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

by Charlotte Gordon

  27 Even more notorious Lucy Moore, Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (London: Harper Perennial, 2011), 48–51.

  28 “play the role” Ibid., 49.

  29 “Let us raise ourselves” Ibid., 118. See also Linda Kelly, Women of the French Revolution (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 49.

  30 he had known many Gordon, VAL, 211, 250–51, 275, 281–82. Later, Wollstonecraft would frequently accuse Imlay of being unable to control his appetite for women. For example, see MW to Imlay, February 10 1795, Letters MW, 283.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: MARY SHELLEY: RETRIBUTION (1816–1817)

  1 “I shall love” CC to Byron, August ?29, 1816, TCC, 70.

  2 the gloomy weather October 7, 1816. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, eds., The Piozzi Letters: 1811–1816 (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1999), 521.

  3 “Mary is reading” PBS to Byron, September 29, 1816, Letters PBS, 1:508.

  4 “Seek happiness from tranquillity” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 185.

  5 Margaret’s cautionary words Walton’s sister was named Margaret Walton Saville. Anne Mellor points out that these initials, M.W.S., “are those Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin coveted and gained when she married the widowed Percy Shelley.” Although we never meet this sister, Mellor points out that it is interesting to note that Walton often mentions his sister’s tempering influence, helping him resist the pull of his ambition. Anne Mellor, “Making a ‘Monster’: An Introduction to Frankenstein,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 12.

  6 Mary should push Shelley Fanny to MWS, October 3, 1816, TCC, 81. Fanny’s actual words were “Is it not your and Shelley’s duty to consider these things?”

  7 “stupid letter” October 4, 1816, Journals MWS, 138.

  8 “Her voice did quiver” “On Fanny Godwin,” Hutchinson, ed., Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 2:45.

  9 “very alarming” October 9, 1816, Journals MWS, 139.

  10 “depart immediately” Godwin to MWS, October 13, 1816, Dowden, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 58.

  11 “the worst” October 11, 1816, Journals MWS, 141.

  12 The Cambrian quoted in Ibid., 139–40 n2.

  13 wearing stays Sunstein, MS:R&R, 127.

  14 “of a being” Dowden, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 57. See also Journals MWS, 139–40 n2.

  15 Her use of the word Wollstonecraft inscribed her reading primer for Fanny: “The first book of a series which I intended to have written for my unfortunate girl.” Jebb, Mary Wollstonecraft, 289.

  16 “Go not to Swansea” Godwin to MWS, October 13, 1816. Dowden, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 58; see also Journals MWS, 139–40 n2.

  17 the Godwins said Godwin to MWS, October 13, 1816, Dowden, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 58.

  18 “much agitated” MWS to PBS, December 18, 1816, Letters MWS, 1:24.

  19 Shelley made comments Charles Robinson writes, “Collaboration seems to have been the hallmark of the Shelleys’ literary relationship.…The manuscript evidence actually enables us to imagine the ways in which the Shelleys passed the notebooks back and forth between August/September 1816 and mid-April 1817.” Introduction to Mary Shelley, Original Frankenstein, 25.

  20 “peculiarly interesting” For a brief survey of Shelley’s changes to the manuscript, see ibid., 26–28.

  21 four thousand original words Ibid., 25.

  22 The Waste Land and The Great Gatsby The editor Max Perkins pushed F. Scott Fitzgerald to develop a “vague” character into the famous Jay Gatsby, even supplying Fitzgerald with ideas for what Gatsby should say and do. Perkins said that Fitzgerald’s vagueness about Gatsby “may be somewhat of an artistic intention, but I think it is mistaken. Couldn’t he be physically described as distinctly as the others, and couldn’t you add one or two characteristics like the use of that phrase ‘old sport’—not verbal, but physical ones, perhaps.” Max Perkins to Scott Fitzgerald, November 20, 1924, in Gerald Gross, Editors on Editing (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 281. In addition, Perkins cut ninety thousand words from the original draft of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. In one of the other most famous examples of collaboration, T. S. Eliot’s friend the poet Ezra Pound deleted almost six hundred lines from the thousand-line first draft of The Waste Land while Eliot was hospitalized for mental illness, removing both the original rhyme scheme and the meter and leaving only 434 lines of free verse intact. In fact, most scholars agree that The Waste Land is a coauthored work. Jack Stillinger writes: “The majority view is that the 434 lines of The Waste Land were lying hidden from the beginning in the 1,000 lines of draft, rather in the manner of one of Michelangelo’s slumbering figures waiting to be rescued from the block of marble. But Michelangelo, in this analogy, was both artist and reviser simultaneously. In the case of The Waste Land, it took one poetic genius to create those 434 lines in the first place, and another to get rid of the several hundred inferior lines surrounding and obscuring them.” Multiple Authorship and the Myth of Solitary Genius (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991).

  23 sometimes his suggestions Robinson writes, “not all of Percy Shelley’s changes to Mary Shelley’s text in the Draft are for the better.” Introduction to Original Frankenstein, 26.

  24 Moreover, both Mary and Shelley See Daisy Hay for a full discussion of the importance of sociability and collaboration, not just for Mary and Shelley but for their group of friends as well. She writes, “Frankenstein, like Shelley’s Alastor, is a critique of selfish, isolated creativity.…Frankenstein brings about his own downfall through an act of self-aggrandizing creation which is characterized by his failure to consider the social ramifications of his actions. He rejects the communal, institutional context of the University of Ingolstadt to lurk in charnel houses and his attic room in pursuit of personal glory. Frankenstein…is Mary’s manifest for the idealized community of enlightened individuals she and Shelley attempted to assemble.” Daisy Hay, Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 86–87.

  25 more bad news T. Hookham to PBS, quoted in Dowden, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 67.

  26 “far advanced” December 12, 1816, The Times, quoted in Seymour, MS, 175.

  27 she wept over Mary wrote, “Poor Harriet to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows as the atonement claimed by fate for her death.” February 12, 1839, Journals MWS, 560.

  28 “Ah! My best love” MWS to PBS, December 17, 1816, Letters MWS, 1:24.

  29 “I need not” PBS to Byron, January 17, 1817, Letters PBS, 1:539–40.

  30 “Dearest Claire” PBS to CC, December 30, 1816, ibid., 1:524–25.

  31 “Mrs G. and G.” Ibid.

  32 “good marriage” PBS describes “the magical effects” of the wedding on the Godwins, ibid.

  33 “Those darling treasures” MWS to PBS, December 17, 1816. Letters MWS, 1:24.

  34 Shelley’s thoughtlessness MWS to Marianne Hunt, January 13, 1817, ibid., 1:27.

  35 Leigh Hunt was a glamorous figure For a more complete portrait of Hunt, see Hay, Young Romantics, 54–57.

  36 “unintelligible,” “tiresome” John Wilson Croker, “Keats, Endymion: A Poetic Romance,” Quarterly Review (1818): 204.

  37 “Cockney,” background John Gibson Lockhart, “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1818): 519.

  38 “had been moved” Roger Ingpen, ed., The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt: With Reminiscences of Friends and Contemporaries, and with Thornton Hunt’s Introduction and Postscript, vol. 2 (London: 1903), 37.

  39 “frightful creatures” Ibid.

  40 Elizabeth Kent For more on Hunt and Elizabeth Kent, see Hay, Young Romantics, 7, 15–18, 55, 60, 70, 72–75, 96–97, 115–18, 226, 262.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: IN LOVE (1792)

  1 “freedom is enthroned” Gilbert Imlay, A Topographical
Description of the Western Territory of North America (London: 1792), 159.

  2 “state of degradation” Gilbert Imlay, The Emigrants, ed. W. Verhoeven and Amanda Gilroy (New York: Penguin, 1998), 101.

  3 “fairy scene” Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution (London: 1794), 476.

  4 “Between you and me” Joel to Ruth Barlow, April 19, 1793, quoted in Eleanor Flexner, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Biography (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1972), 181.

  5 “glistened with sympathy” MW to Imlay, December [date?], 1793, Letters MW, 234.

  6 “Tant pis” W. Clark Durant, “Supplement,” in Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. William Godwin (London: Constable and Co., 1927), 237.

  7 rosy glow MW to Imlay, December [date?], 1793, Letters MW, 234.

  8 The “air is chill” Wollstonecraft, The French Revolution, 162.

  9 The “gigantic” portraits Ibid., 161.

  10 “I weep” Ibid., 163.

  11 “dear girl” MW to Imlay, August [date?], 1793, Letters MW, 228.

  12 “cheerful poultry” Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (London: J. Johnson, 1790), 141.

  13 captivating places Imlay, Emigrants, 54.

  14 “You can scarcely imagine” MW to Imlay, August [date?], 1793, Letters MW, 228.

  15 “revolution in the minds” Wollstonecraft, The French Revolution, 396.

  16 the best plan Todd, MW:ARL, 240.

  17 “inclined to faint” MW to Imlay, November [date?], 1793, Letters MW, 232.

  18 “for the wings” Helen Maria Williams, Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, from the 31st of May 1793, Till the 28th of July 1794, and of the Scenes Which Have Passed in the Prisons of Paris (1795; University of Oxford Text Archive), 37, http://ota.ox.ac.uk/text/4517.html.

  19 “If this young lady” The British Critic, vol. 2 (1793; Google Books, 2008), 252, http://books.google.com/books?id=EP8vAAAAYAAJ&dq.

  20 “politics are a study” quoted in Deborah Kennedy, Helen Maria and the Age of Revolution (Plainsboro, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2002), 106.

  21 “Madame Roland” Quoted in ibid., 115.

  22 “uterine furies” Lynn Avery Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 121.

  23 “each sex” Quoted in ibid., 122.

  24 “In general” Quoted in ibid., 119.

  25 “My sentiments” Quoted in Linda Kelly, Women of the French Revolution (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1989), 123.

  26 “Recall that virago” Quoted in M. J. Diamond, Women and Revolution: Global Expressions (New York: Springer, 1998), 14.

  27 “O liberty!” quoted in Gary Kelly, Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 55–56.

  28 “I have felt” MW to Imlay, November [date?], 1793. Letters MW, 232–33.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: MARY SHELLEY: MARLOW AND LONDON (1817–1818)

  1 “descended the steps” PBS to MWS, December 16, 1816, Letters PBS, 1:521.

  2 “yon nymph” Leigh Hunt to MWS, November 16, 1821, The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, ed. Thornton Hunt, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1862), 1:106.

  3 “a sedate-faced” Leigh Hunt to MWS, July 25–27, 1819, St. Clair, Godwins and the Shelleys, 6:846.

  4 “jumps about like” MWS to PBS, January 17, 1817, Catalogue of the Library of the Late Charles W. Frederickson: A Carefully Selected and Valuable Collection of English Literature, Comprising a Large Number of First and Other Rare Editions, Especially of Byron, Gray, Keats, Lamb, Shakspeare, Scott, and an Unrivalled Collection of the Works of Shelley and Shelleyanna; Also Autograph Letters and Manuscripts of the Greatest Intrinsic Interest and Value (Cambridge, MA: D. Taylor & Company, 1897), 231, quoted in Seymour, MS, 180. This passage is from earlier in the year but is one of Mary’s most vivid expressions of delight in little William.

  5 “of the dead” MWS to Leigh Hunt, May 3, 1817, Letters MWS, 1:32.

  6 “offspring” or “progeny” Mary Shelley, introduction to Frankenstein,11.

  7 as a “dilat[ion]” Ibid., 7.

  8 Although Mary did not provide Anne Mellor provides an analysis of these dates in “Making a ‘Monster’: An Introduction to Frankenstein,” 12, and Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York: Routledge, 1989), 54–55.

  9 it is as though Anne Mellor writes, “the novel is written by the author to an audience of one, herself.” For a more thorough discussion of this idea, see Mary Shelley, 54–55.

  10 No matter how hard Mellor writes, “Victor’s quest is precisely to usurp from nature the female power of biological reproduction. Making a ‘Monster,’ ” 19.

  11 bread and raisins Dowden, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 123.

  12 “his face upwards” Elizabeth Kent, Flora Domestica (London: 1823), xix.

  13 “fair and very young” Dowden, Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 123.

  14 The villagers Ibid., 120–22.

  15 “many complements” Jeanne Moskal, “Introductory note” in Mary Shelley, The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley (London: William Pickering, 1996), 8:4.

  16 “the perusal” Benjamin Colbert, “Contemporary Notice of the Shelleys’ History of a Six Weeks’ Tour: Two New Early Reviews,” Keats-Shelley Journal 48 (1999).

  17 “the master theme” PBS to Byron, September 8, 1816, Letters PBS, 1:504.

  18 “to startle” The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat, and Nora Crook (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012), 3:120.

  19 “Can man be free” Ibid., 3:167.

  20 The Revolt of Islam For a comprehensive analysis of the poem, see Holmes, Pursuit, 390–402.

  21 “So now my summer” Complete Poetry of Shelley, ed. Reiman, Fraistat, and Crook, 123.

  22 The competition Mary wrote, “Clare [sic] is forever wearying with her idle & childish complaints.” MWS to PBS, October 18, 1817, Letters MWS, 1:57.

  23 “Mary has presented” PBS to Byron, September 24, 1817, Letters PBS, 1:557.

  24 She wrote Shelley many letters “Come back as soon as you may,” MWS to PBS, September 26, 1817, Letters MWS, 1:52. See also September 24 and 28, October 2, 16, and 18. She complains about Alba, Claire, and the Hunts, but the most consistent theme is Shelley’s absence.

  25 “Mourn then” David Clark, ed., Shelley’s Prose: or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1966), 168.

  26 Godwin had read Many years later, after Shelley’s death, Godwin would tell Mary, “[Frankenstein] is the most wonderful book to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of.” Paul, Friends, 2:282.

  27 received immediate and angry reviews Seymour provides a summary of the response to Frankenstein in MS, 196.

  28 “respect to those persons” MWS to Sir Walter Scott, June 14, 1818, Letters MWS, 1:34.

  29 a few grudging reviews For an overview of the critical response, see Holmes, Pursuit, 403–4.

  30 a lump or two of bread Hogg frequently refers to Shelley as so pure or “sensitive” that he did not need food. Life of Shelley, 2:114, 2:187, 2:305, 2:517.

  31 “affectionate and mild” PBS to Byron, December 17, 1817, Letters PBS, 1:557.

  32 “pure air” MWS to PBS, September 26, 1817, Letters MWS, 1:27.

  33 “I met a traveler” Complete Poetry of Shelley, ed. Reiman, Fraistat, and Crook, 3:4–5.

  CHAPTER TWENTY: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “MOTHERHOOD” (1793–1794)

  1 “I told them” MW to Imlay, January 1, 1794, Letters MW, 238.

  2 “chat as long” MW to Ruth Barlow, [c. mid-1793], ibid., 229.

  3 increasingly melancholy MW to Imlay, September [date?], 1793, ibid., 231.

  4 “I have been” Ibid.

  5 “money-getting face” MW to Imlay, December [date?], 1793, ibid., 234.

  6 “My head aches�
�� MW to Imlay, January 1, 1794, ibid., 238.

  7 “loved [her] like” Ibid.

  8 “I intreat you” MW to Imlay, January 8, 1794, ibid., 241.

  9 “What a picture” MW to Imlay, January 11, 1794, ibid., 243.

  10 “life would not” MW to Everina, March 10, 1794, ibid., 248.

  11 “quite out of the world” MW to Ruth Barlow, February 3, 1794, ibid., 247.

  12 the origin of society Wollstonecraft, The French Revolution, 7.

  13 “on the basis” Ibid., 13.

  14 “liberty with maternal” Ibid., 19.

  15 “Amen and Amen” John Adams, notations on Mary Wollstonecraft, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, in the Boston Public Library Rare Books Department, available online at https://archive.org/details/historicalmoralv00woll. Daniel O’Neill writes that Adams’s notes on Wollstonecraft’s texts constitute a “dialogue” between Adams and Wollstonecraft on “the theoretical basis for their very different evaluations of the French Revolution’s significance.” He adds that the lack of scholarly work on this “dialogue” is as much a “gap in the literature on Wollstonecraft as in that on Adams.” “John Adams versus Mary Wollstonecraft on the French Revolution and Democracy,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 3 (July 2007), 453. For another analysis of the Adams/Wollstonecraft debate, see Gordon, VAL, 374, 461, 475.

  16 “family affections” Wollstonecraft, The French Revolution, 254.

  17 “pleasantly situated” MW to Ruth Barlow, February 3, 1794, Letters MW, 247.

  18 “ruffle” his moods MW to Imlay, January 15, 1794, ibid., 246.

  19 “smoking on the board” MW to Imlay, March [date?], 1794, ibid., 250.

  20 “matrimonial phraseology” MW to Ruth Barlow, April 27, 1794, ibid., 251.

  21 “the history is finished” Ibid., 252.

  22 “was convinced” MW to Ruth Barlow, May 20, 1794, ibid., 253.