Mary Shelley E-Book

Muriel Spark

• Herausgeber: Lives and Letters
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 499

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

At the age of twenty, Mary Shelley secured her place in history by writing Frankenstein (1818), now acknowledged as one of the great literary classics. The daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley lived an unconventional life dogged by tragedy. At sixteen she scandalised England by eloping with her married lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but was widowed after only a few years of marriage. She went on to survive her husband by nearly thirty years and to support herself and her son as a writer. Here the great twentieth-century novelist Muriel Spark paints a portrait of a gothic icon. First published in 1951, this remarkable biography, reissued with previously unpublished material, recounts Mary Shelley's dramatic life, from her youth and turbulent marriage to her career as writer and editor. The young Spark, who would write The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ten years later, discovered her vocation as a novelist in this study.

Leseprobe

Mary Shelley

Muriel Spark was born in Edinburgh in 1918. After some years living in Africa, she returned to England, where she edited Poetry Review from 1947 to 1949 and published her first volume of poems, The Fanfarlo, in 1952. She eventually made her home in Italy. Her many novels include Memento Mori (1959), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), The Girls of Slender Means (1963), The Abbess of Crewe (1974), A Far Cry from ­Kensington (1988) and The Finishing School (2004). Her short stories were collected in 1967, 1985 and 2001, and her Collected Poems appeared in 1967. Dame Muriel was made Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres (France) in 1996 and awarded her DBE in 1993. She died in Italy on 13th April 2006, at the age of 88.

Also by Muriel Spark from Carcanet Press

Curriculum Vitae

All the Poems

Mary Shelley

Muriel Spark

Introduction

Michael Schmidt

On 17 August 2004 my Carcanet editorial colleague Judith Willson and I crossed the Pennines to Harrogate to meet Muriel Spark and Penelope Jardine. They were on their way to Spark’s native Edinburgh for the Book Festival, where the eighty-six-year-old novelist was to be lavishly fêted. Carcanet was publishing All the Poems, her comprehensive Collected, and she had agreed to sign fifty copies. We had sent them to her Tuscan home in Civitella della Chiana. She had signed them at leisure, boldly, in a gothic copperplate, and brought them with her in two approximate parcels in her enormous car. She declined to fly; her visits to Britain were not frequent but leisurely, this last one quite Edwardian in pattern and pace. Preparations for our rendezvous via her London agent were elaborate. She was frail and particular.

Spark and her companion had chosen their Harrogate hotel for its advertised royal pretensions. It was not what they had anticipated. When they went up to their room upon arrival, she told us, they found the beds ‘dressed in seven dusty petticoats’. The food was not good and lunch was served only on Sundays. When we arrived, we were asked to wait for her in a little playing-card-themed reception room, all black and white and red, spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds on the upholstery, carpet, wallpaper, lampshades, and even on the veneering of the table. Here too was dust, stirred by steeply slanting rays through grey sash windows.

She seemed at first reluctant to join us for lunch, but when she realised we had a car at the door and she could escape from the hotel, she grasped the moment and we drove down into town. She became cheerful and wry. Once we were seated at our table in a restaurant with conventional pretensions she was reluctant for the party to break up. Her conversation was brisk, tangential. Her mind moved inferentially. She could evoke a whole character with a single detail or by describing a small act or gesture. Her poems work that way, finding a course directly to the heart of their subject. And that heart is often gothic with, perhaps, more than a scent of Mary Shelley’s cordite. Take, for example, ‘The Grave that Time Dug’ (1951), a poem not unknown to Elizabeth Bishop:

This is the child an instant born

that lit the stove

that warmed the hand

that rapped on the box

that lay in the grave that time dug.

This is the pink deceptive thorn

that bled the child an instant born

that lit the stove

that warmed the hand

that rapped on the box

that lay in the grave that time dug.

*

In the previously unpublished note included below, dated 1950, Muriel Spark proposed that her first book, on Mary Shelley, Child of Light: A Reassessment (1951), was to be a ‘critical-biography’ which incorporated her digested version of The Last Man (added back into this new edition). Spark was already twice the age that Mary Shelley had been when she composed Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. The Second World War was over but its scars were still deeply etched on the face of London. The world had changed and what had seemed wilful, fantastic, playfully sinister before it now looked rather different, after the death camps, Hiroshima and so much else that was coming to consciousness. It was now possible to see that Mary Shelley’s novels ‘are almost entirely without their counterpart in feminine literature, being the prototypes of the scientific extravaganza popularized by H.G. Wells, and recently reflected in the novels of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell’. There were the kinds of connection between Muriel Spark and her subject that gave the project a superstitious rightness. They shared initials because they retained their husbands’ surnames; 1 February was the date of Shelley’s death and of Spark’s birth. Spark revisited Shelley down the years, a point of departure and a touchstone. The narrative technique she devised for the biographical passages, light, economical, indicative rather than exhaustive (a technique further perfected by Claire Tomalin in her Katherine Mansfield), would prove useful in her fiction.

The pitch she made for her Mary Shelley book was radical. In The English Novel (1954) Walter Allen did not even mention Mary Shelley. Her most famous book, a phenomenon in its own time, continued to be categorised with children’s horror literature. Its deliberate quest for effect, the designs it has on readers – a pursuit of sensation over truth – made it seem laboured and aesthetically trivial. Semiotics, feminism and other forces – in particular Muriel Spark’s advocacy – have brought it into the canon, and thence into the curriculum. By the time Spark thoroughly revised her book in 1987, Mary Shelley had become respectable and unignorable. Frankenstein was ‘the first English novel in which a scientific theme had been combined with the Gothic horror convention’, Spark wrote. And The Last Man, despite its moralising solemnity, Spark calls ‘an amazingly powerful story’, characteristic of an age in which poets and painters explored the theme in ‘a general pessimistic reaction to the progressive time-spirit’. Spark describes Mary Shelley as the author of ‘prophetic fiction’ who in The Last Man lays humanism to rest.

Horace Walpole’s gothic original The Castle of Otranto (1764) had its origin in a nightmare. So did Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, unless with Joyce Carol Oates we prefer to call it ‘a hypnagogic fantasy in her bed’, which sounds so much more serious. Nightmare or fantasy, it showed her the way to her ‘pale student of unhallowed arts’ and his monstrous creation that ‘stands at his bedside, opening his curtains’, the whole spookiness of the situation contained in that hesitant comma, the monster’s fear, and the pale student’s, and ours as readers congealing in that tiny curl of punctuation. Shelley contrived something that would frighten her reader as much as the nightmare had frightened her. In her 1831 introduction she recalls her excitement, vividly re-enacting the successive moments of conception: the intellectual seed of the nightmare, the nightmare itself witnessed (she was not its subject), etc. Thus she began: ‘It was on a dreary night of November…’

Percy Shelley had been fascinated by modern science, its promise and potential. Mary’s concern with its darker aspects, its treachery when pursued in the wrong ways, beyond understanding into the realm of instrumentality, signalled what would become an intense Romantic hostility to the pretensions of progress, a hostility which became more settled as the years advanced towards the estrangement of science and the arts later in the century. This Romantic resistance chimed with Spark’s own Roman Catholic scepticism of progress.

Spark’s fiction took important bearings from Mary Shelley’s courage and persistence and from her practice, not least the rigorous economy of plot that gives Spark’s more intense novels an allegorical precision and gothic clarity of focus. The economy of Spark’s style and her ­containment of argument in character and relationship may, by contrast, have been a response to the relative profligacy and externality of Mary Shelley’s approach. Spark is by inclination more a fantasist than a realist. There is a lot of gothic in her, first and last. She wrote fiction for almost half a century and found it hard to re-read and acknowledge her earlier selves, as though each novel had been committed by a different author and she could not quite take re­sponsi­bility for it. But she could, and often did, revisit Mary Shelley and refresh herself in her company.

Spark dusted down the novel form with energy unusual for a British writer. More unusual is that each time she did it her readership grew; she was not perceived as experimental. Some of her near contemporaries, her friend Christine Brooke-Rose for example, developing comparably radical work, were more jagged, less seductive. Of course, as a Roman Catholic, Spark had a sacramental sense of her vocation: she surprised herself, then followed that surprise tenaciously. She is not out to find a shape: the shapes are given, the levels of allegory are taken for granted; she is after form and, at a cost, like Graham Greene with whom she shared her work, time after time she finds it.

Her first novel, The Comforters (completed in 1955, published in 1957), is indebted to her reading of Mary Shelley. It concerns Caroline who comes to imagine that she is a character in the process of being written. She is also a Roman Catholic still coming over to the faith (conversion was a long process, not a sudden leap). To some extent the teleology of Catholicism gave Spark precisely that sensation, of mattering in a narrative in which – once she granted the fact of free will – she had at least a degree of creative control. Ali Smith speaks of the book as ‘a dialogue’ between Caroline and the Typing Ghost, ‘a raging, vibrant argument held in a perfectly disciplined matrix, and a near-impossible blend, in the process, of subjectivity and objectivity’. Caroline in her self-creation and self-realisation as a woman puts herself through some of the testing that Shelley’s monster, initially seeking acceptance and understanding, experiences.

Many of Muriel Spark’s books include metaphorical monsters and spiritual loners; darkness infuses the work, a kind of gothic shadow play in which hell is real, and all its fears and spirits, too. Laughter does not deflect but intensifies the darkness. In a late interview Spark declared that her writing was driven by an ‘outside force’ which released energies from her memory. One such force was the life and work of Mary Shelley.

Mary Shelley: Author’s Note

The following, which I wrote in 1950, is a scheme of work on Mary Shelley which I offered to publishers with a book in mind for the 100th anniversary of her death in 1851.

Whether my subsequent book Child of Light (1951) – later revised as Mary Shelley (1987) – fulfils the ambitious aims that I set forth in this outline, or not, it does now seem to me to fully incorporate and summarize my past and present opinions on the subject.

Proposal for A CRITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF MARY SHELLEY (1797–1851)

The centenary of the death of Mary Shelley will be 1st February, 1951, and this might be a suitable occasion on which to publish a definitive biography which is, I feel, long overdue.

So far, there have been only three studies of this writer. The first appeared in 1890, by Lucy Madox Rosetti; the second (a very brief outline of her life numbering 80 pages) by Richard Church was published in 1928; and the third, by R. Glynn Grylls, appeared in 1938. All of these biographies have dwelt upon the outward circumstances of Mary Shelley’s life – she has been portrayed rather as the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and as the wife of Shelley, than as an important 19th-century literary figure in her own right. The first of the works mentioned above has been superseded by the discovery of fresh material; the second is perhaps too short to have allowed sufficient scope to the biographer; and the third, whilst providing footnotes and appendices useful to the student, does not seem to me to offer a fluent and convincing study of the inner and outward life of its subject, hampered as it is by frequent quotations and notes. Added to this, the two latter volumes do not ­incorporate material made available since their publication, which reveals new aspects of Mary Shelley’s character during and after Shelley’s lifetime.

The biography I now propose would take into account all the known facts of Mary Shelley’s life, interpreting her character in the light of this new material, and also considering her work as an indispensable source of illumination. So far, her autobiographical novel Lodore, which reflects the characters of her circle and many events of her life, has not been incorporated into biographical studies of Mary Shelley. And, apart from her best-known novel, Frankenstein, her other powerful and imaginative novels and stories have been neglected. In the critical-biography I have in mind, I would propose to examine all her works in assessing the personality that motivated them; and would compare her life and works with those of other women writers of the 19th century. This is not to suggest that I would give her a place in English literature superior to that which she deserves; she had not the craftsmanship, for instance, of Jane Austen, nor the emotional force of the Brontës; but a comparative study such as I have in view would bring to light those qualities in her work which have been overlooked, and which other women writers do not possess. Her novels Frankenstein and The Last Man, for example, are almost entirely without their counterpart in feminine literature, being the prototypes of the scientific extravaganza popularized by H.G. Wells, and recently reflected in the novels of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

I would also trace, in her emotional and intellectual attitudes, the influence of her parents Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin; whilst the effect of Shelley on her life I would show to be manifest in the idealization and ennoblement with which she invested her own tragic situation, and in the ruthless pursuit of her vocation after Shelley’s death.

It has been said that Mary Shelley lapsed into the conventional salon habituée. This, I would argue, is questionable, since an attentive examination of her letters would indicate that her social activities were undertaken simply to further her literary ambitions, and that never was she misled in the matter of basic values. Her letters show, too, an intellectual breadth remarkable in a woman of her times, or indeed, of any time; despite her essential femininity – and she was often frivolous and flirtatious – she handled Shelley’s romantic fluctuations with composure and not a little humour.

Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had been an ardent feminist who, although she was at pains to set forth her theories on the rights of women, was herself temperamentally unsuited to the application of her doctrines. It was her daughter, Mary Shelley, who realised these ideals by a natural acceptance of her status as a creature the equal of, yet different from, the male of her times.

[1950]

(unpublished)

Preface

Mary Shelley was born in 1797 and died in 1851. The main facts of her life, the focus of all interest in her, are as follows:

She was the daughter of two equally progressive thinkers, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, which set the cast of her persevering intellect and her advanced education. She was the consort and then second wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a union which lasted eight years till his death in 1822, in the course of which she was frequently pregnant, and which left her with vivid memories of an exciting youth and one surviving child, a son. She was the author of novels and stories, two of them outstanding: the famous work of science fiction, Frankenstein, and the futuristic novel The Last Man. She was the editor of Shelley’s works, contributing greatly both to the understanding of Shelley’s writings and to the history of ­biographical-literary criticism, which she pioneered.

This was the framework in which she lived out the wear and tear of everyday life in the first half of the nineteenth century, and however variously the whole story is interpreted, no-one can take these facts away.

In 1951, the centenary year of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s death, I published Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Shelley. It appeared in a small edition in the United Kingdom. In those days I was much occupied with nineteenth-century writers: Wordsworth, the Brontës, John Henry Newman were those I wrote about besides Mary Shelley.

Child of Light was never published in the United States of America but some years ago it was offered for sale there, without my permission or participation, in a ‘pirated’ edition – simply a photo-copy of the original British edition, with a perfunctory binding, the price being so high as fortunately to render its circulation very limited indeed. This is one of the reasons why I decided to publish the book with substantial revisions, and with all my best care.

Since the years when I wrote Child of Light a great deal has happened to the Mary Shelley scholarship on which this book leans, and a great deal has happened to me. Thirty-six or more years ago the last thing I would have thought of was that I should write a novel, and now I do practically nothing else but write novels.

In the introduction to my 1951 edition I wrote: ‘It is more than time Mary Shelley was reconsidered, especially in her remarkably neglected capacity as a novelist.’ She is no longer remarkably neglected. Franken­stein is widely read, discussed, filmed and televised. In 1951 The Last Man was available only as a bibliophile’s item – it had not been reprinted since 1826. I appended an abridged version of The Last Man to my book in order to discuss it.

In my first assessment of Mary Shelley’s life story I held the then widely-diffused view that after the death of Shelley she gradually craved more and more for bourgeois respectability. I now think this is an over-simplification. It has been the view of others, starting with her contemporary, Shelley’s friend Trelawny. I now know that when we look at her change of attitudes and aspirations we are not talking so much about Mary Shelley as about human nature and its courage.

Any novelist or writer wants and needs to enter into the fullness of social life in all its various stratifications. Mary Shelley had spent the best part of her married life struggling from place to place in Italy, with her husband, her step-sister, her babies, her books and her friends, and all their endless financial problems. When she became a widow with a son to support, she naturally had to concentrate on her pro­fessional work, and for her son’s education, appease Shelley’s father, Sir Timothy. She managed to achieve this, without dropping her former friends and at the same time acquiring new ones.

Her greatest difficulties were the conventional pressures of the age she lived in, and a tendency to depression. In her widowhood she was blackmailed over some sentimental or love letters she had written to an unmarried man. That she could be blackmailed on such trivial grounds reflects an absurdity of history, and not, as she felt, of herself. Her journals, more than her letters, record her depressive feelings, her loneliness, her grief for the loss of Shelley and the desertion of people on whom she had mistakenly fixed her hopes. Very often the Journals have a touch of the analyst’s couch, and perhaps this mode of relieving her most melancholy feelings was efficacious.

When I came to revise Child of Light I was extremely fortunate in obtaining the generous and invaluable comments of Betty T. Bennett, editor of the definitive Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and a foremost Mary Shelley scholar. Thanks to Professor Bennett’s ample indications of the vast amount of work done and new discoveries made on the subject of Mary Shelley since my first book appeared, I have been able to bring this book up to date; it is not intended to be definitive and detailed; it is a survey with a minimum of footnotes. I have also had the great advantage of the courtesy of the Oxford University Press in permitting me to consult the new and exhaustive edition of The Journals of Mary Shelley so admirably and finely edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert.

In this way I have been able to incorporate into Mary Shelley’s life story many new elements, and have been persuaded by new facts to give more weight to factors that were previously unknown or that I had overlooked. These include Mary Shelley’s ambiguous friendship with Isabel Robinson and her transvestite ‘husband,’ Walter Sholto Douglas (a brilliant piece of detective-scholarship on Betty T. Bennett’s part); the hitherto unsuspected extent of Mary Shelley’s attachment to Aubrey Beauclerk; and the fuller identity of the blackmailer-forger, ‘G. Byron.’

On first reading through my work after so many years, I was amused to perceive that my prose style had taken on a touch of Mary Shelley’s. Through my experience as a writer of fiction I know now that I have a ‘writing ear,’ that it is the act of imaginatively getting under the skin of a character that produces the individual character’s diction. But I recall when I first wrote the book that I was very careful not to make it novelistic. I have always disliked the sort of biography which states ‘X lay on the bed and watched the candle flickering on the roof beams,’ when there is no evidence that X did so.

M.S.

I would like to emphasise, again, my indebtedness to Betty T. Bennett and her The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (The Johns Hopkins University Press), and to the editors, Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, of The Journals of Mary Shelley (Oxford at The Clarendon Press); and to express my gratitude for the kind and practical assistance in many ways of: Sir Joseph Cheyne, Curator of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, Rome; Miss Penelope Jardine; the Hon. G. R. Strutt; Mr. Euan Cameron; and the editors of E. P. Dutton, New York.

M.S.

The first version of this book (Child of Light, 1951) carried the following notice:

My acknowledgements are due to The University of Oklahoma Press for permission to quote from The Letters of Mary Shelley (1944), collected and edited by Frederick L. Jones, whose work here, and in his edition of Mary Shelley’s Journal (University of Oklahoma Press, 1947), has proved of exceptional service to me, as it must to all Shelley students. I am further indebted to the Oxford University Press as representatives of The University of Oklahoma Press, for the valuable time they have spent on my behalf; and to Messrs. John Lane The Bodley Head Limited for permission to quote from New Shelley Letters (1948), edited by W. S. Scott.

I should also like to record my gratitude to the Rev. W. S. Scott; to Mr. G. A. Stolar; and to the late Mr. H. K. Grant (Hon. Librarian of the Poetry Society), for their encouraging assistance in obtaining material for reference. And to the librarians of the British Museum and the North Library, I have a deep sense of obligation for their unfailing and courteous services.

M.S.

Textual Note

Where parts of quotations have been left out by me, I have indicated the omission thus: (…) except at the beginning or end of substantial extracts.

Where the sign … is shown without parenthesis, it indicates the original text so far as is known.

In the interests of fluent readability much of the erratic spelling and punctuation of Mary Shelley and others are not reproduced.

Mary Shelley’s step-sister’s name presents another problem: soon after 1814 she changed her name from ‘Jane’ to ‘Claire’ Clairmont, and this was sometimes spelt ‘Clare.’ The spelling ‘Claire’ is adhered to throughout.

M.S.

PART I

Biographical

Chapter 1

… ere my fame become

A star among the stars of mortal night,

If it indeed may cleave its natal gloom,

Its doubtful promise thus I would unite

With thy beloved name, thou Child of love and light.

SHELLEY, The Revolt of Islam

(dedication to Mary Shelley)

We are hardly impressed with a sense of love and light when we look back now on that period of transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – the period of revolution and reaction which gave effect to the fame of Mary Shelley’s parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Reason had not yet given way to feeling as the cult of the elect; and if we think now of the rationalist tracts, the elaborate arguments to prove man’s perfectibility, the manifestos on the Rights of Man and the vindications of the Rights of Woman which drained their most vehement passions, love, we feel, had little place there, As for light, we are more likely to note its absence than otherwise, if at all we trouble to picture the atmospheric environment in which the progressives of the day progressed. In retrospect, Godwin as a man seems arrested always in a gloomy monochrome of thought, while Mary Wollstonecraft, warmer and more reckless, flounders through a monotonous series of misfortunes. But the importance of both William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft is enormous. They both wrote effective propaganda. It is a promotional genre which acts on its own time, and may or may not pioneer whole future ways of life. Reason and justice were their literary themes. When they attempted to put their theories into practice they often had to modify their theories. Thoughts had to be expressed in the light of what ought to be; life had to be lived in the untidy actuality that it is.

To visualise Mary Shelley’s parents in the actual setting they occupied, we find them, as they were, celebrated figures in the cause of enlightenment, conscious of no gloom but that of the ignorance surrounding them, and confirmed in the belief that they bore a light to emblazon history. And in fact, the light has in some manner sifted on to history, so that we no longer notice the original torch-bearers; reform has deprived the reformers of their justification. In the same way, we should be wrong to assume that the brief union between Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, strangely dispassionate and calculated as it appears, is indescribable as love. The way of life they discovered together for a short time had a softening influence on both; they were devoted to the same cause, and two people who love the same thing find it easy to love each other.

When Mary Wollstonecraft became Godwin’s mistress, she had already made her name as a pioneer feminist, with her book A Vindi­cation of the Rights of Woman; it is now, more than ever, required reading for studies in women’s rights. To the large public, this was a monstrously wanton piece of literature; while the intelligentsia considered it a daring thrust for the rational liberation cause.

Born in London in 1759, Mary Wollstonecraft belonged to that type of family whose social category was then becoming difficult to define. The Wollstonecrafts were impoverished to the point of want, yet their family connections bore that strain of gentility which banned them from giving their children an education and environment to suit them for work outside their home. Tied to household drudgery, the females of the family were yet neither of ‘the leisured class’ nor of ‘the poor.’ Mary Wollstonecraft’s father was a spendthrift and a drunkard, moving whenever failing fortunes compelled him, from one hopeless enterprise to the other. Her mother, a weak type of woman, submitted to his continual bullying, and Mary from an early age acted as protector to the family, meanwhile seizing what fragmentary opportunities of education came her way. For a time she sought independence by becoming a companion to a rich, querulous lady; and here again she found herself in a mid-way position, being neither quite a domestic nor the equal of her mistress. It was not until she became friendly with a publisher who encouraged her to study French and German, and gave her translating work, that she began to feel herself a member of society. The circle which she now entered drew its spirit from the French Revolution, and Mary eagerly took its cause to herself.

Edmund Burke’s retort to the famous pro-revolutionary sermon by Dr. Price at the Old Jewry in 1789 evoked, that same year, a spirited answer from Mary in her Letter to Edmund Burke. Though this publication was overshadowed by Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, it served to confirm Mary as one of the set. The question of everyone’s rights was in the air, and it was a salutary time for the appearance, two years later, of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman. In all her main writings she gave vent to much pent-up indignation by drawing on her own early experience of a tyrannous drunkard father: one might imagine, from reading her account, that all fathers of the day were tyrants, all men seducers, all women miserable victims of the system. Mary Wollstonecraft understood the uses of overstatement as well as Jane Austen knew those of understatement. But it is on the important question of the education of women that she is most balanced and interesting.

All this time, Mary Wollstonecraft was by no means financially secure, but she was warm-hearted, and continued to share her small earnings with her needy family. Her attachment to Fuseli, the Swiss painter, should be mentioned, since it shows an impulsive, even reckless side of her nature that was noticeably inherited by Mary Shelley. Mary Wollstonecraft pursued a friendship she had made with the talented, witty artist, in terms that left her emotional disinterestedness in some doubt. Fuseli was already married, and Mary Wollstonecraft was firmly discouraged; and when, many years later, she attempted to retrieve the over-ardent letters she had addressed to him, Fuseli did not comply, either through wilfulness or indifference. The letters were found among the painter’s papers after his death.

Her next enterprise was a visit to Paris to report on the Revolution. Here Mary Wollstonecraft met Gilbert Imlay, an American who had fought in the War of Independence and with whom she fell deeply in love. The affection was mutual at first, and before long they were living together. She might well have wished to be married, but was not unduly concerned that no legal tie bound her to Imlay, taking pride no doubt in the personal triumph of their voluntary relationship. But her nature, in spite of her intellectual ability, was predominantly coloured by passion, and she abandoned herself, her thoughts, and all her actions to the furtherance of their union. Imlay, however, was not an enduring type of lover. Attracted by Mary Wollstonecraft’s manner and appearance – and she is described as having many personal graces – he does not seem to have been able to tolerate her company for long periods. Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to their child, Fanny, while Imlay’s absences from Paris became longer, his promises of return vaguer. The distracted exponent of the rights of woman was driven to attempted suicide for the sake of her lover.

After her second mishandled suicidal attempt, she made a suggestion to Imlay which may find an echo in Mary Shelley’s behaviour, long after her mother’s death. This suggestion, made by Mary Wollstone­craft under feverish stress, was that she should share a home with Imlay and his new mistress. To pacify her, Imlay agreed, but withdrew his acquiescence shortly afterwards.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s love letters to Imlay and her sociological work make as antithetical reading as ever came from any one pen. They represent, in fact, two facets of character that were never reconciled, although to some extent they were modified by the exhausting quality of her experiences; her passion, after she was deserted by Imlay, became chastened; her social indignation, after the Rights of Woman, abated. But a certain habit of depressiveness which persisted from her early formative years may have been perpetuated in her daughter Fanny Imlay. Her daughter by Godwin, the later Mary Shelley, also acquired from her mother a strong pessimistic strain, but in her Godwin’s intellectual stoicism tempered the passionate pessimism which finally drove Fanny Imlay to suicide.

Mary Wollstonecraft had met William Godwin in her earlier days, when, though mainly occupied in writing and translating for a publisher, she had begun to acquire a reputation for talent. Godwin had not been greatly impressed by her, but upon their renewed acquaintance, shortly after Mary’s spiritual defeat at Imlay’s hands, Godwin wrote,

The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined kind of love. It grew with equal advances in the minds of each.… One sex did not take the priority which long established custom has awarded it.… When in the course of things the disclosure came there was nothing in the matter for either party to disclose to the other. There was no period of throes and resolute explanations attendant upon the tale. It was friendship melting into love.

It would be difficult to say how accurately Godwin expressed Mary Wollstonecraft’s feelings in these sentences, which certainly bear the bleak authenticity of his own experience. Most probably he was not far wrong. Godwin knew of Mary’s recent humiliations; and his non-moralising attitude must have soothed her. We dearly love to see our follies and weaknesses promoted to a theoretical rectitude; we feel warmly towards those who can offer a meaning for our suffering and ignominy. All this Godwin was in a position to do, and it is most likely that Mary Wollstonecraft, drained of passion and disillusioned about female emancipation, loved him because he reinstated her confidence and pride.

William Godwin was over forty years of age when he and Mary Wollstone­craft embarked on their union, setting up each in a separate house in Somers Town, in deference to their ideas of independence. She, with her child Fanny Imlay, lived but a few doors away from Godwin, and the couple formed the habit of sending notes to each other, some of which survive to show their arrangement working to all apparent satisfaction.

Godwin was brought up in a Nonconformist environment. His father was a dissenting minister and he himself was a practising ‘reverend’ until the age of twenty-nine when he dropped the title. In his later emancipation which came to maturity in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published in 1793, some writers have seen an emotional revolt against puritanical restraint, rather than a reasoned arrival at a rationalist philosophy. If this is so, it provides a temperamental parallel with Mary Wollstonecraft and her subjective approach; but in Godwin’s case the subjective element is far more difficult to detect and is so strongly restrained in fact, that his remorseless logic hardly makes reasonable human reading. So far as his influence on Mary Shelley is to be sought in Godwin’s early life, it is worth noting that he was remarkably addicted to study, pursuing knowledge of all varieties of literature from the classics to contemporaneous thought, with none but inner compulsion.

His friends were drawn from those who espoused the dangerous objectives of the Revolution, and Godwin showed no small personal courage in supporting them on many occasions and in publicly recording his opinions on human liberty, before Political Justice presented his comprehensive proposals for a reformed social system. This work immediately raised him from obscurity to the level of a modern sage. ‘No one,’ wrote Hazlitt some years later, ‘was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off.… No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.’

The principle that concerns us most here is that which bears on Godwin’s attitude to property, since it is a prominent factor in his relationship with his daughter and the poet Shelley. Godwin envisaged a system whereby property should be distributed according to each man’s reasonable needs. And the just administration of property, Godwin said, does not stop there. ‘Every man is entitled, so far as the general stock will suffice, not only to the means of being but of well-being.’

Godwin did not hesitate to apply this doctrine to himself, and if we understand this we can encounter without shock the frequent money demands that Godwin made, as though by prerogative, on his daughter and Shelley, while refusing to condone their behaviour. Godwin was merely fulfilling one set of his principles: a courageous and original thinker, he had made certain valuable contributions to society, and he accepted the idea that Shelley, the son of a wealthy baronet, should provide him with the means of well-being. Shelley, who had approached the philosopher with the offer of means, and who held Political Justice as something sacred, was never really in doubt that Godwin was later entitled to the money he asked. Many of Shelley’s biographers have not grasped the fact that Godwin and Shelley were putting into practice a law, which, while outside the Law, was respected by both of them. Of course, this arrangement did not allow for the very human circumstance that people prefer to be generous to people they like; Shelley lost his personal respect – though never his intellectual regard – for Godwin and was very short of money himself, and so Godwin’s demands very often annoyed him. But in justice to Godwin we should not consider whether his view is an acceptable one to ourselves, but remember that he was himself generous to others, when he had the means, in accordance with his principles. In this, his daughter Mary resembled him. And to be sure, there are other aspects of Godwin’s relationship with Shelley which merit such indignation that it is strange and perhaps significant that Shelley’s supporters have chosen this material issue as a wholehearted theme of contempt for Godwin.

The reaction that followed the war with revolutionary France had set in by the time Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft set up together in Somers Town. It was no longer possible to repudiate the law, to strike at the roots of government, to dangle before men’s eyes the ideal of a perfected society liberated from coercive rule, without incurring more than a frown from authority. Public tolerance of Godwin swung to a general hostility. To his friends, among the left-wing thinkers of his time, and to many of the rising generation, Godwin continued to occupy his lofty position, instructing, writing and studying with all his former industry. He first entered on an unconventional union with Mary Wollstonecraft, then married her conventionally at Old St. Pancras Church: a child was coming, and Godwin was moved to waive his disapproval of marriage for Mary Wollstonecraft’s sake. He still stood by his principles, he told a friend, though ‘nothing but a regard for the happiness of the individual, which I have no right to injure, would have induced me to submit to an institution which I wish to see abolished.’

It seems clear that Mary Wollstonecraft’s distrust and fear of men, aggravated by Imlay’s treatment of her, was still latent within her. She had known life as a discarded mistress, as the mother of an illegiti­mate child, and she ardently desired this marriage before her next child was born. None the less, this tends to support the view that Mary Wollstonecraft’s character never achieved integration. She was attracted towards the unconventional mode of life and the type of mind that embraced it; but life had taught her that convention was a protector, and she was equally attracted towards the security it offered. It is to Godwin’s credit as a human being, if not as a practitioner of his own faith, that he recognised her anxiety and alleviated it at the cost of abstract principles. Especially is this so when Godwin must have felt the criticism of his intellectual friends as keenly as he did the congratulations of others. ‘Your broken resolution in regard to matrimony encourages me to hope that you will ere long embrace the Gospel…,’ wrote his mother, whose gentle words must have fairly tried the philosopher.

Meanwhile William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft became enveloped in a domestic intimacy whose delights seem to have surprised them both. The friendly, even flirtatious notes continued to pass between them. ‘I am better this morning,’ she wrote, ‘but it snows so incessantly that I do not know how I shall be able to keep my appointment this evening. What say you? But you have no petticoats to dangle in the snow. Poor women, how they are beset with plagues, within and without.’ While Godwin, during a few weeks’ absence from London, informed Mary, ‘You cannot imagine how happy your letter made me. No creature expresses, because no creature feels, the tender affection as perfectly as you do, and after all one’s philosophy it must be confessed that the knowledge that there is some one that takes an interest in one’s happiness, something like that which each man feels for his own, is extremely gratifying. Tell Fanny we have chosen a mug for her….’

The middle-aged scholar had come late to love, and when Mary Wollstonecraft was confined on 30th August he behaved with less calm than she did, sending him the message: ‘I have no doubt of seeing the animal today.… Pray send me the newspaper….’

Mary Wollstonecraft’s child, a girl, was born that night, and soon afterwards the mother showed signs of fever. Doctors were fetched and poisoning was diagnosed. For the next ten days medical men and nurses came and went, Godwin in the midst of all showing steady tenderness and devotion to the woman who had so humanised him. Racked by the agonies of poison, Mary took no heed of her newborn child, but lay confused and spent.

She died on 10th September, leaving Godwin the poorer for the only true grace he ever experienced in womanly affections, and the richer for two children – one aged two, Imlay’s daughter Fanny Imlay, and the other his own child, Mary.

Chapter 2

When in later years Mary Shelley looked back on her childhood, the time she recalled with the fondest clarity was not her early home life, but the period she spent away from her family. In her introduction to a revised edition of Frankenstein she reminisced:

I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom.

Godwin’s short and happy union with Mary Wollstonecraft had so enamoured him of matrimony that before long he was casting round for a second wife, finding reasons outside his own inclinations to support his desire for marriage. ‘The poor children!’ was his cry, and to be sure, the two infant girls Mary Wollstonecraft left in his charge presented him with a duty he considered too serious to fulfil by leaving them to the care of servants.

After making unsuccessful proposals to two women of his acquaintance Godwin married his next-door neighbour, Mrs. Clairmont, four years after his first wife’s death. The second Mrs. Godwin, a middle-aged widow with two young children, was a strange choice for Godwin, being neither more nor less than a woman of average education, a business sense, some good domestic qualities, and an aptitude for malicious invention. ‘A sensible, amiable woman’ one of Godwin’s friends called her, but most of his circle deplored her commonplace vulgarity and were inclined to blame her for not being Mary Wollstonecraft. Godwin, of course, should have been more discriminating; this woman, who might have made a tolerable companion to the ordinary man, felt her inferiority and in her muddled way compensated by doing all the damage she could. She left her mark on Godwin, on his children, and on her own children.

Charles and Jane Clairmont – the latter a little younger than Mary Godwin – together with Fanny, who was given Godwin’s surname, made up the family until a year later the new Mrs. Godwin gave birth to a son, William. By 1805, at his wife’s suggestion, Godwin became a publisher whose main business was the production of books ‘for the use and amusement of children’; Mrs. Godwin, proving after all at least one departure from the commonplace, set about translating some children’s books from the French, while Godwin self-consciously wrote stories for juveniles under the name of Baldwin. His firm also published the Lambs’ Tales from Shakespeare. They flourished at first, and the family moved to Skinner Street, Holborn, next door to new office premises.

Godwin took a fair amount of interest in the children’s education, and though Mrs. Godwin’s concern over household trivialities caused both Mary and her own daughter, Jane, some resentment, they were compensated by the comings and goings of such rare personalities as Lamb and Coleridge to the house. One evening, we are told, Mary and Jane hid behind the sofa to hear Coleridge read his Ancient Mariner, and on being discovered would have been banished to bed had it not been for the poet’s intercession.

When Mary was nearly fourteen years old, Mrs. Godwin took her and her own children to Ramsgate, while Fanny, now grown up, amenable, and to all appearances contented, was left at home to keep house. The family stayed with a Miss Petman who kept a girls’ school in Ramsgate, and there Mary remained as a boarder for a few months after the others had returned to London. The sea air, it was hoped, would benefit Mary, who suffered from a weakness in one arm – a ‘weakness’ which is not described in precise terms; and as no complaint of a weak or defective arm is made by Mary in later years we can assume this was a temporary ailment. She seems to have recovered during her absence from home, to have contracted the weakness again on her return to London, and to have recovered again after her next departure from the Godwin household, to stay in Scotland, and therefore it may not be immoderate to suggest – although we cannot of course be certain – that this ailment was in some measure aggravated by Mary’s admitted dislike of Mrs. Godwin, whom she secretly compared with the illustrious mother she had never known except by hearsay.

By the time Mary had reached her teens, her personality had developed under Godwin’s tutelage and her nature had become the more spirited for her resentment of her step-mother and classic idealization of her own mother. Feeling herself an exceptional being, she could not then, nor did she ever, dispose herself tolerantly towards Mrs. Godwin. In answer to an enquiry about the education of his children, Godwin’s reply illuminates what little we know of Mary’s girlhood:

Your inquiries relate principally to the two daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft. They are neither of them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system and ideas of their mother. I lost her in 1797, and in 1801 I married a second time. One among the motives which led me to choose this was the feeling I had in myself of an incompetence for the education of daughters. The present Mrs. Godwin has great strength and activity in mind, but is not exclusively a follower of the notions of their mother….

Of the two persons to whom your inquiries relate, my own daughter is considerably superior in capacity to the one her mother had before. Fanny, the eldest, is of a quiet, modest, unshowy disposition, somewhat given to indolence, which is her greatest fault, but sober, observing, peculiarly clear and distinct in the faculty of memory, and disposed to exercise her own thoughts and follow her own judgment. Mary, my daughter, is the reverse of her in many particulars. She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty. Fanny is by no means handsome, but, in general, prepossessing.

It was Mary’s second visit away from home about which she wrote in such nostalgic terms in her introduction to Frankenstein. An admirer of Godwin, Mr. William Baxter, invited Mary to spend a prolonged holiday at his home near Dundee with his own family, which included several girls near Mary’s age. In June 1812, Mary left for Scotland, and once more it is from Godwin’s correspondence that a fairly objective picture of Mary, and her father’s concern for her, can be formed:

Skinner Street, London.

8th June 1812.

My dear Sir – I have shipped off to you by yesterday’s packet, the Osnaburgh, Captain Wishart, my only daughter. I attended her, with her two sisters, to the wharf, and remained an hour on board, till the vessel got under way. I cannot help feeling a thousand anxieties in parting with her, for the first time, for so great a distance, and these anxieties were increased by the manner of sending her, on board a ship, with not a single face around her that she had ever seen till that morning. She is four months short of fifteen years of age. I, however, spoke to the captain, using your name; I beside gave her in charge to a lady, by name I believe Mrs. Nelson, of Great St. Helen’s, London, who was going to your part of the island in attendance upon an invalid husband. She was surrounded by three daughters when I spoke to her, and she answered me very agreeably, ‘I shall have none of my own daughters with me, and shall therefore have the more leisure to attend to yours.’

I daresay she will arrive more dead than alive, as she is extremely subject to sea-sickness, and the voyage will, not improbably, last nearly a week. Mr. Cline, the surgeon, however, decides that a sea-voyage would probably be of more service to her than anything.

I am quite confounded to think what trouble I am bringing on you and your family, and to what a degree I may be said to have taken you in when I took you at your word in your invitation upon so slight an acquaintance. The old proverb says, ‘He is a wise father who knows his own child,’ and I feel the justness of the apothegm on the present occasion.

There never can be a perfect equality between father and child, and if he has other objects and avocations to fill up the greater part of his time, the ordinary resource is for him to proclaim his wishes and commands in a way somewhat sententious and authoritative, and occasionally to utter his censures with seriousness and emphasis.

It can, therefore, seldom happen that he is the confidant of his child, or that the child does not feel some degree of awe or restraint in intercourse with him. I am not, therefore, a perfect judge of Mary’s character. I believe she has nothing of what is commonly called vices, and that she has considerable talent. But I tremble for the trouble I may be bringing on you in this visit. In my last I desired that you would consider the first two or three weeks as a trial, how far you can ensure her, or, more fairly and impartially speaking, how far her habits and conceptions may be such as to put your family very unreasonably out of their way; and I expect from the frankness and ingenuousness of yours of the 29th inst. (which by the way was so ingenuous as to come without a seal) that you will not for a moment hesitate to inform me if such should be the case. When I say all this, I hope you will be aware that I do not desire that she should be treated with extraordinary attention, or that any one of your family should put themselves in the smallest degree out of their way on her account. I am anxious that she should be brought up (in this respect) like a philosopher, even like a cynic. It will add greatly to the strength and worth of her character. I should also observe that she has no love of dissipation, and will be perfectly satisfied with your woods and your mountains. I wish, too, that she should be excited to industry. She has occasionally great perseverance, but occasionally, too, she shows great need to be roused.

You are aware that she comes to the seaside for the purpose of bathing. I should wish that you would inquire now and then into the regularity of that. She will want also some treatment for her arm, but she has Mr. Cline’s directions completely in all these points, and will probably not require a professional man to look after her while she is with you. In all other respects except her arm she has admirable health, has an excellent appetite, and is capable of enduring fatigue.… I am, my dear sir, with great regard, yours,

– William Godwin.

Mary throve in her new freedom. It was a release both from petty friction with her step-mother and from the distracting artifice of a London environment. There, in the stability of a congenial home life and expansive surroundings, she began to find within herself a corresponding ‘still centre’ and spiritual breadth. ‘It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house,’ she wrote in her introduction to Frankenstein, ‘or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.’ Long periods of leisure invited forth the rich freight of her imagination; ‘airy flights’ she called these fantasies in after years, but she was mistakenly identifying herself, then, with Shelley; for Mary’s imagination, animated by those months among the Perthshire hills, was in no way ethereal. Her vision was not of the bright, revelatory order, nor yet did the experience of fantasy reach her, as it did Shelley, through a sort of nebulous lustre. As she developed, her mind seems to have derived its complexion from the substance of reality, with a tendency to reproduce, in fictional terms, massive and broad outlines as of the earth. Mary was right in looking back on her visit to Scotland as a period of creative gestation; early examples of her writing date from that time. The comparative vastness of the hills and wooded landscape evoked a latent response to actuality, as later the Swiss mountains were to stimulate her creative powers.

Mary’s stay in Scotland was interrupted by her return to London with one of the Baxter girls, but after seven months Mary returned with her friend for a further ten months.

Meanwhile, Godwin’s financial troubles, which were to pursue him almost to the margin of the grave, had become more involved. But he retained the admiration and friendship of such men as Hazlitt, Lamb and Coleridge who frequented his household. Early in 1812, before Mary had left for Scotland, Godwin had added the poet Shelley to his retinue. Shelley had written that Godwin would be surprised at hearing from a stranger but that the name of Godwin had always aroused in him feelings of reverence and admiration.

By the time Mary returned finally to London in May 1814, Shelley and his wife Harriet had become almost daily visitors at Skinner Street. The poet’s reverence for Godwin’s work flattered the philoso­pher, though it is apparent from Godwin’s advice to Shelley on the latter’s harebrained political mission to Ireland in 1812, that the older man was somewhat dismayed by the poet’s fanatical interpretation of Political Justice. Shelley, however, had appeared at a time when Godwin’s financial affairs were rapidly deteriorating. Shelley’s own position was by no means stable, for since his expulsion from Oxford and his estrangement from the Shelley family, he could barely live on the allowance his father made him. As the heir to a wealthy baronetcy, however, he was able to raise money on the strength of expectancies; and Shelley procured considerable sums of money in this way, to place at Godwin’s disposal, with promises of further endeavours. He was welcome, then, as a man of fortune who counted it a privilege to fortify a man of genius. But Godwin did not fail to appreciate, too, the fact of Shelley’s own intense intellectual curiosity, his originality of thought and his eloquence.

To Mary, now a girl approaching seventeen, the continual appearances of Shelley at Skinner Street provided an entirely new experience. She had always enjoyed the company of her father’s friends, and had listened enrapt to their conversations. But they were mostly middle-aged or old men. Shelley, a fine-featured youth of twenty-one, had both physical and mental attractions for her. Added to his exceptional powers of dialectic, there was in him a characteristic audacity and flexi­bility of bearing which was lacking in her father’s older friends; and Shelley’s visits became a source of consolation to Mary, now once more under the distasteful domination of her step-mother.

Mary formed the habit of taking her books to her mother’s grave in St. Pancras Churchyard, there to find some peace after her irksome household duties, and to pursue her studies in an atmosphere of communion with a mind greater than the second Mrs. Godwin’s. And it was there, before long, that she was meeting Shelley in secret.

By October 1814, Shelley had separated from his wife. But it was not necessarily his newly-conceived love for Mary that precipitated this break. On 3rd October 1814 Shelley wrote to his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg explaining his state of mind before he met Mary:

… In the beginning of spring, I spent two months at Mrs. Boinville’s [a friend of Shelley and Harriet] without my wife. If I except the succeeding period those two months were probably the happiest of my life: the calmest, the serenest, the most free from care. The contemplation of female excellence is the favourite food of my imagination. There was ample scope for admiration: novelty added a peculiar charm to the intrinsic merit of the objects: I had been unaccustomed to the mildness, the intelligence, the delicacy of a cultivated female. The presence of Mrs. Boinville and her daughter afforded a strange contrast to my former friendship and deplorable condition. I suddenly perceived that the entire devotion with which I had resigned all prospects of utility or happiness to the single purpose of cultivating Harriet was a gross and despicable superstition. Perhaps every degree of affectionate intimacy with a female, however slight, partakes of the nature of love. Love makes men quick-sighted, and is only called blind by the [illegible] because he perceives the existence of relations invisible to grosser spirits. I saw the full extent of the calamity which my rash & heartless union with Harriet: a union over whose entrance might justly be inscribed

‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate!’