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

by Charlotte Gordon

  When it came to Mary’s intellectual achievements, Godwin criticized or discounted any elements that disrupted his “plot.” A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, he wrote, was flawed by “sentiments…of a rather masculine description” and was “amazonian”—an insult—with too many “passages of a stern and rugged feature.” She was “too contemptuous” of Burke. These were only momentary lapses, Godwin assured his reader—“incompatible with the writer’s essential character” and her “trembling delicacy of sentiment”—but they were also the reasons why her most famous work was not a masterpiece: “When tried by the long established laws of literary composition, [Rights of Woman] can scarcely maintain its claim to be placed in the first class of human productions.” Emotional and passionate as she was, Godwin argued, Mary was incapable of following the rules of logic and rhetoric: Rights of Woman was “an unequal performance and eminently deficient in method and arrangement.” He had consented to its inscription on her gravestone because it was her most famous work, but he worried that its readers would judge her as “rude, pedantic [and] dictatorial.” To him, it was essential that the public understand that Mary was “a woman, lovely in her person, and…feminine in her manner.”

  In the course of this exegesis, not only did he neglect her philosophical influences, he ignored the final essay Mary wrote, “On Poetry, and Our Relish for the Beauties of Nature,” her clearest articulation of her goals as a writer. Thus, readers of A Memoir never learn that Mary believed that authors should strive for the power and honesty that comes from Nature rather than an artificial correctness of structure and style. They never read that she wanted to reach readers’ emotions and passions, not just their intellect as Godwin had in Political Justice. To Godwin, his wife’s goals did not seem worth mentioning, as he deemed them incoherent and incomprehensible. He disliked the repetition, colloquial language, and autobiographical asides she employed, viewing these elements as evidence of an untrained mind, rather than rhetorical tools or innovations. Even worse, in his view, were her use of humor and her sudden shifts between formal and informal language; these marred the polish of her books and revealed her lack of discipline. Poor Mary, Godwin said, no one had ever helped her. She had not had the education she deserved; she was not (unlike himself) trained as a scholar, and her books suffered accordingly. For him, her tangents and self-revelations ruined the coherence of her arguments and revealed her weakness as a thinker rather than her originality. He did not mention her book on the French Revolution, even though others, including John Adams, would continue to reread it long after she died, and he completely failed to acknowledge her stylistic innovations in Letters from Sweden.

  Regrettably, Godwin’s assessment of Mary’s work shaped the thinking of subsequent generations of readers, who condemned her for venturing into “masculine” territory. To most nineteenth-century critics, her books were too many things at once: personal and fictional, historical and autobiographical, formal and informal—a mélange that no longer seems odd to modern readers but that at the time seemed indecorous, raw, untaught, and inchoate. Even in the twentieth century, with a few notable exceptions, including Virginia Woolf’s essay on Wollstonecraft in 1929 and Ralph Wardles’s Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography in 1951, most readers criticized Wollstonecraft for her inclusion of personal reflection and informal language in philosophical, political, and historical works. Not until the 1970s, in the wake of a new interest in women’s literature, did critics begin to reexamine Wollstonecraft’s contributions to history. Now most scholars view Mary’s mixture of writing styles as sophisticated rather than sloppy, innovative rather than naïve.

  At last, Mary began to be seen as a seasoned professional, acutely aware of what she wanted to achieve as a writer, rather than as the overly emotional, ill-trained amateur depicted by her husband. Only those writers with “less vigorous” minds create works of “elegance and uniformity,” she declared, whereas those who “speak the language of truth and nature” will by necessity produce work with “inequalities” and “roughness.” By implication, she knew which category she was in. Impatient with restrictions, she wanted to break rules, stylistically and thematically. In the same way that she lived a headlong life, overturning traditions and following her own path, she wrote works that shattered convention and destroyed stultifying customs. She could not do otherwise. She had never been able to submit to authority. In her writing, her voice rings out, unpolished, inelegant, and filled with the force of truth.

  IT TOOK GODWIN LESS than eight weeks to finish A Memoir. On November 15, two months after Mary’s funeral, he had completed the first draft. He revised it in four days, and on November 19 he handed it to Johnson for publication. The result was a disaster. The speed with which Godwin had written had indeed harmed his story, just as Everina had predicted. The facts had not been sifted and checked; much was missing. Godwin’s own prejudices colored his assessment of Mary’s contributions to political philosophy, and, worst of all, his frankness about her sexual experiences and his characterization of her as the heroine of many love affairs seemed calculated to alienate his audience. However, if Johnson had reservations about publishing the book, he did not mention them; he knew how much Godwin needed the money, and he believed that the reading audience should be offered the details of Mary’s life, controversial though these had been. But perhaps it was he who suggested that the book be called a memoir, not a biography—an important change, since it reminds the reader that the book is meant to be a personal remembrance rather than a balanced accounting.

  When A Memoir appeared in the bookstalls in January 1798, the elegies from the weekly magazines and newspapers came to an abrupt halt. No longer was Mary depicted as a beacon of Enlightenment values. Her ideas were now “scripture…for propagating w[hore]s,” said The Anti-Jacobin Review. Even her admirers were shocked, less by her escapades—they had already known about these—than by the fact that Godwin had exposed them. According to one of her keenest fans, the poet Robert Southey, Godwin was guilty of “stripping his dead wife naked.” Little Fanny became the most notorious bastard of her generation. Wollstonecraft’s ideas were now completely overshadowed by her notoriety as a “fallen woman.”

  The government, which secretly funded The Anti-Jacobin Review, seized this opportunity to discredit the author of Political Justice, encouraging the publication of articles and reviews that lambasted Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and liberal social values in general. Even three years later, the campaign was still going strong. One of the most notorious attacks was a ribald verse that satirized Godwin’s exposure of Wollstonecraft’s personal history:

  William hath penn’d a wagon-load of stuff,

  And Mary’s life at last he needs must write,

  Thinking her whoredoms were not known enough,

  Till fairly printed off in black and white.

  With wondrous glee and pride, this simple wight

  Her brothel feats of wantonness sets down,

  Being her spouse, he tells, with huge delight,

  How oft she cuckolded the silly clown

  And lent, O lovely piece! herself to half the town.

  Many popular novels appeared that ridiculed Wollstonecraft’s feminist principles, turning back the tide on any advances inspired by her ideas. Overnight, it seemed, the character of the female philosopher became a stock character, a villain or a figure of fun. In Elizabeth Hamilton’s novel Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800), the heroine, Julia Demond, espouses the ideas of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, which ultimately lead to her ruin; she falls in love with a libertine because she thinks he is a philosopher, but he turns out to be a cad, abandoning her when she is pregnant. The Anti-Jacobin Review applauded Hamilton’s stance against the “voluptuous dogmas of Mary Godwin.” In Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda, Harriet Freke is a female philosopher whose foolish “antics” land herself and her friends in scrapes that are both absurd and dangerous. Elinor Joddrel in Fanny Burney’s The Wanderer (1814) is painted as a pathetic yo
ung woman who, though she lives through the Terror and advocates for the rights of woman, tries to kill herself when she is rejected by the man she loves. Interestingly, both Elinor and Harriet dress as men in several key scenes, demonstrating the common belief that female philosophers were “unsex’d,” having lost their feminine identity when they attempted to cross over to the “masculine” world of reason and logic. Even Amelia Alderson, one of “the fairs,” poked fun at both Godwin and Wollstonecraft in her novel Adeline Mowbray, in which the central characters are geniuses whose absurd ideals are impracticable and end up causing them heartbreak.

  Although A Memoir provoked an uproar, it did not sell well. The same conservatives who were writing scurrilous articles told people not to endorse the sinful behavior of Godwin and his paramour by buying the book. For that matter, they declared, the purchase of any volume by Godwin or Wollstonecraft would contribute to the moral turpitude of English society. Even some liberal admirers distanced themselves. Godwin, who had been famous ever since the publication of Political Justice, plummeted in the eyes of the public. Having once stood for the Enlightenment values of reason and freedom, his name was now synonymous with immorality and decadence. His status as a well-respected spokesperson for the Reform movement had been shattered. A decade or so later, the establishment’s assault would work in his favor, as young men like Shelley would view Godwin as a martyr, but at the time it was difficult for Godwin to sustain this blow to his reputation.

  Only a few of Godwin’s contemporaries recognized the real damage the book had done. The Analytical Review, one of the magazines Mary had written for, argued that Godwin’s emphasis on her passions rather than her intellect did not do her justice: A Memoir gives “no correct history of the formation of Mrs G’s mind. We are neither informed of her favorite books, her hours of study, nor her attainments in languages and philosophy.”

  Nevertheless, buoyed by a strong sense of his own rectitude, Godwin believed he was honoring his wife. He must have known that people would condemn both Mary and Fanny, but he wanted to make it clear that he was not ashamed of how she had lived her life. He was unaware that his motivations might have been murky, that some part of him might have wanted to destroy the woman who had abandoned him, and to represent himself as her savior. All he was certain of was that he had lost the woman he loved. Even her daughters, he said, had not lost as much as he. With A Memoir, he staked a final claim on her life, shaping her story according to his own conscious and unconscious dictates, attempting to demonstrate that he was the man who had known her best, the one who had won her from all other contestants. No one, least of all the heartbroken Godwin, could have foreseen the harm his book would do.

  CHAPTER 37

  MARY SHELLEY: A WRITING LIFE

  [ 1832–1836 ]

  the spring of 1832, at age thirty-four, Mary attracted the attention of a handsome and intelligent man, thirty-one-year-old Aubrey Beauclerk. It had been ten years since Shelley died and she had assumed that she would never fall in love again, but Aubrey stood out from the other men she had met. Like Shelley, he was idealistic, gentle, and aristocratic. In addition, he seemed to admire her for precisely those things that scandalized most people: her writing, her politics, and even her decision to run away with Shelley. The son of the Mrs. Beauclerk who had hosted the ball in Pisa where Mary had danced with Trelawny, Aubrey had been raised almost entirely by his enterprising mother. Thanks to her and to his many energetic, lively sisters, Aubrey was comfortable with women and was a veteran of many love affairs by the time he was introduced to Mary. He had fathered two illegitimate children by different mothers. Although he did not marry either woman, unlike many men of his class he had given the children his name and large financial settlements.

  Long before they encountered each other, Aubrey had heard glowing reports about Mary from his mother, who was far more open to unusual domestic arrangements than most people of her social background. Emily Beauclerk was the only daughter of the notorious Duchess of Leinster and her second husband, William Ogilvie. After her first husband, the duke, died, the duchess had outraged her family and friends by marrying Ogilvie, her children’s tutor. By all reports, the duchess and her second husband remained in love throughout the course of their long marriage. Having witnessed her parents’ happiness firsthand, Emily taught her children to step outside the prejudices of their class in their own quest for love. She herself had flagrantly broken her marriage vows, having found her husband so uncongenial that she had taken a lover (Lord Dudley) with whom she reputedly had several children. As a result, when she took her brood of seven daughters to Italy to find them husbands, she had had no qualms about leaving her own spouse behind, circumstances that no doubt made her more open to welcoming Mary at her balls than she might otherwise have been.

  In the winter of 1831, Aubrey and Mary saw each other frequently. Aubrey’s sister Gee had become one of Mary’s closest friends when Gee moved to London with her husband, John Paul. Eight years Mary’s junior, Gee had admired Mary ever since they first met in Pisa. To her, Mary and Shelley’s self-imposed exile seemed glamorous. They were the quintessential Romantic hero and heroine, as they had given up everything for love. Mary, in turn, was grateful to Gee for her warmth. Though she had made many literary and artistic contacts in the years after Shelley’s death, most “proper” Londoners still refused to acknowledge her.

  Gee had given enthusiastic reports of Mary’s virtues to her older brother, and he made efforts to draw Mary out when they met at the Pauls’. But this was not always easy. Although she could be giddy when surrounded by her friends, Mary tended to be quiet in the company of strangers. Those who encountered her for the first time were often surprised to find that the notorious poet’s wife was neither a hoyden nor a seductress. Indeed, Mary was just the opposite: reserved and dignified. One new friend described her as strikingly “gentle, feminine, lady-like.” Another acquaintance confessed that although he thought the author of Frankenstein would be “rather indiscreet, and even extravagant,” he found her “cool, quiet, feminine,” revealing how difficult it was for Mary’s contemporaries to square the boldness of her work with its creator. Instead of being loud or “masculine,” she appeared to embody their ideas of what “proper” womanhood should be.

  Still, Aubrey did not give up. The more time they spent together, the more captivated he became. Mary’s hair was still the distinctive red gold of her youth; her eyes were soft and understanding. She had never lost her habit of wearing light-colored dresses unless she was going to the theater; then she wore low-cut black gowns that revealed her white shoulders and the curve of her breasts. She also had a highly developed spirit of fun. She earned the adulation of her friends’ children by treating the teenagers as though they were adults, and she amused the younger ones by displaying her double-jointed wrists, bending her long tapering fingers back at an impossible angle.

  Yet nothing might have come of their relationship if a crisis with Gee had not occurred. In November 1831, Gee was driven out of her house by her husband when he discovered that she was having an affair. Mary instantly leapt to the rescue. “My first impulse,” she said, “is to befriend a woman.” She stood by Gee during the scandal that ensued and consoled her as she prepared to move away from London to live with a cousin in Ireland. The Beauclerks were grateful to Mary for her support of Gee, Aubrey in particular. He and Gee were so close that she had named her first (and only) child after him.

  Drawn together by Gee’s problems, Aubrey and Mary began to take strolls in the country, sometimes heading north toward Mary’s childhood home in St. Pancras. They went to the theater and concerts, met at dinner parties, and after a few months enjoyed moments of what Mary called “ineffable bliss” in each other’s arms. A newly elected MP for East Surrey, Aubrey held the same political views as Mary and her father. He fought for the abolition of slavery, supported the Irish cause, and was one of the most energetic advocates for the Reform Bill being debated in Parliament that s
pring. “Liberty must and will raise her head o’er the grave of bigotry and ignorance,” he had declared in the House of Commons in 1828.

  As an up-and-coming politician, Aubrey needed a wife who would help him advance his career. Beleaguered by debt and scandal, Mary Shelley was hardly the obvious choice, even if she was the daughter of one of his heroes, William Godwin. But Aubrey could not resist spending time with his new love. He found talking to Mary exhilarating. From Godwin, Shelley, and Byron, Mary had learned how to discuss politics, a topic that was usually off limits for women. She knew how to ask helpful questions and suggest new points and ideas. She also had her own opinions. Political strategy sessions and literary discussions were her forte. For the aristocratic Aubrey, who was not used to dining with intellectuals and radicals, Mary’s erudition and liberal credentials were somewhat intimidating, and yet, like the other men in Mary’s past, he found her fascinating. She was a beautiful woman who was smarter and better educated than most of the men he knew, including himself.

  To Mary, Aubrey was a tamer version of Shelley, a dreamer who was also reliable, a reformer who was also respectable. Dedicated to the cause of social justice, he had chosen to work from within the system rather than from the rocky promontory of exile. Neither reckless nor wild, he plotted his moves with caution and forethought. He seemed trustworthy, a man she could love with safety, a man worthy of her affections. When the Reform Bill that he had helped sponsor passed, they both regarded this triumph as an endorsement of his political career. “I hope things will turn out well—I trust they will,” she wrote Jane, having sworn to tell her if she ever fell in love again.