Before I quitted Geneva you promised me—verbally it is true—that my child, whatever its sex, should never be away from its parents.…This promise is violated, not only slightly, but in a mode and by a conduct most intolerable to my feeling of love for Allegra. It has been my desire and my practice to interfere with you as little as possible; but were I silent now you would adopt this as an argument against me at some future period. I therefore represent to you that putting Allegra, at her years, into a convent, away from any relation, is to me a serious and deep affliction.…Every traveler and writer upon Italy joins in condemning [convents]…. This then with every advantage in your power of wealth, of friends, is the education you have chosen for your daughter. This step will procure you an innumerable addition of enemies and blame, for it can be regarded but in one light by the virtuous of whatever sect or denomination.…I alone, misled by love to believe you good, trusted to you, and now I reap the fruits.…So blind is hatred!
Hearing of the situation, the Williamses offered to put Claire up for a few weeks at their house in the country, an invitation she accepted with eagerness. Once she arrived, Shelley and Mary shuttled back and forth between Pisa and San Giuliano. The time apart had done the sisters good. Claire delighted Mary by playing with Percy. She also helped her pick out furniture for the grand new house in Pisa that Shelley wanted to find for them. Despite Shelley’s accumulated debt (over £2,000), he had decided to splurge on a palazzo. He could never keep up with Byron—he had only a tenth of his lordship’s income—but he could still try. Together, Mary and Claire chose beds, linens, a looking glass, and high-backed chairs. Claire accompanied Mary and Shelley on a trip to the Gulf of Spezia to spend the last days of summer at a seaside resort; their four days of picnicking, sailing, riding, and sightseeing were so splendid they decided La Spezia should be their summer destination the following year.
During this vacation, Mary could feel the mounting intensity of Shelley’s feelings for Claire, but for the first time in their life together she did not protest. If Claire wanted to engage in a passionate relationship with Shelley, then Mary was prepared to accept it. In many ways, Claire was safer than an outsider. Mary knew that Shelley was aware of Claire’s limitations: her volatility as well as the lethargy that overcame her at times. She no longer believed that he would desert her for her stepsister. Instead, she appreciated the temporary freedom she gained while Claire was with them. With Shelley happy and busy, Mary could write letters to her Greek prince and focus on Percy. She had written the conclusion of Valperga. The only task left was to copy it over. Then she could send it to England and perhaps earn some money, maybe even some fame.
When they returned from La Spezia, Claire began to complain about having to go back to Florence. Why couldn’t she live with Mary and Shelley again? Shelley liked the idea, although he remained worried about Byron’s reaction. But Mary’s newfound enthusiasm for her sister evaporated immediately: a visit from Claire was fine, but living with her was an appalling prospect. She did not mind sharing Shelley for a few days, but she did not relish the idea of having Shelley turn to Claire all winter. Mrs. Mason agreed. The sisters needed to be apart, she said, and she sent such a stern warning to Claire that on the very day Byron arrived in Pisa, Claire was rattling out of town on her way south.
CHAPTER 30
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: IN LOVE AGAIN
[ 1796 ]
Godwin returned to London from his holiday on July 24, it was four days later than Mary had expected, and she had worked herself into a prickly state of anxiety. While he was away, she had been certain enough of his feelings to move to 16 Judd Place West, just around the corner from his rooms on Chalton Street. For the first time since she had left for France in 1792, she took her furniture out of storage to set up on a more permanent basis. Now she was wondering if that was a mistake. Perhaps Godwin would turn out to be like Imlay—unreliable, making promises he would not keep. She tried to make light of her worries, writing to him that because he had not returned when he said he would, “I mean to bottle up my kindness, unless something in your countenance, when I do see you, should make the cork fly out.”
Godwin came to see her the moment he arrived back in London, but Mary was only partially reassured. He was too anxious to say anything revealing, and for the next few visits, they went back and forth, fencing with each other and only hinting at their feelings. At last, after almost three weeks of this, heartened by the steadiness of Mary’s warmth as well as her flirtatious notes—which she sent before and after their meetings—Godwin took courage and confessed his love by kissing her, a momentous occasion for both parties. Later, Godwin remembered “the sentiment which trembled upon the tongue, burst from the lips.”
But still, neither wanted to be the one to take the next step, and so the affair proceeded slowly, with tentative advances and retreats on each side. Sexual intimacy became a kind of chessboard, a test of strategy. For Godwin, whose father “was so puritanical that he considered the fondling of a cat a profanation of the Lord’s Day,” it seemed shocking to act on his sensual impulses. Mary, on the other hand, felt ready to plunge forward and was disappointed with Godwin’s restraint. She began to refer to him as “your sapient Philosophership,” partly in jest, but also to provoke him to display his feelings more openly.
Matters were made more difficult by the challenge of finding time alone. At Mary’s house, Fanny was underfoot and Marguerite always nearby. At Godwin’s, visitors called at all hours. Both knew that the discovery of a love affair between the author of Political Justice and the author of the Vindications would be a gold mine for the newspapers; they had plenty of enemies who would delight in telling this story, and for all of his radical ideas and writings, Godwin was thin-skinned when it came to scandal. Mary recognized that news of her relationship with Godwin would expose her to dangerous inquiries. Before long, people would guess that Fanny was illegitimate.
The remarkable thing is that they did not let their fears stop them. In the late summer evenings, while both Marguerite and Fanny were asleep, their time together was filled with increasing fervor. Writers that they were, they confessed their feelings in letters, dispatching quick flurries of words after their encounters. Mary told Godwin she could not escape from her “voluptuous sensations.” Godwin confessed to Mary, “you set my imagination on fire.…For six & thirty hours I could think of nothing else. I longed inexpressibly to have you in my arms.” But these rapid missives worked against them, too, making them uneasy when one of them expressed something awkwardly or confessed a moment of anxiety.
After one of their first intimate sessions, Godwin was so humiliated by his inadequacies that he avoided visiting Mary the next day and was cold to her when she stopped by his lodgings. When she sent him a note, trying to win him over by using Fanny’s childish lisp—“Won’tee, as Fannikin would say, come and see me to day?”—he did not respond, and when he continued to avoid her, she sent another message asking, “Did you feel very lonely last night?” offering him an opening to express his affections. But the embarrassed Godwin replied grumpily, “I have been very unwell all night. You did not consider me enough in that way yesterday, & therefore unintentionally impressed upon me a mortifying sensation.” Mary did not know what this mortifying sensation was and so felt rebuffed.
Godwin, though, had not meant to retreat. Afraid that his inexperience made him appear foolish—he certainly felt like a fool—he wanted confirmation of Mary’s continued interest. The moment she admitted her despair, he told her he had been yearning for her but had withdrawn because he feared “I might be deceiving myself as to your feelings & that I was feeding my mind with groundless presumptions.”
Having declared the seriousness of their intentions and the depth of their feelings, one might suppose the barriers could tumble down and they could fall into each other’s arms, but both Godwin and Mary were terrified that the other might withdraw. In addition, as is often the case in love affairs, what one first admires in
a partner can quickly become irritating. Godwin, who had at first been impressed with the intensity of Mary’s emotions, now found her moods somewhat disturbing and preached the need for greater restraint. “You have the feelings of nature,” he wrote Mary. “But do not let them tyrannise over you.” Mary, who had admired Godwin’s integrity, his reserve, his ability to control his behavior and his impulses, responded by telling him he needed to cultivate his intuition and imagination and act more spontaneously.
Their differences extended to the way they went about their daily lives. Godwin’s routine rarely varied, while Mary, through necessity, kept very irregular hours. Fanny got sick. Mary Hays needed to weep over her Unitarian. A tradesman had to be appeased. Maria Reveley and Henry dropped by unannounced. She had also started reviewing for Johnson again, but she was still trying to make headway with The Wrongs of Woman. To assume some of the household chores, including the delivery of her notes across the city, she hired a maid, but quiet reflective hours, the bedrock of Godwin’s existence, were rare in Mary’s life; it was not that she did not want them, but simply that they were hard to come by.
Despite these difficulties, by the end of August Mary and Godwin had consummated their relationship. It took four tries, which Godwin marked in his diary with characteristic understatement: “chez moi” (my house), “chez elle” (her house) twice, and then finally “chez elle toute” (her house—everything). Godwin was no Imlay. An anxious virgin, he needed these three fumbling practice sessions before toute. Afterward, he did not effuse. There are no lyrical descriptions of Mary’s beauty or of his own rapture. Fortunately, Mary was unaware of Godwin’s laconic record keeping, or she might well have seen it as yet more evidence of his coldness.
But Godwin was in fact warming up. His notes to Mary became positively playful as summer turned to fall. By September he was referring to himself as Mary’s “boy pupil.” In October he added “bonne” to his terse “chez moi.” Mary, too, was learning to trust Godwin. She began to write letters to him that overflowed with feeling: “It is a sublime tranquility I have felt in your arms—Hush! Let not the light see, I was going to say hear it—these confessions should only be uttered—you know where, when the curtains are up and the world shut out.” They relied on the birth control system of the time: no sex for three days after menstruation, and then, since everyone believed that frequent intercourse lowered the possibility of conception, a lot of sex for the rest of the month.
Mary still pushed Godwin to be more expressive, though. She wanted “little marks of attention,” but Godwin resisted being told what to do, complaining, “You spoil little attentions by anticipating them.” Why couldn’t she trust that he loved her? Because, Mary wrote, she had found that if she wanted “attention” from him it was “necessary to demand it.” She sensed that he was anxious and tackled the problem with characteristic directness. “Can you solve this problem?” she asked. “I was endeavoring to discover last night, in bed, what it is in me of which you are afraid? I was hurt at perceiving that you were—but no more of this—mine is a sick heart.” And yet these quarrels were testimony to the intimacy they were developing. Often bewildered by Mary’s hurt feelings, Godwin was learning to pay her compliments and reassure her about his commitment. In turn, Mary was learning not to expect too many sentimental tokens from her reserved suitor and to use tact and brevity when expressing disappointment in him, rather than lengthy speeches and sheaves of letters.
Characteristically, neither allowed their affair to slow down their work. Both were deeply involved in literary projects. Godwin was revising Political Justice for a second edition while working on a play, the tragedy Antonio; or, The Soldier’s Return (which was produced in 1799). He brought the manuscript to Mary’s house in the evenings and they would go over it together. After a few of these tête-à-têtes, Mary sent an early draft of The Wrongs of Woman to Godwin for his advice. His response was not at all what she wanted to hear. There was “a radical defect” in her writing, he said. The grammar was still sloppy despite his tutoring. The ideas incoherent. The story unclear. While Mary had welcomed his comments on her work earlier in the summer, now they felt intrusive and harsh. She was far more invested in The Wrongs of Woman than she had been in her play, and she expected more now that they were lovers. He should understand her, she felt, and see the value of her work without her having to argue on its behalf. She sent him a long letter outlining her position:
What is to be done, I must either disregard your opinion, think it unjust, or throw down my pen in despair; and that would be tantamount to resigning existence.…In short, I must reckon on doing some good, and getting the money I want, by my writings, or go to sleep for ever. I shall not be content merely to keep body and soul together.…And, for I would wish you to see my heart and mind just as it appears to myself, without drawing any veil of affected humility over it.…I am compelled to think that there is something in my writings more valuable than in the productions of some people on whom you bestow warm elogiums—I mean more mind…more of the observations of my own senses, more of the combining of my own imagination—the effusions of my own feelings and passions than the cold workings of the brain on the materials produced by the senses and imagination of other writers.
I am more out of patience with myself than you can form any idea of, when I tell you that I have scarcely written a line to please myself…since you saw my M.S.
For all that she respected Godwin, Mary had made it clear that she was not prepared to abandon The Wrongs of Woman. The play Godwin had criticized had not been worth continuing, she felt. She had seen that and had put it aside. But The Wrongs of Woman was different, its message far more significant. In this book, she would be able to expose the injustices that women faced, the sufferings they endured. Godwin could work on Political Justice and his own play as much as he liked, but he must allow her to reveal herself in her writing—to express personal emotions and to describe her visions and nightmares, her fantasies and memories. They had different aims, and hers were as worthy as his.
After receiving her letter, Godwin apologized and said he would continue to help her with her grammar if she wished, which she did, confessing her insecurity: “Yet now you have led me to discover that I write worse, than I thought I did, there is no stopping short—I must improve, or be dissatisfied with myself.” Still, his assumption of superiority rankled. Six months later she would rally and write an essay arguing on behalf of her writing ideals. This essay was so well designed that Godwin did not take offense, and indeed may not even have realized that it was directed, at least in part, at him.
As the weather grew cool, they spent many evenings by Mary’s fireside, reading, working, talking, and playing with Fanny. Sometimes they went for walks in the nearby fields. Other times they spent afternoons at Godwin’s lodgings while Marguerite stayed with Fanny. But these hours felt stolen and brief; both yearned to spend an entire night together, and so they made plans for a secret outing away from London. Mary liked the idea of visiting the country. Godwin liked the idea of uninterrupted privacy. They set a date in September for a weekend outside the city. But their plans were ruined by Fanny, who had become whiny and difficult in the week leading up to their departure and broke out in chicken pox the day before they were supposed to depart. Mary did not want to leave her sick daughter, and so they waited until the spots had almost disappeared before they set forth. In the end, Mary was still so concerned about Fanny that they decided to spend only one night away.
Excited and in love, they took a coach to the village of Ilford, not far from Wollstonecraft’s first home in Epping, where they paid a visit to her old house and found it almost unchanged. Since no one was living there, they were free to wander through the fields where Mary had played as a little girl. The past came rushing back to her as they walked: her father’s drunken rages, her mother’s weakness, the many injustices she had endured—Mary told Godwin everything she remembered, connecting to him the best way she knew how, through s
tories and memories.
When they returned home, Mary found a very sick little girl. She wrote to tell Godwin this news “with [Fanny] in my arms.” The pox had come back; Fanny had refused to sleep without Mary and had itched herself into a scabby fever. Now she dogged her mother’s steps, and Mary spent the day trying to amuse her so she would stop scratching her face. Other eighteenth-century mothers might have disciplined their two-year-olds, or tried to, but Mary hoisted her daughter up and lugged her about the house, the little girl clinging like a crab. At night, Fanny still could not sleep and kept Mary up as well; after a few days of this, Mary also became ill.
Godwin, meanwhile, was rolling briskly through his revisions of Political Justice. Not once did it occur to him that Mary might need help, and she railed against his self-absorption: “Why could you not say how do ye do this morning. It is I who want nursing…—are you above the feminine office?” He argued back—it was not his job to take care of her—and promptly withdrew, refusing to respond to her accusations. Mary complained more vigorously, until finally Godwin relented, paying her a bedside visit. Instantly, Mary cheered up. His steadiness more than made up for his selfishness. She saw that he was trying to unbend and give her what she wanted, and in return she tried to demand fewer displays of affection. However, his stiffness continued to irritate her, and when she felt better, she urged him to be more “cheerful, gay, playful; nay, even frolicksome.” She was impatient with his literal-mindedness and his stilted conventionality. For his part, Godwin wanted Mary to be more serious, more reasonable. He complained that he could not “distinguish always between your jest and earnest, and know when your satire means too much and when it means nothing. But I will try.”
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley Page 42