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

by Charlotte Gordon

  And yet, curiously, Imlay would not break off the connection. Maybe he was still attached to Mary. Perhaps he wanted to live up to her ideals and prove his credentials as a freethinker. Maybe he just wanted to avoid more dramatic episodes. Or perhaps he simply wanted to save money: one establishment was cheaper than two. In any case, a few weeks into her recovery, when Mary again voiced her idea that they should all live together—Imlay, the mistress, Fanny, Marguerite, and herself—Gilbert agreed. After all, there would be some benefits to such an arrangement: Fanny would have a father. Gilbert would learn to live in a family, which would be good for him—Mary had said this, and he could see her point—and Mary would not have to raise a child alone, which would give her the time to write and earn money.

  They rented a house in Finsbury Square near the Christies. The more Mary regained her strength, the more she managed to feel sorry for Gilbert’s “actress,” taking every opportunity to preach the benefits of independence to this young woman, whose name has not come down through history, but who seems to have had no interest in being “improved,” at least not by Mary. But Mary persisted. If the actress could be educated, who knew what she could achieve? Perhaps she would even move on from Gilbert. But before Mary had a chance to teach her anything, the girl put her foot down once again, vetoing the living arrangement for a second time. She could not understand Mary. Instead of seeking to destroy her rival, Mary had tried to be friends. When she fought with Gilbert, she spouted philosophy and quoted foreign writers. She paid no attention to fashion. She did not care what people thought about her. The actress could not see how Gilbert could ever have loved this strange female. She cried and nagged until—in the throes of “passion,” as Mary wrote contemptuously—Gilbert bowed to her demands, taking her to Paris toward the end of November. He tried to send Mary money that winter, but she refused his offers, despite the urging of her friends.

  Something had finally shifted for Mary. Perhaps it was that at eighteen months, Fanny could say a few words and reach her arms out to her mother, giving Mary a powerful incentive to recover from her despair. Perhaps she had realized that Imlay was not the man she had thought he was. Or perhaps the self-reflection in Scandinavia had taught her more than she realized. She demanded her letters back from Imlay and tried to use them to write a novel about their love affair, but the material was too close to home and so she began developing another idea. She would not fictionalize her experience. Instead, she would edit her letters from Scandinavia and turn her broken heart into a book that would honestly examine her struggle with despair. It would be a travelogue and reflection, an observation and self-examination. When at length she sat down to write, she realized the project had been in the back of her mind all along.

  Travel writing was traditionally a male genre, but Mary had reviewed more than twenty travel books for Johnson before she left for Paris, and she felt confident she could write an account of her experience that would be beneficial to her readers and that they would find fascinating. As winter approached, she went through her notes and letters, rediscovering her strength and her resourcefulness. Yes, Imlay had broken her heart, but she had been rescued, brought back to life; she did not know why, but maybe there was a reason, one that she would find if she started writing again.

  Mary found her own rooms near Rebecca at 16 Finsbury Place, a quiet neighborhood close to the famous bookstore the Temple of the Muses (owned by Lackington’s, the publishing house that would one day publish her daughter’s Frankenstein), not far from St. Paul’s Churchyard and Johnson’s house, and there she spent her days cutting and reorganizing the letters, excising self-pity, rage, redundancy, and recrimination and reframing parts of the story. She omitted complaints that made her sound hysterical or irrational. Originally she had written that her spirits were “deranged” when she arrived in Gothenburg, but she revised this so that her arrival was now “peaceful,” describing how she “gazed around with rapture.” She dropped her stance as “the abandoned woman” and presented herself as a “woman of observation”—a woman in control of her circumstances. To this end, she added descriptions of the habits of the people and the landscapes, as well as hard-won and often humorous self-reflection. Gone were the over-the-top ventings and the emotional indulgences written during the crises, and in their place were artful, carefully designed vignettes.

  One of the most poignant captures a farmer and his children heading home from a day in the fields. At first Mary idealizes their rural life, saying she wishes she were the farmer’s wife, but then she laughs at herself, reminding the reader of what it is really like to be a farmer’s wife: “My eyes followed them to the cottage, and an involuntary sigh whispered to my heart that I envied the mother, much as I dislike cooking, who was preparing their pottage.” About small towns, she observes that since no one cares about literature, art, or politics, “a good dinner appears to be the only centre to rally round.” She did pursue her feud with Imlay, but only covertly. Instead of attacking him personally, she critiqued business and business interests, mercantilism and the pursuit of wealth.

  With each paragraph, she felt her energy returning. Just as it always had, writing was giving Mary a new purchase on life. She began to go out in the evenings with Rebecca Christie, her trusted companion, but more important, she woke up in the morning anticipating the day of work that lay ahead. At times, she even caught herself wondering what the future might now hold for her. By December, she was finished. Joseph Johnson published Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in January 1796.

  Readers were instantly captivated by the more personal style Mary had adopted, and the book sold briskly, earning more money than any of her earlier works, and was translated into German, Dutch, Swedish, and Portuguese. Even though some critics carped at the book’s unorthodox mixture of sentiment, philosophy, personal revelation, and politics, the inclusion of Mary’s reflections and feelings allowed readers to feel connected to her, while at the same time they learned about places they would probably never see. Mary seemed wise, warm, and close enough to touch, so close that one reader—her future husband—would say, “If ever there was a book calculated to make a man in love with its author, this appears to me to be the book.” But Letters was more than a charming self-portrait, more than the flame that would draw Godwin. The book is a psychological journey, one of the first explicit examinations of an author’s inner life, tracing Mary’s path from despair to self-acceptance, from desolation to a hard-won tranquillity. As such, Letters from Sweden is a reflective, innovative book, an emotional but philosophical announcement of the author’s artistic goals, her initiation of an artistic revolution. As one modern critic puts it, Mary’s “revolutionary feminism” allowed her to transform the genre of travel writing.

  In fact, the avant-garde of her generation viewed Letters from Sweden as the most significant and beautiful of all her works, and it would quickly become the touchstone for many of their own poems. Coleridge’s meticulous description of psychic pain in Dejection: An Ode would echo Mary’s record of her suffering: “A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, / A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, / Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, / In word, or sigh, or tear.” Many of the lines from Kubla Khan were directly inspired by Letters from Sweden: “A savage place! As holy and enchanted / As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted / By woman wailing for her demon-lover,” as were passages from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Frost at Midnight. Wordsworth’s ideas about Nature and the imagination in The Prelude were largely anticipated by Wollstonecraft. “She has made me in love with a…northern moonlight,” said the influential poet Robert Southey. And, twenty years later, Shelley derived his thinking about the genius of the poet from Letters from Sweden, which he reread many times.

  Mary had elevated the exploration of the inner life by integrating self-reflection with political and historical observations. Though Rousseau had done this before her, Mary was among the
first English writers to declare that the psychological journey was as important as the external, the self as worthy of exploration as a foreign land. Letters from Sweden was more an interior pilgrimage than a travelogue, an account of the author’s struggle and her eventual self-acceptance, and as such was the first of its kind. Not only had Mary celebrated the imagination, she had offered a glimpse into her creative inspiration:

  How often do my feelings produce ideas that remind me of the origin of many poetical fictions. In solitude, the imagination bodies forth its conceptions unrestrained, and stops enraptured to adore the beings of its own creation. These are moments of bliss; and the memory recalls them with delight.

  That the mind can create actual “beings” and that “feelings” can “produce ideas”; that inspiration comes from inside the self, not outside, from emotions, not logic; that the wanderer can see truths in Nature that the city dweller misses; that in solitary contemplation the artist combines emotion and thought, recollection and observation, to create a new universe, new creatures, a new vision for humankind—these are the principal tenets of Romanticism, and Mary articulated them six years before Wordsworth’s famous preface to the Lyrical Ballads, traditionally viewed as the first Romantic manifesto in England. In fact, it is Letters from Sweden that “vindicated” emotion, subjectivity, and psychological complexity, the book that showed the Romantics a new writing world.

  But despite the importance of Letters from Sweden’s innovations, Mary’s book has only recently been acknowledged for the role it played in literary history. At the time, as with any unorthodox work, Letters from Sweden prompted bitter criticism. A French traveler to Sweden, Bernard de la Tocnaye, called the book “grotesque,” “new-fangled,” and “modish nonsense.” The Monthly Magazine and The American Review were shocked by Mary’s unconventional theology, accusing her of “discard[ing] all faith in Christianity.” The writer Anna Seward ridiculed the change Wollstonecraft had undergone from the Vindications to Letters from Sweden. The Monthly Mirror scoffed at the mixture of her personal reflections and political observations, calling her ideas confused and contradictory.

  And yet Letters from Sweden has had lasting appeal. Fifty years later, it would inspire a generation of British travelers. Among the most famous were two women: Mary Kingsley, who voyaged to Africa and wrote a book exposing the horrors perpetrated by British imperialist policy, and Isabella Bird, who wrote more than fifteen bestselling works about her travels to Hawaii, India, Tibet, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, China, and Australia. And when Letters from Sweden was reissued at the end of the century, Robert Louis Stevenson, the author of Treasure Island and a dear friend of Wollstonecraft’s grandson, Percy Florence Shelley, took along a dog-eared copy on his voyage to Samoa.

  Perhaps most significant of all, though, was the impact the volume had on Mary’s own daughter, Mary Shelley, who would one day model her own travel books on Letters from Sweden—History of a Six Weeks’ Tour and Rambles in Germany and Italy—works that would bookend her career, the first and the last that she published. Certainly she never forgot her mother’s praise of the imagination, immortalizing Wollstonecraft in her famous preface to the revised Frankenstein in 1831. Right before she gives her account of the inception of her novel, she describes her own beginnings as an artist: “It was beneath the trees…that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.…I could people the hours with creations.” What better restatement could there be of her mother’s ideas? Mary had found a way to keep her mother’s legacy alive.

  CHAPTER 27

  MARY SHELLEY: “WHEN WINTER COMES”

  [ 1819–1820 ]

  —Work—Walk—Read—Work.” Such is Mary Shelley’s record of her activities in the weeks before her fourth baby was due. Though she rarely used her journal as an emotional outlet, these entries have a strangely flat quality, as though she had nothing else to say. In her letters to the Hunts she wrote that she felt as though she were not quite alive. Caught as she was between death and life, between losing a child and gaining a child, looking forward was as dangerous as looking back. Anything was better than hope. Nothing was worse than memory.

  In the evenings, Shelley read aloud—Clarendon’s The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England and Plato’s Republic. He had chosen these authors because right before they had arrived in Florence, the Shelleys had heard news from home that shocked them both and provoked Shelley into writing one of his angriest, most political poems, The Mask of Anarchy. Although it has since been called “the greatest poem of political protest ever written in English,” The Mask of Anarchy contained so many radical ideas that publishers refused to print it in Shelley’s lifetime.

  On August 16, 1819, at St. Peter’s Field on the outskirts of Manchester, armed government troops broke up a crowd of sixty thousand working men and women who were staging a public meeting to determine how to achieve reform through “the most legal and effectual means.” More than a hundred women and children were seriously injured. The death toll was eleven, including a child who was trampled to death. Liberals everywhere were outraged, and almost immediately the tragic event became known as Peterloo, a notorious example of government brutality.

  To Mary, this was yet more fuel for her despair. Yet for Shelley, it was galvanizing—a sign that revolution had to be coming in Britain, for who could tolerate such naked governmental oppression? Surely the people would soon rise up in protest. He spent his time in Florence prowling around the Uffizi gallery, searching for “that ideal beauty of which we have so intense yet so obscure an apprehension.” Beauty and justice, like Keats’s beauty and truth, had fused in Shelley’s mind: the perfect human form achieved by Renaissance sculptors and the perfect government envisioned by Plato, Rousseau, or Locke shared the same source—they sprang from the human imagination. The artist’s job was to summon these ideals, to envision and embody them so others could be inspired. Only in this way could the human condition improve. To Shelley, a great work of art could overthrow tyranny just as decisively as an army could. In fact, more decisively, because a painting or a poem could change people’s minds and souls, something brute force could never do.

  Energized by righteous indignation, Shelley began to prepare for action. He wanted The Mask of Anarchy to be the first step in an uprising against oppression. To Shelley it did not matter whether the victim was one person (for example, a wronged artist such as himself) or sixty thousand working men and women, whether the tyrant was one critic or a trained militia sponsored by Parliament. Injustice was injustice. Despotism was despotism. Like the protesters at St. Peter’s Field, he, too, had been brutalized, most recently in the Quarterly’s review, and it was his obligation to do something about it. “Hope is a duty,” he wrote to Maria Gisborne, yet he was finding hope elusive. His mysterious pains were back. His wife was hardly speaking to him. He tried to craft a response to the Quarterly, one that spoke for the Peterloo victims as well as himself, but the task became overwhelming, and after a few aborted attempts, he felt so much worse that he gave up, ate lunch, and went for a walk along the river. It was one of those days when a storm was coming—Shelley’s favorite kind of weather; the clouds swept across the sky and the wind rattled through the plane trees, at once “tempestuous” and “animating,” Shelley said, jotting down his thoughts in the notebook he always carried with him.

  His anger at the Quarterly dissolved and he stayed outside, roaming along the Arno, until rain began to pelt down. Then he rushed home and poured forth on paper the consolation his walk had offered, how the wind, full of force, had driven his ghosts away, how everything grim and sharp—William’s death, his repudiation by the literary world, his wife’s sorrow and her reproaches, his aging, his debt, Peterloo, the dual suicides, his father’s hatred—had somehow lost its power. Without realizing that these would be among the most famous lines he would ever write, he began with certainty:

  O wild West wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

/>   Thou from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

  Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing.

  He flew through three more stanzas that evening and worked on the poem for the next five days, writing the last lines in another notebook. At first he thought the poem should end with a declaration: “When Winter comes, Spring lags not far behind!” But he decided to change this into a question, darkening the poem and rendering more accurately his own uncertainties: “If winter comes, can spring be far behind?”

  Mary could not respond with any kind of reassurance. It is not even clear when she first read this poem. Years later, after Shelley had died, she would have to reconstruct Western Wind, divided as it was between two notebooks. To further complicate matters, Shelley had begun drafting a story in Italian in ink over the pencil manuscript of the first three stanzas. Ultimately, piecing together Western Wind, as well as Shelley’s other poems, would bring Mary to the brink of breakdown. She would berate herself: if only she could have been more compassionate, if only she could have reached out to Shelley and listened to his struggles. At the time, she was too consumed by grief. It was her writing that offered relief, not her husband.

  Each day, Mary worked on the final pages of Matilda, even though her baby was due any moment. She emphasized the dangers Matilda faced without a mother, an expression of her own loss of Wollstonecraft but also one of her favorite political and literary themes—the indictment of a world without mothers, a world in which women are prevented from occupying leadership roles, either inside the family or out. In Frankenstein, without maternal love the creature turns to violence and Frankenstein’s ambition is allowed to flourish unchecked; in Matilda, the death of her mother exposes Matilda to the predations of her father. In fact, it is the death of the mother that sparks the father’s lust, since, to Mary, all problems began with the erasure of maternal influence. For her, the moral was clear: uncontrolled patriarchal power was dangerous for everyone, including men. Women needed to be empowered in order to rein in men’s appetites, and, more important, to offer an alternative mode of being, one based on love, education, and cooperation rather than on aggression and ambition.