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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Having settled into a routine after the birth of Fanny, Mary and Gilbert had a life that was so quiet they could almost pretend they were not living in the midst of a revolution. But Mary never lost track of what was happening in the capital, following the news from Paris as closely as she could. During July the number of executions skyrocketed from five to more than twenty-five a day until at last Robespierre was overthrown by the National Convention in a dramatic coup and guillotined on the afternoon of July 28. Suddenly the Terror was over. Mary had still not heard from her sisters, but she wrote to Everina that she hoped “peace [would] take place this winter” and that then they could see one another. Although in some ways this long hiatus from her sisters was a relief—Mary was spared their constant laments and did not have to hear their commentary on her life—the silence made her uneasy. She had written to tell them about Imlay, and then baby Fanny, but she never heard anything back.

  For Mary, August was a worrisome month. Now that the Terror had ended, Paris was open again, and Gilbert left to oversee his business concerns there, apprehensive about reports of some “knavery” on the part of one of his underlings. Mary sent him long, loving messages, but she was beginning to suspect he was not as enthusiastic about family life as she was, and on August 17 she wrote him a sardonic letter about his preoccupation with money, saying that “[business] is the idea that most naturally associates with your image.” She hoped, she said, that he would aspire to do more with his life than simply “eat and drink, and be stupidly useful to the stupid.” The choices he was making, she wrote, were beneath a man of true imagination.

  Only two days later, on August 19, she was asserting her self-reliance: If he did not love her as passionately as she loved him and was with her only out of duty, then he should not be with her at all. She could take care of herself and Fanny. “There are qualities in your heart, which demand my affection; but, unless the attachment appears to me clearly mutual, I shall labour only to esteem your character, instead of cherishing a tenderness for your person.” But she could not hold on to this brave renunciation for long. In the next paragraph, she confessed the bitterness of her feelings: “I found I could not eat my dinner in the great room—and, when I took up the large knife to carve for myself, tears rushed into my eyes.” She ended the letter saying, “you are the friend of my bosom, and the prop of my heart.”

  The next day, though, Mary reverted to anger, complaining about his “reserve of temper.” Too often “you wounded my sensibility, concealing yourself.” How she longed for him to be “without disguise.” He insisted women were “cunning,” but she was always honest, always true. Why did he stay in Paris? Was it his mercantile ambitions? Or was it her? They had been so contented just a week ago. Yes, there were the normal irritations of living with another person, and the baby was demanding, but if he would let go of his desire to make a fortune, they could be happy, she was sure of it. All she wanted, she wrote, was to “be revived and cherished” by his “honest” love. Where was the “epanchement de coeur” she yearned for and felt she deserved? Had he forgotten last summer, their joy in Neuilly, their dreams for the future?

  Mary’s letter writing campaign was interrupted only when baby Fanny caught smallpox. In the late eighteenth century, this dread disease killed four hundred thousand Europeans a year and left a third of its victims blind. For babies, the odds were even worse; as many as 80 percent of infants in London died from smallpox. But Mary, though frightened, prided herself on possessing up-to-date scientific information. Johnson had recently published John Haygarth’s An Inquiry How to Prevent Small-Pox (1784), which contained the latest theories on the disease, and so she was well versed in the course of the illness and the best methods of treatment. Instead of bundling the baby up inside an airtight room, as most of her neighbors advised, she bathed Fanny twice a day and opened the windows to keep the child as cool as possible. The residents of Le Havre were appalled at her ministrations, but Mary dismissed their concerns, writing Everina that her neighbors “treat th[e] dreadful disorder very improperly—I however determined to follow the suggestions of my own reason, and saved [Fanny] much pain, probably her life,…by putting her twice a day into a warm bath.”

  A sick baby is always difficult to care for, and Fanny was no exception. She was feverish and miserable. Her body was covered with itchy, painful scabs. She slept only fitfully and nursed incessantly. When the fever was at its height, she lay eerily still. With no one to help her, Mary grew exhausted, pouring what energy she had into saving her daughter. She felt like a “slave,” but she loved her baby, writing to Gilbert before the illness struck, “She has got into my heart and imagination, and when I walk out without her, her little figure is dancing before me.”

  When at last the fever broke and Fanny was on the mend, Mary wanted to join Gilbert in Paris, but he forestalled these plans, announcing that he had to travel to London. He stopped in Le Havre only to make financial arrangements with Mary and to apologize for his absence. He was fond of Fanny and fond of Mary, too, he said reassuringly. But he was adamant that he had to go. The “knavery” he had suspected was all too true. He had lost money, and now that it looked as if England might lift the embargo, he wanted to establish connections with merchants in London. Mary tried not to be suspicious of his intentions, but he seemed remote, lukewarm, even bored. Perhaps he had lost interest in life with her and the baby. Perhaps he meant to desert her.

  CHAPTER 21

  MARY SHELLEY: ITALY, “THE HAPPY HOURS”

  [ 1818–1819 ]

  the Shelleys arrived in Italy on March 30, 1818, everywhere Mary looked, she saw beauty: “The fruit trees all in blossom and the fields green with the growing corn.” Having read Homer to each other on their journey over the Alps to prepare for their first glimpses of classical antiquity, the first thing Mary and Shelley did when they crossed the border was to rush down “a green lane covered with flowers” to see an ancient “triumphal arch that had been erected to the honour of Augustus.”

  They traveled east through Turin, reaching Milan in mid-April. “In Italy,” Mary effused to the Hunts, “we breathe a different air and every thing is pleasant.” Shelley’s health was steadily improving. The children were thriving. The bread was “the finest and whitest in the world.” Even the cows were beautiful, “a delicate dove colour” with liquid eyes that reminded Mary of Homer’s descriptions of the goddess Juno’s “ox-eyes.”

  Both Shelley and Mary assumed that Byron would come spend the summer with them, as he had in Geneva. With that in mind, they left Claire in charge of the children and took a coach north to Lake Como to find an elegant villa to rent, one suitable for his lordship, with gardens, a view of the lake, and easy access to boating. They marveled at the lemon and orange orchards, where, Shelley observed, “there is more fruit than leaves.” At length, they discovered the Villa Pliniana, a half-ruined old palace that Mary described as having “two large halls, hung with splendid tapestry, and paved with marble.” Like the Villa Diodati at Lake Geneva, it had views of the water and the mountains. There was even a waterfall that came crashing down the nearby rocks into the lake below. One night there was a spectacular thunderstorm, bringing back yet more memories of the summer with Byron. Without Claire and the children, Mary and Shelley were alone for the first time in over a year. For three days, they walked, sunned, wrote, and read to each other, relishing the peace. Shelley did have one of his nightmare visions, but Mary would later recall this time as idyllic. Neither knew it would be one of the last times they would have on their own.

  When they returned to Milan, they found a cold letter from Byron informing them that he had no interest in joining their party. He did not want to encourage Claire to think that she had a future with him, nor did he want to correspond with her. All communication would be through Shelley. But his attitude toward Allegra had undergone a dramatic shift; for his own inscrutable reasons, any doubts about her paternity had vanished and he had decided that he wanted them to send t
he fifteen-month-old to him in Venice, where—though he did not mention this—he continued to attend shockingly bacchanalian parties, drink too much, and have sex with many men and women, all eager to please the rich English lord.

  Claire was shattered by the prospect of parting with Alba but knew she had no real choice, nor legal claim. She would have to rely on Byron’s goodwill if she wanted to see her daughter again. She had tried to accept that it would be better for Alba to grow up as the daughter of Lord Byron rather than as the illegitimate child of Claire Clairmont. Yet now that reality had struck, she was heartbroken. “I send you my child,” she wrote Byron, “because I love her too well to keep her. With you who are powerful and noble and [have] the admiration of the world she will be happy, but I am a miserable and neglected dependant.”

  When Byron’s servant arrived to collect the little girl, however, Claire could not follow through. She declared that Alba was too sick to travel and refused to hand her over. Shelley and Mary knew that it would do no good to anger Byron; they had both seen how ruthless he could be. Perhaps, Mary suggested, if Claire appeased him now, he would allow her to see her little girl for extended visits each year. She also offered to send Elise along to serve as Alba’s nurse so that Claire would know her daughter was well looked after. At this, Claire relented, writing his lordship a note (on which it is still possible to see her tear stains):

  I love [Allegra] with a passion that almost destroys my being she goes from me. My dear Lord Byron I most truly love my child. She never checked me—she loves me she stretches out her arms to me & cooes for joy when I take her.…I assure you I have wept so much to night that now my eyes seem to drop hot & burning blood.

  Portrait of little Allegra, known as Alba. (illustration ill.24)

  Once again, there was no response from Byron, and so on April 28, Alba and Elise, escorted by Byron’s servant, left for Venice. Claire was devastated. The villa on Lake Como now seemed too grand for their little party, but Mary had glimpsed life without Claire and was reluctant to let it go. She wanted to be rid of her sister and spend the summer with Shelley and their two children in one of the little towns on the lake. Nonetheless, Shelley was adamant that they could not abandon Claire.

  At length they decided to head southwest to Livorno to meet Wollstonecraft’s old friend Maria Reveley, who had taken care of Mary as a baby and had moved to Italy eighteen years earlier with her second husband, John Gisborne. Mary looked forward to reconnecting with Maria but dragged her feet about leaving the north. Years later, she would remember the decision to turn away from Como as an unlucky turning point, the first link in the chain of disasters that would soon befall them.

  The party arrived in Livorno on May 9. “A stupid town,” Mary reported, unhappy about traveling as a trio once again; even the red-roofed villas, the splendid coast, and the wide stone piazzas did not cheer her up. Her spirits lifted when they called on Maria, who at forty-eight was still beautiful, with “reserved yet…easy manners.” She was an accomplished painter and musician who shared Mary and Shelley’s liberal political views and had been deeply influenced by the ideas of the revolutionary generation, particularly the works of her friends: Godwin’s Political Justice and Wollstonecraft’s Vindications. One of the reasons she lived in Italy, she told the travelers, was that she and her husband loathed how conservative Britain had become.

  After they arrived, Maria walked along the seawall with Mary, telling her about her mother, how brave she had been, how passionate, and how honest. Mary was deeply moved to be with the woman who had first cradled her and who had been her mother’s trusted confidante. She knew that her father had proposed to Maria after Maria’s first husband had died and had been refused. If only she had accepted, then Mary would have had the ideal stepmother, cultured and highly literate, someone who knew and celebrated Wollstonecraft, who would have loved her little girls. Fanny might not have succumbed to suicide. Her father might have stayed true to his beliefs. And, best of all, there would have been no Claire.

  Maria, a warm and gracious hostess, did not mention the awkward fact that her young visitors had appeared without any warning. Nor did she ask them any difficult questions about why they were in Italy. Instead, she invited them to stay as long as they needed, advising them against traveling to Florence or Rome, as these cities were notorious for disease in the summer. A woman of the world and a self-proclaimed atheist, like Shelley, Maria had known that Wollstonecraft had an illegitimate daughter and had still befriended her. Still, the Shelleys chose not to fill her in on the details of their ménage. Delighted by Maria’s warmth and informality, they did not want to jeopardize their new friendship. Even Maria’s enormous dog, Oscar, greeted the travelers with gusty excitement. He took a particular shine to Mary—not a dog enthusiast—drooling on her shoes and nuzzling her when she drank her tea in the Gisbornes’ drawing room.

  Mr. Gisborne was less immediately charming. He stayed in the background, stepping forward only to declare in a nasal voice that he had discovered a small factual error in Godwin’s latest novel, Mandeville. Shelley ridiculed him in a caustic letter to Hunt:

  His nose…weighs on the imagination to look at it,—it is that sort of nose which transforms all the gs its wearer utters into ks. It is a nose once seen never to be forgotten and which requires the utmost stretch of Christian charity to forgive. I, you know, have a little turn up nose; Hogg has a large hook one but add them both together, square them, cube them, you would have but a faint idea of the nose to which I refer.

  Poor Gisborne. To be preserved this way was an indignity, but he did seem a strange choice for the beautiful and spirited Maria Reveley. Eventually, both Mary and Shelley would acknowledge his erudition and his helpfulness, but he would never be a favorite of theirs.

  They stayed for a month with the Gisbornes, and under Maria’s watchful eye, Claire slowly regained her spirits and Mary grew less irritable. Mary and Shelley appreciated Maria’s “frank affectionate nature” as well as her “most intense love of knowledge.” But Maria was also practical and had been running a household in Italy for almost two decades. She told them what vegetables to buy in the markets, and she pointed them toward the strawberries, which had come early that year. She found them a seamstress, a doctor, and a servant named Paolo Foggi, and she advised them to rent a place in the nearby hill country.

  After a few weeks of searching, Shelley found a house, the three-story Villa Bertini, perched high in Bagni di Lucca, a fashionable resort a day’s ride away from Livorno. Known as the Switzerland of Tuscany for its location in the foothills of the Apennines, the town’s hot springs were supposed to cure just about anything: gallstones, sprains, tumors, deafness, headaches, bad teeth, acne, depression, and ugliness. Shelley and Mary were not interested in taking the waters, but they liked the setting of the town, nestled next to the Serchio River.

  The Villa Bertini was at the end of a dusty track. A thick hedge of laurels shaded their small patch of lawn and protected them from the possibility of peering eyes; the scent of jasmine filtered in through the windows. The gardens were overgrown and tangled; “I like nothing so much as to be surrounded by the foliage of trees only peeping now and then through the leafy screen on the scene about me,” Mary wrote Maria. It was an easy walk down to the town, where there were shops, a drugstore, and an assembly room that hosted dances and concerts for the many tourists whom the Shelleys avoided.

  Mary loved their new home. “When I came here,” she wrote Maria, “I felt the silence as a return to something very delightful from which I had long been absent.” After almost two and a half months of traveling, they settled into their usual schedule—reading, writing, and exploring the countryside. Their new servant, Paolo, helped run errands and negotiate with the locals. A cleaning woman came in every day to do the laundry, scrub the floors, and cook.

  Milly, the nursemaid they had brought from England, helped Claire and Mary look after Wilmouse, a busy toddler intent on discovering the world around him.
Clara napped and smiled at her admirers. One hot July day, Claire twisted her ankle, giving Mary and Shelley the opportunity to walk alone in the evenings. Later, Mary would remember how they admired the stars, the fireflies, and the pale moon. There was a riding stable in the town and occasionally husband and wife rode, on one memorable occasion visiting il prato fiorito, a flowery meadow near the top of one of the tallest mountain peaks. They saw no one else during the steep ascent, hearing only the cicadas, the muffled thud of the horses’ hooves, and an occasional cuckoo.

  Shelley set up a study inside the house, but was exhilarated by the open skies and the clouds that would glide in from the west, bringing in sudden storms. Before long he found a woodland stream where he felt free to shed the trappings of civilization. In a letter to his friend Peacock, he described his routine:

  My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the perspiration has subsided, and then to leap from the edge of the rock into this fountain—a practice in the hot weather exceedingly refreshing. This torrent is composed as it were, of a succession of pools and waterfalls, up which I sometimes amuse myself by climbing when I bathe, and receiving the spray over all my body.…

  This picture Shelley painted of himself helps explain why those who met him were struck by his mad originality, his playfulness, or, as they called it, his genius. Who else sat on a wet rock, naked, reading ancient Greek? For that matter, who plunged into pools of water without knowing how to swim and then described the whole scene to prim English friends? Only Shelley, who was constantly on the lookout for inspiration, doing whatever he could to invoke the muses.