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

by Charlotte Gordon

  16 “William hath penn’d” Anti-Jacobin Review 5 (1800), 25.

  17 “voluptuous dogmas of Mary Godwin” Anti-Jacobin Review 7 (1801), 374 (Google Books). For an overview of Elizabeth Hamilton’s philosophy and work, see Claire Grogan, introduction to Memoirs of Modern Philosophers by Elizabeth Hamilton (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000).

  18 In Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda Deborah Weiss suggests that Edgeworth’s portrait of Harriet Freke is not meant to be a caricature of Wollstonecraft, but in fact extends and develops Wollstonecraft’s theories about sexuality, as, like Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth rejected “the period’s essentialist understanding of gender.” “The Extraordinary Ordinary Belinda: Maria Edgeworth’s Female Philosopher,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 19, no. 4, article 5 (2007). http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/ecf/vol19/iss4/5.

  19 “no correct history” Analytical Review 27 (1798), 238.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: MARY SHELLEY: A WRITING LIFE (1832–1836)

  1 “gentle, feminine” For a full account, see Eliza Rennie, “An Evening at Dr Kitchiner’s,” in Friendship’s Offering (London: 1842), 2:243–49.

  2 “rather indiscreet” Viscount Dillon to MWS, March 18, 1829, Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 2:197.

  3 “My first impulse” November 18, 1831, Journals MWS, 524.

  4 “ineffable bliss” October 5, 1839, ibid., 563.

  5 “Liberty must and will raise her head” Peter Beauclerk Dewar and Donald Adamson, The House of Nell Gwynn: The Fortunes of the Beauclerk Family (London: William Kimber, 1974), quoted in Sunstein, MS:R&R, 316.

  6 a tamer version The comparison between Aubrey Beauclerk and Percy Shelley is based on Sunstein, MS:R&R, 316–17.

  7 “I hope” MWS to Jane Hogg, May 5, 1833, Letters MWS, 2:189.

  8 “the aspect” April or May, 1833, Journals MWS, 529.

  9 “Dark night” August [date?], 1833, ibid., 530.

  10 Victor is a puppet Anne Mellor argues this case slightly differently. She points out the difference in Mary Shelley’s depiction of fate and Nature in the two versions, but argues that although her vision of fate is darker in the 1831 Frankenstein, her view of human nature, of Frankenstein himself, is slightly more positive. Mellor writes, “In 1818 Victor Frankenstein possessed free will or the capacity for meaningful moral choice—he could have abandoned his quest for the ‘principle of life,’ he could have cared for his creature, he could have protected Elizabeth. In 1831, such choice is denied to him. He is the pawn of forces beyond his knowledge or control.” Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988; reprint, New York: Routledge, 1989), 171. Thus, according to Mellor, in 1831, Mary’s fatalistic vision excuses Frankenstein from some of his crimes since he is helpless. Mellor also makes the important point that Mary presents herself in the same role as Frankenstein, helpless in the hands of fate; Mary Shelley “disclaimed responsibility for her hideous progeny and insisted that she had remained passive before it, ‘leaving the core and substance of it untouched.’…Like Victor Frankenstein, she has become the unwilling ‘author of unalterable evils.’ ” Mary Shelley: Her Life, 176. For another discussion of the role of fate in the two different versions of Frankenstein, see Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, and Jane Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1884), 133–41. See also John R. Reed, “Will and Fate in Frankenstein,” Bulletin of Research in the Humanities 83 (1980): 319–38.

  11 “Unhappy man! Do you share?” Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, 24.

  12 there is consensus For a comprehensive discussion of Mary’s work as a biographer, see Greg Kucich, “Biographer,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 226–41.

  13 “My life & reason” December 2, 1834, Journals MWS, 543.

  14 she spent hours excavating For example, in her portrait of Montaigne, his youthful admirer, Marie de Gournay le Jars, steals the spotlight from the great male writer; Marie, like Mary, promoted the work of the man she loves: “It was she who edited and published his essays, writing a preface in which she ably defended the work from the attacks made against it.” Indeed, in Mary’s hands, Marie sounds a good deal like Mary herself: “[Marie was] a young person of great merit, and afterwards esteemed one of the most learned and excellent ladies of the day; and honored by the abuse of pedants, who attacked her personal appearance and her age, in revenge for her transcending even their sex in accomplishments and understanding: while, on the other hand, she was regarded with respect and friendship by the first men of her time.” Mary Shelley, Lives of the Most Eminent French Writers (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1840), 44.

  15 “You must consider me” MWS to Mrs. Gisborne, June 11, 1835, Letters MWS, 2:245.

  16 “I have bartered my existence” December 2, 1834, Journals MWS, 542.

  17 “great horror” MWS to Mary Hays, April 20, 1836, Letters MWS, 2:270.

  18 “What I then went through” June 7, 1836, Journals MWS, 549.

  19 “as near” MWS to Mary Hays, April 20, 1836, Letters MWS, 2:271.

  20 But Mary stood firm To Trelawny’s accusations, Mary replied, “Could you not trust that I thought anxiously—decided carefully—& from disinterested motives—not to save myself but my child from evil—” MWS to Trelawny, January 26, 1837, Letters MWS, 2:282.

  21 The heroine of Falkner For an insightful comparison of the two Elizabeths, see Kate Ferguson Ellis, “Falkner and Other Fictions,” in Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, 151–62.

  22 the novel’s subversive conclusion Until fairly recently, Shelley’s work was viewed as growing increasingly conservative over time. As Kate Ferguson Ellis writes, “[Mary] Shelley’s later fiction is not usually considered particularly feminist.” “Falkner and Other Fictions,” in Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, 161. In 1984, Mary Poovey argued that Falkner is a far less innovative and political novel than Frankenstein, as Shelley had retreated from political topics to a celebration of the domestic sphere. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer, 164–65. But as Ellis points out, basing her argument on the ideas of Anne Mellor in Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, in Falkner Shelley takes the radical step of attempting to depict what Mellor calls “the egalitarian bourgeois family.” “Falkner and Other Fictions,” 161. For further insight into Shelley’s radical politics in Falkner, see Melissa Sites, “Utopian Domesticity as Social Reform in Mary Shelley’s Falkner,” Keats-Shelley Journal 54 (2005): 148–72.

  23 Most critics disliked For an overview of the novel’s critical reception, see Seymour, MS, 445–46.

  24 The Age The Age, April 2, 1837, 106.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT: MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE WRONGS (1797–1798)

  1 he did edit several of Mary’s Harriet Devine Jump analyzes the ways in which Godwin changed Wollstonecraft’s “On Poetry” to make it more conservative and more in keeping with Enlightenment values, rather than the new Romantic aesthetics. She writes that he “removed or amended no less than four references to the imagination.” “ ‘A Kind of Witchcraft’: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Poetic Imagination,” Women’s Writing 4, no. 2 (1997): 242–43. Tilomatta Rajan suggests that Godwin included “On Poetry” in Wollstonecraft’s Posthumous Works to paint a picture of Wollstonecraft as a “private and ruminative” writer instead of a “public” author. See “Framing the Corpus: Godwin’s ‘Editing’ of Wollstonecraft in 1798,” Studies in Romanticism 39 (2005): 511–31, 515.

  2 diluting her ideas Having never agreed with Mary’s arguments that the best writing should come straight from the heart and the imagination, that it was better to have an unpolished essay that was honest and powerful than an overly refined one that contained little of merit, he cut four of her references to the imagination. But this was a profound misrepresentation of her ideas, since, for Wollstonecraft, the imagination represented a democratic opportunity. Anyone could ha
ve an imagination. Not everyone could have an education. In addition, her “poetic reveries” allowed her to break down gender stereotypes and ideological boundaries. As Lawrence R. Kennard writes, “[Wollstonecraft’s] poetics of sensibility and her poetical reveries represent attempts to reconstruct both self and reality.…Wollstonecraft’s reveries…offer a critique, not simply of generic conventions but also of ideological binarism and the stereotyped subject.” “Reveries of Reality,” in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, eds. Buss, Macdonald, and McWhir, 66.

  3 If one looks up “Prostitution” European Magazine, April 1798 (33: 246–51), in Durant, “Supplement,” 340. For an excellent overview of the critical response to Wollstonecraft, see Claudia Johnson, “Introduction,” and Cora Kaplan, “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Reception and Legacies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–6, 246–70.

  4 foster licentiousness Durant, “Supplement,” 344.

  5 “the misconduct of one of [her]” Ibid., 340.

  6 “the most pernicious consequences” Ibid.

  7 “the good old rules” Wollstonecraft, Wrongs of Woman, ed. Mellor, 354.

  8 “a poor victim” Quoted in Miriam Wallraven, Writing Halfway Between Theory and Fiction: Mediating Feminism from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century (Würzburg, Ger.: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007), 93.

  9 Robert Browning cemented Robert Browning, “Wollstonecraft and Fuseli,” in Jocoseria (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1883), 48.

  10 In 1885, when Karl Pearson Gordon, VAL, 389.

  11 “the hero of each tale” Wollstonecraft, advertisement for Letters from Sweden.

  12 “tracing the outline” Godwin, Memoirs, 8.

  13 “[w]hose earnest lives” History of Woman Suffrage, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, vol. 1 (1881; Project Gutenberg, 2007), 831, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28020/28020-h/28020-h.htm#CHAPTER_I.

  14 Carrie Chapman Catt On June 9, 1936, in a commencement speech at Sweet Briar College, Catt declared, “Just when the woman movement began, no one knows. I like to think that the definite woman movement was lifted out of the disconnected and far scattered agitation by Mary Wollstonecraft’s book, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.’ ” www.loc.gov/rr/mss/text/catt.html#speech.

  15 a literary “grandmother” This is Browning’s famous complaint about the lack of female literary forebears: “I look everywhere for grandmothers and see none.” Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Henry Chorley, January 7, 1845, in The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Frederic G. Kenyon, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1898), 232.

  16 Reading Wollstonecraft at age twelve “I read Mary Wolstonecraft [sic] when I was thirteen—no, twelve!…and, through the whole course of my childhood, I had a steady indignation against nature who made me a woman, & a determinate resolution to dress up in men’s clothes as soon as ever I was free of the nursery, & go into the world ‘to seek my fortune.’ ” Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Mary Russell Mitford, July 22, 1842, ibid. For further discussion of the importance of Wollstonecraft to the young Elizabeth Barrett, see Susan Wolfson, Borderlines: The Shiftings of Gender in British Romanticism (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 87.

  17 “loftiness of moral” George Eliot, “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft,” Leader 6 (October 13, 1855), 988. Reprinted in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge, 1968).

  18 “Many millions have died” Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader (1932, repr. London: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1960), 148.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE: MARY SHELLEY: RAMBLINGS (1837–1848)

  1 “Poor Harriet” February 12, 1839, Journals MWS, 560.

  2 “This is not the time” “Preface” in Hutchinson, ed., Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1:x.

  3 “I am torn” February 12, 1839, Journals MWS, 559.

  4 “sort of unspeakable” MWS to Leigh Hunt, July 20, 1839, Letters MWS, 2:318.

  5 The Examiner For the negative response to Mary’s work as an editor, see Letters MWS, 2:282 n1.

  6 “to mutilate” MWS to Leigh Hunt, December 14, 1839, ibid., 2:326.

  7 “as many of Shelley’s own words” MWS to Leigh Hunt, October 10, 1839, ibid., 2:327.

  8 “His spirit” Hutchinson, ed., Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1:xii–xiii.

  9 “Christian hearted” George Lewes and Thornton Hunt, obituary in The Leader, 1851, quoted in MS:R&R, 384.

  10 “Time…adds only to the keenness” MWS to Leigh Hunt, December 23, 1839, Letters MWS, 2:335.

  11 “She lives on hogs wash” Trelawny to CC, August 17, 1838, Forman, ed., Letters of Edward Trelawny, 209.

  12 “Another hope” November 27, 1839, Journals MWS, 563–64.

  13 “I feel a good deal of the gipsy” Mary Shelley, Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (London: Moxon, 1844), 1:9.

  14 “to my own land” MWS to Abraham Hayward, October 26, 1840, Letters MWS, 3:5.

  15 “amounting almost to agony” Shelley, Rambles, 1:61.

  16 “A friendship secure” November 27, 1839, Journals MWS, 563.

  17 “unhappy, betrayed, alone” Mary wrote this in Italian on January 12, 1841, ibid., 570–71. “Pare che le mie calde preghiere sono udite esaudite—Pare—dio volesse che sara—ed io—se veramente tutto va bene—felice me! partire di questo paese fra poco.”

  18 “I gave all” February 26, 1841, ibid., 573.

  19 “the immeasurable goodness” Mary Shelley, Rambles, 1:12.

  20 arguing against Austria’s occupation For an analysis of Mary Shelley’s politics in Rambles, see Jeanne Moskal, “Travel Writing,” in Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 247–50. For Mary Shelley’s art criticism, see Moskal, “Speaking the Unspeakable: Art Criticism as Life Writing in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy,” in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, ed. Helen Buss, D. L. Macdonald, and Anne McWhir (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 189–216.

  21 no one noted Overall, however, the book was received enthusiastically. One reviewer praised Rambles, declaring that Mary Shelley had proven herself to be “a woman who thinks for herself on all subjects, and who dares to say what she thinks.” Quoted in Elizabeth Nitchie, “Mary Shelley, Traveller,” Keats-Shelley Journal 10 (1961): 22–42, 34. A review in the Atlas lauded her “rich fancy, her intense love of nature and her sensitive apprehension of all that is good, and beautiful and free.” Quoted in Jeanne Moskal, introductory note to Rambles in The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, vol. 8, ed. Jeanne Moskal (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1996), 52. Yet there were some naysayers; one reviewer in The Observer complained, “With her, as with all women, politics is a matter of the heart, and not as the more robust nature of man, of the head.…It is an idle and unprofitable theme for a woman.” Quoted in Moskal, “Travel Writing,” 250.

  22 “Near you” CC to MWS, May 7, 1845, TCC, 428.

  23 “To do a little good” MWS to CC, June 6, 1845, Letters MWS, 3:185.

  24 “neuralgia of the heart” For a comprehensive discussion of Mary’s illness, see Sunstein, MS:R&R, 373.

  25 tingly, “alive” Quoted in ibid.

  26 Elizabeth Barrett For this connection, see ibid.

  27 “tall and slim” Rolleston, Talks with Lady Shelley, 25–28.

  28 the “Great Old Snake” The snake and tortoise legends come from a letter written by Shelley’s sister Hellen in Hogg, Life of Shelley, 1:7.

  29 his mother’s favorite Hellen Shelley wrote, “I have heard that Bysshe’s memory was singularly retentive. Even as a little child, Gray’s lines on the Cat and the Gold Fish were repeated, word for word, after once reading; a fact I have frequently heard from my mother.” Ibid., 9.

  30 “The whole place” MWS to CC, August 28, 1848, Letters MWS, 3
:346.

  31 “I walk” MWS to CC, February 5, 1849, ibid., 3:356.

  32 “Until they have” CC to Antonia Clairmont, August 1, 1850, TCC, 533.

  33 “her sweet” Jane Shelley to Alexander Berry, March 7, 1851, Letters MWS, 3:394.

  CHAPTER FORTY: MARY AND MARY: HEROIC EXERTIONS

  1 Her obituaries focused Sunstein, MS:R&R, 384.

  2 Muriel Spark’s Spark was determined to bring Mary Shelley back into the forefront of literary history. She argued that Shelley was one of the first writers of science fiction and that it was time for a reassessment of Shelley’s work. See Spark’s biography, Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Essex, UK: Tower Bridge, 1951). Spark revised her biography in 1988, after the publication of Betty T. Bennett’s edition of Shelley’s letters was published. An expanded edition was later published as Mary Shelley (London: Carcanet, 2013).

  3 “suggested that Mary Shelley’s letters” Betty T. Bennett, “Finding Mary Shelley in Her Letters,” Romantic Revisions, ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 291.

  4 Her body of work The radical viewpoints embedded in Mary Shelley’s novels were routinely overlooked until fairly recently. As Betty T. Bennett wrote about The Last Man, “the political significance of the novel received little notice, no doubt because women were not expected to deal with politics. One of the major barriers Mary Shelley encountered in her audiences then—and often now—was a failure to see how all of her major works are structured around politics, both civil and domestic.” “Radical Imagining: Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” The Wordsworth Circle 26, no. 3 (Summer 1995), 147–52. Romantic Circles, http://www.rc.umd.edu/editions/mws/lastman/bennett.htm.

  5 “The memory of my Mother” MWS to Frances Wright, Letters MWS, 2:3–4.

  6 “Mary Wollstonecraft was one of those” Paul, Friends, 1:231.

  7 “The writings of this celebrated woman” Mary Shelley, preface to William Godwin, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (London: Harper & Brothers, 1870), 11.