Wollstonecraft’s account of the formation of the “omnipotent” French National Assembly, Adams wrote, “Hear! Read!” twice, and “i.e. potent enough to destroy itself & the Nation!” (illustration ill.23)

  As in both of her Vindications, the links that Mary saw between the domestic and public spheres, and between the government and the family, are among her most significant insights and one of the key reasons her work still resonates today. By demonstrating how the denial of the rights of women is linked to other inequities in society, Mary anticipated modern theorists who argue that feminism has never been simply about “women’s rights,” but is about the societal injustice caused by patriarchy in all its forms. To these writers, modern feminism extends far beyond issues of sexuality, gender, and reproduction to include discussions of class, race, disability, and human rights.

  Mary did not analyze Robespierre and the Terror directly, but she lamented the fact that the Revolution had fallen off course. Instead of representing a step forward for human society, the guillotine was a cautionary example of what happened when folly and greed ruled the day. Reason and good judgment were the necessary components of progress, she argued. When leaders were motivated by the lust for power, death would triumph, not liberty.

  Mary’s French Revolution is a more mature articulation of her ideas than the Rights of Woman; not only did she discuss her theories of natural liberty and social justice, she emphasized the importance of political science as a discipline and the positive role the political scientist can play in the amelioration of the human condition. And yet, despite the prescience of this groundbreaking work, it is the least well known of all her books, an irony that epitomizes how poorly Wollstonecraft has been treated by history.

  FOR THEIR HOME IN LE HAVRE, Gilbert had rented a large house near the water, owned by an English soap merchant. Mary described her new house as “pleasantly situated.” From her window, she could see the ships arrive in port, swooping into the bay like gulls. The fishing boats and commercial trading vessels rode close together in the harbor, rising and dipping with the waves and tides. At Gilbert’s prompting, she hired a maid to help her with the household chores. Although the rain and wind slashed through the town that winter, Mary took a walk every morning before breakfast and wrote to Ruth that she “was more seriously at work than I have ever been.” She also decided to embrace Gilbert’s various trading ventures, and with high spirits told him that she would try not to “ruffle” his moods “for a long long time—I am afraid to say never.”

  When she was not writing, she shopped for groceries and cooked meals. She ordered fabric from Paris to make baby clothes and asked Ruth to send her some material for maternity dresses—dimity, cotton, or calico. When Gilbert was home, he liked to read over Mary’s shoulder and see what she was writing. For all his commercial interests, he was still a man of ideas, still the man who had written a novel celebrating liberty. Like a married couple, they took pleasure in domestic details. When Gilbert had to travel for business, Mary wrote a note describing the leg of lamb she had left “smoking on the board” for him to “lard [his] ribs” when he came back home. To Ruth, she described the linens she had found for Gilbert’s shirts in Le Havre and proudly noted that she now used “the matrimonial phraseology” of “us,” rather than I, having established a domestic partnership “without having clogged my soul by promising obedience &c &c—”

  Mary completed French Revolution in April. Now she did not care how soon the baby arrived, since “the history is finished and every thing arranged.” Finally, on May 14, just two weeks after she turned thirty-five, Mary gave birth to a baby girl, whom she named after her old friend Fanny. She had relied solely on the assistance of a nurse who, Mary told Ruth, “was convinced that I should kill myself and my child” because she had not called a doctor and did not stay in bed for a week after delivery. Though she was tired and sore, she was up the day after giving birth. Labor was a natural process, she declared, not an illness. She trusted in her own physical strength, and although she acknowledged that giving birth “was not smooth work,” she and the baby flourished.

  Here was yet more evidence for the importance of educating women, Mary felt. She had been able to endure her contractions without terror because she understood the workings of her own body. To Mary, it was essential to tell women about the realities of childbirth, because “this struggle of nature is rendered more cruel by [women’s] ignorance and affectation.” Delighted by Fanny’s vigorous health and her triumphant delivery, Mary gloated to Ruth, “I could almost forget the pain I endured six days ago.” Refusing to hire a wet nurse, as was the practice of the day, she breast-fed Fanny and felt “great pleasure at being a mother.” Eight days after Fanny’s arrival, Mary had resumed her daily walks, and Gilbert’s “constant tenderness” made her “regard a fresh tie as a blessing,” although she also noticed that he was occasionally “impatient” with “the continual hindrances” that hampered his business ventures. This irritability was a new side to the charming Imlay, but it did not alarm Mary, as most of the time he was loving and affectionate.

  As the days lengthened, Mary rejoiced in Fanny’s rapid growth, writing to Ruth that the child was “uncommonly healthy, which I rather attribute to my good, that is natural, manner of nursing her, than to any extraordinary strength of faculties. She has not tasted any thing, but my milk, of which I have abundance, since her birth.” Fanny soon learned to lift her head and smile at her doting mother, and Mary, ever prouder of her little girl, went everywhere with her—out to dinner, down to the harbor, and to the market. She told Ruth that the baby nursed “so manfully that her father reckons saucily on her writing the second part of the R—ts of Woman.”

  When the weather grew warmer, the cool ocean air kept mother and daughter comfortable. Mary played with Fanny in the large-windowed rooms of the house, while Gilbert worked long hours on the waterfront, negotiating with captains and sailors and overseeing the black market commodities he was trading. Prices had risen so steeply in France that there was a brisk demand for the basic goods that traders like Gilbert imported illegally from England and America. In addition, Gilbert had recently begun a new, even more dangerous venture. He had capitalized on Robespierre’s edict against owning luxury items such as china, silver, art, and g
lassware, and had purchased thirty-six solid silver platters with the Bourbon crest and glassware for a fraction of their original value. Now he was working on smuggling these goods out of the country to his contacts in Scandinavia. This meant getting past the English blockade of the harbors, as well as the French authorities, but Imlay was clever and persistent, and he could be very persuasive.

  The silver was a special case, however. The platters were so precious that to avoid detection, he hired a young Norwegian named Peter Ellefson to captain one of his ships past the English to the port of Gothenburg and his contact there, Elias Backman. The Norwegians were a neutral nation and Norwegian ships were not supposed to be harassed by either British or French authorities, but as a precaution, Ellefson and his first mate were the only ones on board who knew about the silver. Moreover, the ship’s papers named Ellefson as the owner. Imlay’s tracks were covered. All he could do now was wait for the ship to reach its port safely and hope his gamble would pay off.

  Ellefson stayed with them that summer before he sailed for Sweden, and when Mary saw the platters for herself, felt how heavy they were, and saw the royal crest, she realized that their fortune was riding on the young Norwegian. Deeply invested in the success of this scheme, Mary took charge when Gilbert was called away on business, giving Ellefson his final instructions on the day the Norwegian set sail. As the ship tacked out of the harbor, Mary watched it grow smaller and smaller, and prayed that all would go smoothly. If they could get the silver sold for a good price, maybe she, Gilbert, and Fanny could move to America and start their small farm. Maybe she could even bring her sisters with them. Even though Eliza and Everina felt far away, she continued to worry and wrote them letter after letter, despite knowing it was unlikely the girls would ever receive them. The French censors were strict about communication between the two warring nations, and the English, too, were suspicious of mail from France.