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

by Charlotte Gordon

  Mary understood the complexity of her sister’s loss, how grief and guilt could torture a bereaved mother. Claire had been in the untenable situation of having no rights to Allegra; she had believed her daughter to be in danger but had been unable to do anything to save her. In retrospect, Claire was now certain that her nightmares had been messages from her daughter; Allegra had been crying out for help and her mother had not answered her call. A small girl was dead because the cruelty of her father was backed by the law. This is not the kind of tragedy that one gets over. For the rest of her life, Claire would be haunted by thoughts of her daughter and questions she could not answer. What had the child’s final days been like? What had she suffered at the convent?

  In 1870, when she was seventy-two years old, long after Byron, Shelley, and Mary were dead, Claire managed to obtain from the convent all the paperwork that pertained to Allegra. There were few new details, but each one was precious: Byron’s banker, Signor Pellegrino Chigi, had brought Allegra there on January 22, 1821. She had been wearing a warm ermine coat. At age four, she was too young to be a full-fledged pupil, so she was looked after by a nun, Sister Marianna, along with another little girl, Isabella, the daughter of the Marchese Ghislieri of Bologna. At least Claire now had these facts to add to the ones Shelley had given her after he had paid Allegra a three-hour visit the previous August. He had described her as carefully as he could, since he knew Claire would want every detail:

  She is grown tall and slight for her age, and her face is somewhat altered. The traits have become more delicate, and she is much paler, probably from the effect of improper food. She yet retains the beauty of her deep blue eyes and of her mouth, but she has a contemplative seriousness, which mixed with her excessive vivacity which has not yet deserted her, has a very peculiar effect in a child.

  He noted her expensive white muslin dress and black silk apron. Her hair was “beautifully profuse and hangs in large curls on her neck.” She seemed “a thing of a finer and a higher order” than the other children. At first she was standoffish, but Shelley had always known how to enchant small children. He gave her “a basket of sweetmeats” and a pretty gold necklace. Before long, “she grew more familiar, and led me all over the garden, and all over the convent, running and skipping so fast that I could hardly keep up with her.” She showed him where she slept at night, the chair where she sat for meals, and the garden cart. He observed that she was still as mischievous as before; she rang the convent bell without permission, and the nuns began to file out of their cells to chapel before their prioress could explain that it was only Allegra’s prank. Shelley was glad to see that she did not get in trouble for this bit of mischief. However, he was not impressed with her education: “Her intellect is not much cultivated. She knows certain orazioni [prayers] by heart, and talks and dreams of Paradiso and angels and all sorts of things.”

  In Claire’s final years, she converted to Catholicism, so perhaps at this stage of life she found it consoling that her daughter had been trained in the Catholic tradition. Maybe that was why she converted in the first place: to share these rituals with her little girl. But in 1822, when Shelley reported Allegra’s talk of angels, Claire was appalled that Byron was training her daughter to become the kind of religious young woman who would grow up to condemn her unmarried mother. To her, it was yet more evidence of his master plan to separate her from her daughter, no matter the cost.

  Although she could not know it then—she was too grief-stricken, too stunned by pain to know exactly what she thought—for Claire, Allegra’s death was a turning point. She and Mary had staked their lives on Shelley’s ideals of free love, but when, at the end, she stood back and assessed what she had suffered—indeed what they all had suffered—she decided that she, Mary, little Allegra, Harriet, Jane Williams, and all the other women Byron and Shelley had known and claimed to love had been gravely harmed by the men’s deluded ideals. The two great poets had inflicted unspeakable pain, she believed, all in the name of freedom and passion. The loss of Allegra was the case in point. Her daughter was the sacrificial lamb in the Romantic experiment, the little girl who had been worth nothing in the eyes of her father. Near the end of her life, Claire wrote a damning condemnation of both poets. This document was only recently discovered in a sheaf of her papers: “Under the influence of the doctrine and the belief of free love,” she declared, “I saw the two first poets of England…become monsters of lying, meanness cruelty and treachery—under the influence of free love Lord B became a human tyger slaking his thirst for inflicting pain upon defenceless women who under the influence of free love…loved him.”

  Claire included Shelley in her condemnation because she felt he should have saved Allegra. Indeed, she faulted Shelley in particular; he should have been stronger than Byron, should have been faithful to those who loved him. He had said he adored Claire and her little girl, but he had cruelly neglected both of them, with disastrous consequences. He had said he loved Harriet, but he had abandoned her. And Mary—he had repeatedly betrayed Mary, falling in love with one woman after another, including Claire herself, whenever a new woman represented a fresher dream, a wilder hope, or redemption from his own suffering. The price that she and Mary had paid had been too steep.

  In the immediate aftermath of Allegra’s death, Byron, who had moved to Livorno for the summer months, took charge of the burial, since Claire refused, arranging for it to take place in the church of his old school, Harrow, never guessing that the priggish vicar would refuse to let the little “bastard” girl be buried inside the church, instead relegating her remains to the church courtyard with no memorial stone.

  Allegra’s death and funeral preparations again deepened Mary’s fears for Percy. She begged Shelley to let them go back to Pisa, but Shelley ignored her pleas, and so Mary reverted to the icy silence that he hated, at times breaking into hysterical tears or raging at him, but mostly punishing him with the “cold neglect [and] averted eyes” that crushed his heart. Later, she would regret this behavior, writing him an anguished apology he would never read:

  My heart was all thine own—but yet a shell

  Closed in its core, which seemed impenetrable,

  Till sharp toothed Misery tore the husk in twain

  Which gaping lies nor may unite again—

  Forgive me!

  But that summer, he was the one who seemed callous, making light of her fears and neglecting her and Percy to spend all of his time with Jane.

  To the Williamses, Mary’s complaints seemed increasingly outrageous and self-centered. Neither could imagine why she would treat the sweet-tempered Shelley with such unkindness. Why did he stay with her? they wondered. They were enchanted by the house and their holiday. Jane, in particular, was lighthearted. Her children, little Jane (whom they called Dina) and Meddy, were pink-cheeked and strong as soldiers. She basked in the admiration of Shelley and Williams and sunned herself on the terrace that faced the sea, strumming on the guitar Shelley had given her and singing verses he had written for her in her high, light voice. As he watched her one afternoon, Edward felt even sorrier for Shelley. “I am proud,” he told Jane, “that wherever we may be together you would be cheerful and contented.” The comparison was obvious: Mary was neither cheerful nor contented. Instead, she seemed like a shrew—angry, resentful, and weepy.

  Shelley had his own way of dealing with Allegra’s death. The day after Claire discovered the truth, he had one of his waking visions. A shaken Williams described what happened:

  While walking with Shelley on the terrace and observing the effect of moonshine on the waters, he complained of being unusually nervous, and stopping short he grasped me violently by the arm and stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach under our feet. Observing him sensibly affected I demanded of him if he were in pain—but he only answered, saying “There it is again!—there!”

  Williams looked but could see nothing. Still, Shelley insisted that he could see a child floating up from the wa
ves, hands clasped. Only great poets could have such visions, Williams told Shelley. He “had felt” the ghost’s presence, but only a genius like Shelley could see it.

  THIS SPECTRAL CHILD WAS the first of many such hallucinations Shelley had that summer. His moods were becoming increasingly erratic. His Italian doctor had dismissed the long-believed diagnosis of tuberculosis, but Shelley was still having difficulty sleeping. He had been relying on laudanum to ease a rheumatic pain in his side; he did not feel like eating and all too often was flooded by a terrible panic that even the laudanum could not assuage. On his good days, the future seemed exciting and full of promise, but his glorious high spirits made the crushing bouts of depression even harder to bear. On bad days he felt he was a failure; that his poetry would not endure; that he was trapped in his marriage; and that tyranny had ruined the world. After a few weeks of these wild alternations, he stocked up on prussic acid, a lethal form of cyanide, as “a golden key to that perpetual chamber of rest.” At night, he had feverish dreams that kept him awake and restless. He was experimenting with a drama that cast Jane as an alluring “Indian enchantress” and writing a dark poem, The Triumph of Life, in which he described Life as a relentless procession of masked, demonic figures. The last stanzas he composed are fragmentary and difficult to understand:

  “Then, what is Life?” I said…the cripple cast

  His eye upon the car which now had rolled

  Onward, as if that look must be the last

  And answered…happy those for whom the fold

  Of

  Here he stopped, never returning to finish, and covering the back of the sheet with sketches of boats.

  With Shelley in this volatile condition, Mary found the business of running a household even more challenging than usual. The children had to be fed, supplies obtained, bills paid, and rooms kept in order. The servants were more trouble than help; the Shelleys’ servants hated the Williamses’ servants and they fought, Mary complained, “like cats and dogs.” Eventually, disgusted with their accommodations and the remoteness of the village, both sets made good on their threats to quit, and new help had to be found. “You may imagine,” Mary wrote to Mrs. Gisborne in the midst of this chaos, “how ill a large family agrees with my laziness…Ma pazienza.”

  Shelley’s sketches of boats. He filled his notebooks with drawings and doodles as well as poems. (illustration ill.32)

  On May 12, the whole party came out onto the terrace to watch Shelley’s schooner-rigged ship skim into the bay, heeling sharply and trailed by a dark foamy wake. “She is a most beautiful boat,” Shelley exclaimed with delight. However, Mary continued to see the boat as a dangerous new toy. It was all Shelley talked about—her lines, her grace, her perfect slim size; at twenty-four feet long, she was narrow, with two very tall masts, topsails, and more jibs than most vessels her size. Mary could see how intoxicated her husband was, and she feared what stunts he might attempt. An added blow was that he christened her the Ariel, in tribute to Jane.

  Aside from Mary’s chagrin, there were some additional troubles caused by the boat’s name. Trelawny had thought they should call the vessel the Don Juan. Byron had been much flattered by this and told Trelawny to paint Don Juan in huge block letters on the sail before he delivered the ship to Shelley. But since the whole point, in Shelley’s mind, was to compete with Byron, not flatter him, Shelley decided to change the name, at which Byron “took fire.” Undeterred, Shelley and Williams spent the next three weeks trying to get the paint off. They scrubbed with soap and turpentine and even wine, to no avail. Finally Shelley had the patch of canvas ripped out and resewn, and at last the boat displayed her real name. Shelley had triumphed and was looking forward to flaunting his handiwork at Byron.

  When Shelley went off sailing, which he did as frequently as possible, Mary felt completely abandoned, a sea widow. Sometimes he took pity on her, taking her out with him, and she would sit propped against his knees as she had on their first water crossing to Paris when she was sixteen. But she knew he was only trying to be kind to her, that he would much rather have been with Jane. Each morning, he retreated from the household, the crying children, and the new servants to the Ariel, using the ship as a floating study, leaning against the mast, reading, writing, and napping, while his frazzled wife attempted to train a cook and a maid, order the dinners, pay the bills, and smooth the feathers of pouting toddlers. If Shelley missed their old intimacy, Mary felt deserted by his airy dismissal of her sorrows and the burdens of running such a complicated household. Jane was no help at all. She ignored the servants and played with her children, untroubled by where their next supplies would come from or what the next meal might be.

  In the days leading up to the anniversary of William’s death on June 7, a heat wave settled in. Mary wanted Shelley to mourn with her, and when he resisted, she retreated even further than usual, refusing to speak to him, her mood made worse because she was tired and sick. “My nerves were wound up to the utmost irritation,” she remembered later. Thunderstorms blew through, which only seemed to make the air thicker, the heat more difficult to bear. The children quarreled; the grownups snapped at each other and, like Coleridge’s mariner, began to see things that were not there. In fact, bored and hot, they did their best to outdo one another in visionary capacity. The Williamses were new to this kind of thing, but Jane earned her colors when she saw an apparition of Shelley pass by the window and “trembled exceedingly” from the vision.

  On June 8, Mary woke up feeling desperately ill. She did not receive much sympathy from the Williamses, who thought this was yet another ploy to gain Shelley’s attention. She bathed in the sea, which gave her some relief, but only temporarily. For Mary, who believed in signs and auguries, it did not seem an accident that this new misery came on the heels of the anniversary of William’s death. That afternoon, Trelawny, who had returned from his travels to stay in Livorno with Byron, sailed his lordship’s boat into the bay, announcing his arrival by shooting off the war cannon that Byron had insisted be installed on the deck. Shelley and Williams raced out to the terrace to see who had arrived, thinking at first that it was a warship. But when they saw Bolivar painted in bold letters on the sails and the contessa’s pink flag waving from the mast, they were forced to acknowledge that Byron had outdone Shelley once again. The ship dominated the bay, making the Ariel look like a much younger sister, the runt of the litter.

  To console himself, Shelley came up with a scheme to lengthen the masts of his already top-heavy boat to make her “sail like a witch.” Together, he and Williams designed bigger sails, on the principle that the more canvas, the faster the ship. More experienced sailors would have known the Ariel was too light-bottomed a vessel to be able to handle so much sail, but neither Shelley nor Edward realized this, and even if they had, they would probably have continued with their plans anyway. All that mattered was having a faster boat than Byron’s.

  In better days, Mary could have calmed her husband, convincing him that this was a reckless project, but her mood had worsened. She had passed the three-month mark of her pregnancy at the end of May, usually a turning point for her, but instead of feeling better she grew increasingly weak, and on June 16, she woke up to find blood soaking the sheets. Jane and Claire rushed to her side but had no idea what to do. Mary faded quickly. They sent for the doctor, but he was miles away, and for seven hours Mary bled uncontrollably, believing she was going to die. She did not feel much pain, but she was desperately worried about what would happen to Percy and Shelley. The women tried to keep her conscious by wiping her brow with “brandy, vinegar[,] eau de Cologne etc,” but they were losing her. Shelley, who had a smattering of medical knowledge derived in part from his interest in science, but largely from monitoring the vagaries of his own health, had the good sense to send for ice to slow the bleeding, but it took many hours to arrive. At last, when the servants staggered in carrying the melting blocks, Shelley filled a tub with water and ice, lifted the nearly unconscious Mary from the
bed, and plunged her in. Aghast at this harsh treatment, Claire and Jane tried to intervene, telling Shelley to wait for the doctor, but fortunately, as Mary said, “Shelley overruled them & by unsparing application of [the ice] I was restored.”

  Shelley had saved his wife’s life, but now she had another loss to grieve. There would be no new baby. Percy was still an only child. His siblings were ghosts. She lay in bed, too weak to get up, while Shelley paced the halls of the Casa Magni, feeling trapped. He wanted to try out the new and “improved” Ariel, but Mary pleaded with him to stay with her. The mood in the house was grim. With each passing day, Shelley grew more impatient while Mary wept, growing sadder and clingier. The heat continued to blanket the coast, making them all irritable. Finally, Shelley broke.

  About a week after her miscarriage, Mary heard screaming in the middle of the night and then the pounding of feet. Shelley sprang into her room, eyes wide open, still screaming but sound asleep. This pale, monstrous Shelley was like a phantom from her first novel, the white-faced student, Frankenstein. Terrified, Mary leapt out of bed, fell, picked herself up, and ran into the Williamses’ room. Shelley, meanwhile, awoke, confused and gasping. He had seen terrible things, he said. He had seen Edward and Jane, not in a dream, but in a vision,

  in the most horrible condition, their bodies lacerated—their bones starting through their skin, the faces pale yet stained with blood, they could hardly walk, but Edward was the weakest & Jane was supporting him—Edward said—Get up, Shelley, the sea is flooding the house & it is all coming down.