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

by Charlotte Gordon

  After almost a year of happiness, Mary was so sure of Aubrey’s affections that she made the decisive move of introducing him to her father, inviting both men to a dinner party at her home in April 1833. Godwin approved, and Mary allowed herself to envision a future with Aubrey, albeit tentatively, writing in her journal that May, “the aspect of my life is changed—I enjoy myself much yet nothing is certain.”

  That summer, while Mary was in the country on vacation, she fell ill with influenza, and during the many weeks it took for her to recover, Aubrey did not visit or even write. When she returned to health in early August, she found out why: he had proposed marriage to another woman, a rich baronetess named Ida Goring, who at nineteen was fifteen years younger than Mary. Ida was unremarkable, but she was well connected and an advantageous match.

  In Mary’s eyes, Aubrey had made a heartless decision, choosing convention and propriety over love. “Dark night shadows the world,” she scrawled in her journal. She wrote to Claire saying she hoped this would be her final year on earth. Alarmed, Claire wrote back, urging her to remember her son, her father, and her work. Still, for all her desolate words, Mary knew how to combat despair.

  To avoid seeing Aubrey, she moved out of London, renting a house in the village of Harrow, where Percy had started school the previous year. Living with her son would help assuage her loneliness, and it would also help her economize, as the school’s fees for room and board were a drain on her finances. Unlike many teenagers, the fourteen-year-old Percy welcomed the arrival of his mother. Though Mary sometimes found him disappointing—he had a stoop; he refused to speak in public; he was pudgy, short, and not at all interested in poetry—she was devoted to him, and he to her. Their interests did not dovetail—he liked hunting and, even worse, sailing, and he did not want to be the philosopher she had hoped he would be—but she never lost sight of his loyalty, his loving nature, his innocence, and his desire to protect her. Most of all, he was alive, a survivor just as she was.

  Safely out of London, Mary did what she had always done in times of disaster: she immersed herself in work, launching herself into the world of another novel, Lodore, a direct response not only to Aubrey but to Godwin and Shelley, the men in her life who had broken her heart time and again. In the world of Lodore there are no heroes. The male characters are so weak that the women must save one another from harm and find happiness on their own. Although there is a young bride who at first glance seems to be the heroine, the only idealized figure in the story is the intellectual Fanny Derham, an independent woman who reads philosophy, dedicating herself to cultivating her own “genius” and that of others. It is no accident that Mary named her heroine Fanny: Fanny lives the life she wished her sister could have had. Self-sufficient, untrammeled by men, and supported by her female friends, Fanny Derham, unlike Fanny Godwin, does not commit suicide. Instead, she educates herself, helps and advises her friends, and works toward reforming society, embodying the Wollstonecraft axiom: provide women with freedom and the world will be a better place for everyone.

  Writing Lodore was a cathartic exercise. Mary took a stand against those who had tried to discredit her mother’s ideas at the same time that she asserted the benefits of independence for all women. By the time Mary was finished, she had healed from Aubrey’s betrayal and drawn strength from her own and her mother’s ideas. When Lodore was published in 1835, the reviews were more positive than those for her other books and it sold briskly.

  The solace she gained from this experience helped solidify Mary’s goals. She needed to fulfill her destiny as a writer, she decided. She did not need a man. The years before Aubrey’s rejection had been full of authorial achievements. In 1830, the Athenaeum had listed her as the most distinguished literary woman of her time. The following year, she had published her fourth novel, Perkin Warbeck, based on a medieval pretender to the English throne. Although it did not sell well, it received positive reviews and raised her stature as a writer. Most important, Bentley’s Standard Novel series offered Mary a place on its list for Frankenstein if she revised it so that Bentley could own the copyright.

  Mary was happy for the opportunity to rethink her first novel. Far from becoming more conventional after Shelley died, as Trelawny and Claire had claimed, she had grown increasingly disillusioned with the hypocrisy she witnessed in daily life. When she sat down at her writing desk, she applied herself to painting an even bleaker picture than in the original, making changes that emphasized her darkened outlook. In her first version, Victor Frankenstein has the freedom to choose whether to pursue his ambition to create a man. When he makes the wrong choice, it is his own action that brings about his downfall; like a character in a Sophoclean drama, his actions determine his future. But in the 1831 version, Mary strips him of any agency. Victor is a puppet in the hands of inexorable forces, both inner and outer, a man who must obey his impulses and is helpless in the hands of the fates. She lengthens Walton’s letters to his sister, having Frankenstein redouble his warnings against ambition: “Unhappy man! Do you share my madness?” Frankenstein says to Walton, “Have you drunk also of the intoxicating draught? Hear me,—let me reveal my tale, and you will dash the cup from your lips!” Elizabeth, Frankenstein’s bride, who was no paragon of strength in the first edition, is now even more powerless, silent and weak, reflecting Mary’s pessimism about women’s chances for happiness when they are dependent on men.

  By the time she had finished, Mary had written a new Frankenstein that was far more critical of society than the first. The 1831 edition depicts the harm caused by human (male) ambition and the lust for power. The female characters may lack the ability to save themselves or others, but they are entirely innocent. They suffer solely because they are connected to Frankenstein. For those naysayers who believed that Percy Shelley was responsible for the writing of the first version, and for those, such as Trelawny and Claire, who accused Mary of being a timid compromiser, the 1831 Frankenstein stands as a supremely original accomplishment, a dystopian vision created entirely by its author, Mary Shelley. Without Shelley by her side, Mary had been forced to become increasingly independent, and, in becoming so, she was now able to write a more complex and powerful book than when she was nineteen years old and her beloved was still alive.

  Critical response was largely negative, since, as in The Last Man, the novel’s bitterness undercut the ideal that most nineteenth-century readers held dear, and that Shelley himself had endorsed—that science would ensure the rosy future of Western civilization. But Mary had no patience with these clichés. She knew she was going against the tide, but she was driven by her need to expose class hatred, racism, and unabated prejudice.

  Unpopular though her ideas were, the reissuing of Frankenstein confirmed Mary’s fame. The stage versions continued to grow in popularity and keep Mary’s name in the public eye, although they also continued to stray from the original story. And yet, despite the acclaim, she was still poor. In the ten years since Shelley had died, Sir Timothy had never raised her allowance. The ladies’ magazine paid her comparatively well, but barely enough to cover the expense of Harrow, let alone fund those who continued to cling to her for financial support. Fortunately, while she was in the midst of finishing Lodore, Dionysus Lardner, a friend of her father, invited her to compose biographical essays for The Cabinet Cyclopedia, the first encyclopedia. This was a signal honor, since Lardner had his pick of contributors and intended to reach a wide audience. Also, he paid well. The assignment he gave Mary was to write essays on the literary men of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France. She was one of the few writers he knew who had the requisite language skills, erudition, and talent to take on this challenge. Pleased to be recognized for her abilities, Mary gladly accepted Lardner’s offer, making her the only female contributor in a literary stable that included luminaries such as Sir Walter Scott.

  Excited to start a new literary challenge, she began work on the essays in November 1833, three months after Aubrey’s betrayal. For the next four
and a half years, she researched and wrote more than fifty portraits of the “Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal and France,” finishing in May 1838. For many years, scholars underestimated how many of these articles Mary had written, as Lardner did not always identify the authors. Now there is consensus that Mary wrote at least three quarters of the 1,757-page project. She relied largely on her own translations, and the results are among her best literary efforts. Her writing is uncluttered, clear, and forceful. She chose compelling details to illuminate the characters. Her scholarship was impeccable. The tragedy is that the essays are difficult for the modern reader to find.

  “My life & reason have been saved by these ‘Lives,’ ” she wrote. The partial anonymity of the articles—not all were signed, and then usually just with initials—allowed her to express her views without fear of repercussions, just as her mother had in her early days as a reviewer. In addition, these “Lives,” focused and informative as they were, released Mary from the limitations of writing fiction. Instead of having to advance a plot, she could include her own meditations, even parts of her own story, albeit refracted through the biographies of great men.

  To this end, she spent hours excavating the lives of the mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters of her subjects. Loyal female friends, mistresses, and widows crowd the pages. In fact, after the initial stages of research, she became so interested in these women’s lives that she proposed a volume on historical female figures to Lardner. When he refused, she returned to her undercover strategy, embedding the lives of women in her biographies and sometimes allowing the women to overtake the men.

  Not only did Mary’s work on these biographies help her forget Aubrey, they released her from the bitter isolation of parochial Harrow. The long empty evenings had filled her with crippling dread before she began the project, but her immersion in her subjects’ lives helped her endure the loneliness of the small town. The local minister was the notoriously pompous prude who had refused to bury Allegra inside the chapel. In 1832, the year before she began writing for the Cyclopedia, her cherished brother William had died during a cholera epidemic. Her father was increasingly frail and refused to travel the twelve miles from London to visit; her friends were also loath to make the trip. To Mary’s envy, in early 1836, Jane had a new baby daughter she named Prudentia—an ironic name for the child of a woman who had lived such a dashingly imprudent life, but perhaps Jane hoped her baby would make more considered choices. Jane herself was unhappy. Her relationship with Hogg had deteriorated. Bored and lonely, she had attempted to start a new flirtation, but Hogg had caught her. Now they were trapped together, quarreling, irritable, and suspicious.

  Claire was also out of reach, having moved to Pisa to be a governess during the day and to sow the seeds for a women’s community of like-minded souls by night. This left only Percy, and for two years Mary devoted herself to her work and to her son, but finally she could no longer bear the isolation. “You must consider me as one buried alive,” she wrote to Maria Gisborne in the summer of 1835. At times she resented Percy, saying, “I have bartered my existence for his good,” but that was rare; for the most part, she was grateful to him. When his friends teased him for living at home, she reached out to them, inviting them over for tea. She borrowed money to buy him a tailcoat. He yearned for a horse, which they could not afford, but she let him have a terrier.

  Although Mary was concerned by Percy’s poor academic performance—he scraped by, still evincing no interest in his studies—she was proud of how ruddy and strong he was becoming. He devoted himself largely to sports and terrified his mother in the grand tradition of his father by taking up rowing and sailing, although, unlike Shelley, he was always cautious.

  In the winter of 1836, during Percy’s last year at Harrow, they received the sad news that Mr. Gisborne, the husband of Mary’s beloved Maria Reveley, had died. A few months later, Maria was also dead. Mary’s closest connection to her mother was gone. Harrow was suddenly intolerable. With an urgency born of panic, she removed Percy from school, reasoning (rightly) that he was not getting much out of his classes, and they moved to London near Regent’s Park. She had not given up on Percy attending university, hiring him a tutor that winter, but she knew that she could not stand any more time immured in the country. She needed to be close to her father and her London friends.

  That spring the eighty-year-old Godwin contracted a bad cough and fever. By the first week of April, he was seriously ill. Mary and Mary-Jane took turns by his bedside as he expressed “great horror of being left to servants.” Occasionally, he roused himself to speak, but, as Mary wrote to her mother’s old friend Mary Hays, “his thoughts wandered a good deal.” They did not give up hope; Godwin himself thought he would recover; but on the evening of April 7, 1836, Mary reported that “a slight rattle called us to his side.” Then, after a few hours of struggle, he stopped breathing. His heart had stopped.

  Mary consoled herself that Godwin had died without suffering, but her own pain was immense. “What I then went through—watching alone his dying hours!” Mary wrote in her journal, discounting Mary-Jane’s presence, as she always had.

  The funeral was a macabre affair. With no consideration for the feelings of the living, Godwin had written in his will that he wanted to be buried “as near” his first wife “as possible.” And so Mary, Percy, and Mary-Jane watched as the gravediggers shoveled the dirt out of Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. “Her coffin was found uninjured,” wrote Mary, and everyone stared down into the hole where they could see “the cloth still over it—& the plate tarnished but legible.” It was the closest Mary had come to her mother since she was a few days old. And now her father was gone, too.

  Since Claire and Charles lived outside the country, the care of her widowed stepmother fell squarely on Mary’s shoulders. She worked diligently to get her old enemy a pension from the state, supplementing it with her own earnings. She also visited Mary-Jane regularly, a chore she resented but discharged for the sake of her father. Although these demands hampered her work, they were far less onerous than those Godwin still required of her. Before he died, he had appointed Mary as his literary executor, making it clear that he expected her to cement his place in the pantheon of English literature by writing his biography and editing his unfinished works for publication. In true Godwinian fashion, he had given little thought to the impact this might have on his daughter’s life. Mary knew her father would not be content with a brief memoir like the one he had written of her mother. Only a comprehensive exegesis of his life and philosophical contributions would do.

  She began dutifully enough, but soon became bogged down in the piles of papers that littered Godwin’s desk. Convinced as he was of his own place in history, Godwin had kept a copy of almost every document he had ever composed, as well as most of the letters he had received, which made sorting through his accounting books, correspondence, journals, drafts, and articles a dusty, tedious, and painful business. And yet, despite his conviction of their future significance, he had left his affairs in a mess. Furthermore, he was elliptical, mysterious, and obfuscatory, referring to friends only by initials and to his ideas and important events in shorthand—slashes, dashes, parentheses—a code that was almost impossible to decipher.

  Mary knew that he would not consider his difficult habits an excuse for not completing the job; he himself would have worked briskly and diligently to bring the task to a close, as he had for her mother. But the memoir he had composed for Wollstonecraft had dire results. Mary had never articulated her feelings about her father’s exposure of her mother’s private life, but she was only too well aware of what would happen if she revisited the tragedies and the old scandals. If she told the story of Fanny’s suicide, her own elopement, her mother’s affairs, and Godwin’s assault on governmental authority, she and Percy would be ostracized forever. She might never be offered work again. And yet, despite her misgivings, out of loyalty to her contradictory, unyielding father, sh
e began the project, and she worked on it steadily for almost four years before stopping.

  When at last she gave up, she tortured herself, feeling that once again she was falling short, once again disappointing her father. Yet the more time she had spent with the material, the more she was certain that Percy would be ruined by the publication of such a book. At one point, as a compromise, she decided to have the memoir end right before her father met her mother. In another version, she included her mother but falsified the date of their marriage. But Mary was not a liar. She could not publish a book that was untrue. Neither could she write one that would harm her son.

  Godwin had also wanted her to arrange for the publication of his final manuscript, a weighty diatribe against Christianity. With his customary rigor and systematic logic, her father criticized the Catholic Church, the Church of England, and the Reformed churches, building the kind of comprehensive argument he believed was essential and relying on his formidable knowledge of history to back up his points.

  Mary was familiar with his ideas, having heard them before, both from Godwin and from Shelley, and though she did not disagree with them, she, like her mother, found occasional solace in the liturgy of the Church of England. However, as with the biography, she decided the public was not ready for such a book and never submitted it to a publisher. She had learned from Shelley’s career what the public thought of atheists. Besides, her experience in the literary marketplace had taught her that publishing such a long, scholarly book was a doomed enterprise; no one would buy it or read it, so there seemed little point in putting the family through the kind of suffering that would result from revealing Godwin’s hostility to religion. Nevertheless, her decision gave fuel to her enemies. When Trelawny got wind of it, he renewed his attacks against her, accusing her of being shallow, of repressing important philosophical truths, and of being overly concerned with the opinions of others. But Mary stood firm, and in doing so she was far braver than Trelawny could ever understand: she was breaking the rules that governed nineteenth-century daughters, placing her own concerns and those of Percy ahead of her father’s wishes.