For the writer Mary Shelley, resisting social norms was practically laid in the cradle: she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 – 1797), for many the world’s first feminist. Mary campaigned for women’s equality and freedom at a time when women were more or less the property of their husbands and considered to be creatures incapable of rational judgement. This, she wrote, would be achieved through education. The system did not allow them to do so, but Mary believed that a bright woman could educate herself and leap over the barriers that society put in her way, even if they were often so high that she would not be able to achieve her dreams.
She was undoubtedly a bright woman with an extraordinary will. Born into a family in which the drunken father lorded it over his wife, she was condemned to poverty. To avoid her mother’s fate, she chose an independent life instead of marriage and did the only things available to women at the time to earn a living: she was a companion to an elderly lady, a nanny, helped wealthy acquaintances, sewed, opened and closed a girls’ school with her sister, and all the time she was reading and self-educating.
At 28 years old, she has finally found her key to a fulfilling life: a talent for writing. A few years earlier, the priest Richard Price had introduced her to a selection of London’s liberal intellectuals, including the publisher Joseph Johnson. She published her first novel in an attempt to draw attention to the limited possibilities of women and the fatal impact such limitations can have on their lives.
Since then she has written everything, children’s stories, book reviews, articles for the Analytical Magazine, essays … She debated with the leading English thinkers of the time about the events in France, which was being shaken by the Revolution, and enjoyed a life so different from that of her mother and sister: she supported herself, she read, and she educated herself by debating in the company of people among whom she felt accepted.
Full of energy and enthusiasm, at the age of 32 she had such a loud argument with a new acquaintance, William Godwin (1756-1836), at a dinner party that the other guests had to shut up because they were overheard. The two were at first antipathic with the well-known writer, philosopher and one of the founders of anarchism, but they immediately went their separate ways.
Mary’s essays A vindication of the rights of men and A vindication of the rights of woman, in which she clearly explained her views on women’s education, women’s equality, women’s status in society, women’s rights and women’s roles in public, private, political and family life, were no more sympathetic.
The surprising captive of an emotional storm
A sincere believer that the French Revolution would bring about a new humanity, she went straight to turbulent France, where she was disillusioned to find that chaos reigned in Paris and that she, too, was in danger, not only from the opponents of the Revolution and the Girondists, heretofore allies of the Jacobins.
In the midst of this darkness, a ray of sunshine soon shone into her life: she met Gilbert Imlay. He was an officer during the American Civil War, a businessman in London and now an American diplomat in Paris. As an American, he was safe during the so-called Reign of Terror, during which the Jacobins rounded up their opponents, but Mary was not as an Englishwoman. England was at war with France, so he took her under his protection and registered her as his wife at the American embassy.
They were not married, but they were lovers with not exactly the same goals: 34-year-old Mary fell in love, he soon became infatuated. He was less and less in Paris, she was more and more anxious to keep the relationship going. In a time without contraception, she soon became pregnant. Totally committed to her feelings, she tried to follow him wherever he went. In 1794 she joined him in Le Havre and gave birth to a daughter, Fanny Imlay, there on 14 May, but he immediately whisked her off to London with the promise that he would soon join her in Paris, where she was headed. Of course, he was not there and she went straight to London.
“It seems to me that I have not only lost hope, but also the strength to be happy. Every emotion is now filled with anxiety. My soul is in turmoil and my emotions are shattered”, she wrote to him after discovering that she was living with another woman in London. She managed to keep the relationship alive by attempting suicide, but not long afterwards Imlay sent her to Scandinavia with her daughter, not yet one year old.
For six months, she wandered around with her child, chasing after his rogue business partner and the ship captain who allegedly stole his gold and silver, all the while diligently recording her impressions of the landscape.
Imlay should have been there to meet her when she returned, but of course she wasn’t. She arrived in London alone. The story repeated itself: he was living with another woman again and Mary was again surprised:
“I would rather face a thousand deaths than another night like last night. Your attitude has thrown my mind into chaos, yet I am calm. I am going to find my peace …,” she wrote to him. She also announced a repeat of the second part of a scenario she had seen before, only this time she decided to jump into the Thames because it was “the least likely to steal from me the death I crave”.
She did jump into the river, but was rescued, even though she was pulled ashore unconscious. But Mary was still not ready to let Imlay out of her arms, and she proposed a happy threesome in a shared household. At first he agreed, but soon changed his mind. In December 1795, at the age of 36, she finally said goodbye to him, returned to her old life and renewed contact with her former friends.
Two deaths
Among them is now the unmarried William Godwin, with whom they once shared a mutual antipathy. Four months after she had drawn the line under Imlay, Godwin, against social norms, sought her out. Four months later, they were lovers.
Godwin has so far read her Letters from Sweden, which is the title of a travelogue she wrote during her trip to Scandinavia. “If ever there was a book designed to make you fall in love with its author, this seems to be it,” he later said, explaining why he had changed his mind about it. Once he found it rational, distant and critical, now he found it highly emotional and sensitive.
A good six months into their relationship, the philosopher, a born optimist, and the writer, rather pessimistic, were faced with a difficult decision: should they marry or not? Mary, 38 years old, was pregnant again. Both were fervent opponents of marriage, which had nothing to do with an ideal loving partnership, and both changed their minds when it came to their child. They married immediately, but kept their own place.
As quickly as it happened, it ended. On 30 August 1797, Mary gave birth to a daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, without complications. Eleven days later, she died of poisoning. Just a year after they were reunited, the 41-year-old Godwin was left alone with three-year-old Fanny Imlay, whom he had taken as his own, and the newborn Mary.
To pay tribute to his late wife, he quickly published her unpublished works and added her biography. In it, he naively revealed the details of her affair with Imlay, the birth of her illegitimate daughter and her suicide attempts. He did not feel that Mary’s private life was a denial of what she had spoken and written about, but to the public it was, and he successfully undid all that she had achieved in her lifetime.
People would have forgiven her for the fact that love had swept her off her feet, but they did not forgive her for the fact that it was completely contrary to the social norms of the time. Her opponents had their five minutes of mercy. They called her a ‘poor unbalanced woman’ and a ‘horny victim of licentious love’, and went on to say that even in death she had proved the straightforwardness of the difference between the sexes, because she had died a woman’s death.
Such was the scandal that even her friends let her down. No one publicly came to her defence, and she died a second time, this time professionally. Even though she had dug herself out of poverty, educated herself and supported herself, all her work was now devalued. She had become a symbol of female irrationality and her ideas about women’s equality and women’s right to education had faded into oblivion.
Little Mary
In reality, her reputation has never fully recovered from the blow dealt by her own husband, who was undeniably a good father. When Mary was three, he had to go to Ireland. He wrote home: “And now what shall I say to my poor little girls? I hope they have not forgotten me. I think of them every day. I should be glad if the wind were kinder and blew them a kiss from Dublin to Polygon.” In the letter he also told them that he had not met anyone who “loved him as much or thought as highly of him” as he did of them.
The family idyll, which had been shattered by Godwin’s financial difficulties, was shattered when he married a neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont. She brought her two illegitimate children, a son, Charles, and a daughter, Jane, who was only eight months younger than the then four-year-old Mary. In 1803, William Godwin junior joined the family.
Now Mary had to compete with four siblings for her father’s love. She could have managed that, but coexisting with her stepmother, who was said to have had no cultural affinity with her, was unthinkable. For Clairmont, her husband’s children were not hers. She sent her Jane to school, for example, which was remarkable at the time, and not Mary.
Godwin taught all his children at home. He made no distinction between the sexes, but little Mary grew up listening to his anarchist teachings and his conversations with friends, writers, philosophers and scientists. With her father’s encouragement, she read widely and was already highly educated as a teenager.
At the age of 15, she was, in her father’s words, “extremely bold, commanding in a way, and quick-witted. Her thirst for knowledge is great and her perseverance in everything she undertakes is almost invincible.” Improving relations with her stepmother was never a goal.
Mary Jane Clairmont was jealous of her, not only because her father was extremely fond of her as his only biological daughter, but also because she had inherited both her parents’ talent for writing. The family supported itself by self-publishing children’s books. Godwin wrote them, his wife wrote them, and Mary wrote her first story in verse at the age of ten. Five years later, her fourth reprint was on sale.
By that time, relations between Mary and her stepmother had become so strained that Mary’s father withdrew to his friend William Baxter in Scotland. During the six-month visit, “under the trees that surrounded the house, or at the foot of the nearby bare treeless mountains”, Mary’s “imagination flew to the sky, was born and grew”, as she later recalled her beginnings as a writer.
Not yet 15, she met 20-year-old Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) during a visit to his home. He was with his wife, 17-year-old Harriet, whom he had married the year before, incurring the wrath of his father, Sir Timothy Shelley, a rather wealthy baronet. Father and son had been in each other’s hair before. Percy was never a model son, fulfilling the wishes of his father and grandfather. To get him on the right track, they sent him to boarding school at the age of ten.
A withdrawn, quiet and strange boy, he first became fascinated with science there. During the holidays, he tried to cure his sister’s fence by running electricity through it. He remained the same at Eton College. His classmates were merciless with him, but he never wanted to buy the protection that other weak boys did.
When the violence went too far, he went mad, as when he stabbed a classmate with a fork, but otherwise he was a dreamer who often forgot to tie his shoelaces or tie the prescribed hat on his head. Before he knew when, he was being called Nori Shelley.
Although his family was wealthy, he believed in the injustice of social inequality and later deeply despised the aristocracy to which he formally belonged. Nevertheless, he not only took money from his father, he demanded it until his death.
He became fascinated by the revolutionary political and philosophical ideas of Thomas Paine and William Godwin. Of course, he was also an atheist, but he wrote a pamphlet against the church which got him thrown out of Oxford, where he entered in 1810. He was so different from his peers at the time that, in the words of his cousin, “madness hung over his head by a hair’s breadth …”.
His father and grandfather, who paid his pocket money, found his rebelliousness hard to bear, and when he eloped with his younger sister’s friend Harriet Westbrook in 1811 and secretly married her in Scotland, they promptly cut off his financial support. But Shelley was able to turn them around. His finances were soon back in order, and he found a cure for the problems that were beginning to plague him.
When he suffered his first nervous attack, as it was called, at the age of 19, at the beginning of 1812, he began to consume laudanum, a mixture of ethanol and opium. From then on, he walked in his sleep whenever life became a little more difficult and stressful. One evening, his wife and a neighbour found him lying on the doorstep, motionless. He claimed that he had been attacked, although no one knows whether he might have imagined it.
Freethinking, yes, but for others
It was also the year he met his role model William Godwin and met his 14-year-old daughter Mary for the first time. She was a sweet girl then, and by the time they crossed paths two years later, she already had a reputation as a bright and educated girl.
The 23-year-old immediately seduced her and proposed to his wife, the 19-year-old mother of one-year-old Elizabeth Ianthe, that the three of them and Mary should live together. If that was unacceptable to her, this admirer of free love added, they should at least cohabit on friendly terms. She flatly refused, and William Godwin was also appalled by his daughter’s choice.
He was only free-minded when his principles applied to others, and when his daughter wanted to live by them, he asked her to break off contact with Shelly. Mary complied, Shelley did not. On one occasion he stood at her door with a gun and a laudanum and threatened to commit suicide. Another time he invited her to join him in death if they could not already be together in life. The teenage Mary gave in rather than die.
Barely two months into their relationship, she ran away with him to the continent, taking her sister Jane with her when she was not yet 17. A few months later, they were home. They were penniless. But even now it was no easier.
Unmarried Mary was pregnant. Her lover was so embarrassed that he ended up behind bars. When he was released, he hid from his creditors. Her father did not forgive her for running away. Her friends distanced themselves from her. Shelly was her only support. A seventeen-year-old could have broken, but she didn’t. Like her mother, she had no problem sharing her private life with the public, but she wrote up her romantic journey in a travelogue and published it successfully.
In January 1816, she became a mother for the second time. Her first-born Clara, born two months premature in February 1815, died when she was only a few weeks old. Her son William survived, but Mary continued to write and to help her father financially, who accepted her money but not her.
Shelly had her half-sister Jane, now called Claire, by her side. Jane changed her name because she found her birth name too poetic and cast her eye on the most famous and notorious English poet of the time, Lord Byron.
Like so many women before her, she decided she was perfect for him, and like so many women before her, she tried to convince him. She didn’t mind that he was living in the middle of a public and private tornado, which was raised when his wife Anabella, after a year of marriage, asked for a divorce because she realised that he was using her to cover up a two-and-a-half-year affair with his half-sister Augusta, with whom he was actually in love and probably had a daughter.
Claire made sure they met and then tirelessly sent him letters, the running theme of which was that he should accept “what my heart has been passionately wanting to give you for a long time”. Byron later wrote to a friend that he did not love her and had never been in love with her, but that a man is a man and if such an attractive girl was offered to him, he would not defend her. The self-confident 18-year-old Claire, of course, had a different understanding of landing in Byron’s bed.
When he fled to Switzerland not long afterwards because of a scandal and did not even think of taking her with him, she persuaded Mary and Shelley to follow him in May 1816. They took their son William, a few months old, with them and settled on Lake Geneva, not far from Byron. The two poets soon became good friends.
One day in June, Byron told the assembled company – Mary, Shelley, Claire and his personal physician, John William Polidor – about ghosts. Then he came up with a famous competition: each of them had to write a short horror story. Mary, aged 19, presented a draft of Frainkestein to the gathering. She won.
Claire also seemingly won. Byron initially rejected her, but soon softened and renewed his relationship with her. When she told him she was pregnant, he refused to see her again. It is not clear whether Claire knew she was pregnant before she set off, but she has now convinced Mary and Shelley to ask Byron to acknowledge the baby.
He acknowledged the child and wanted nothing more to do with her. So, at the end of August 1816, Claire returned to England with her sister and Shelley and settled with them in Bath. Mary was writing Frankenstein at an accelerated pace, Shelley was writing for himself, when in October the news struck: Fanny, Mary’s half-sister, had committed suicide. Less than two months later, it struck again: Shelley’s 22-year-old wife, Harriet, had also committed suicide. She was pregnant. No one knew with whom.
In her farewell letter, she asked Shelly to leave the baby with her sister. He didn’t want to. He hastily married Mary, sought custody and lost it. Convinced that he would never find peace in England because of the Mary scandal, he and his family went to Italy, taking Claire and her daughter with them.
Mary had hoped to finally make a home for herself, but she and her husband moved again and again. The upheavals came one after another. Towards the end of 1818, they had a daughter, Elena Adelaide. Because of financial difficulties, the couple fostered the child. He died there two years later.
Many biographers are convinced that Shelley was indeed the child’s father, but that his mother was not Mary, as officially stated in the birth record. Claire had been in love with Shelley ever since she met him and he made no secret of his affection for her, but there is no hard evidence that they were lovers.
In September of the same year, when Mary formally became Elena Adelaide’s mother, her baby Clara Everina, just a year old, breathed her last in her arms in Venice. Less than a year later, in June 1819, she lost her three-year-old son William to malaria, but in November she gave birth again, to a son, Percy Florence.
Despite all the pain, she kept writing and her marriage was falling apart. She was depressed and her husband was chronically plagued by nightmares and hallucinations. He decided to spend the summer of 1822 sailing. He could not swim and had nearly drowned the previous year, but the sailing ship was still a quieter place than home. Mary was pregnant again and due to give birth in December, but miscarried in June, and there was tension at home, not least because he had fallen in love with another woman not long before.
On 7 July 1822, 16 kilometres off the coast, the ship was caught in a gale. It sank. The bodies of Shelley, Williams and the captain were washed up ten days later. Because of laws protecting the inhabitants from the plague, the body of Shelley, not yet 30, was burned on shore after his heart was removed. It was given to a friend, who handed it over to Mary. He was eventually buried in Bournemouth on the south coast of England.
Mary was left alone at the age of 24. After all her losses, for the first time she was now so low on strength that she could not write, but there was no time to mourn: she had herself and her son to survive. Fortunately, her novel Valperga was finished and she was able to publish it in February 1823, but she could not stay in Italy.
Mary and Claire’s lonely fight
She had no money, but she raised enough to pay for Claire to go to her brother in Vienna. But Claire couldn’t calm down. She turned down a marriage proposal from Edward John Trelawny, a writer and adventurer she had met six years earlier, because she wanted peace and he wanted excitement. From then on, she earned her living in the same way as the women of her time, whom she never wanted to be like: as a companion to elderly ladies and as a nurse.
At the age of 70, she decided to write an autobiography. Until 2010, when fragments of it were accidentally found in an archive, it was considered lost, and until then it was also believed that she had never said a word over Shelley. But she always had a lot to say over Byron.
That a few minutes of happiness with him had caused her a lifetime of struggle, she lamented. She hated him from the moment their daughter Allegra died. She had given her to Byron in the belief that he would give her a better future, but he had sent her to a convent and prevented Claire from contacting her, saying she was a bad mother. The girl died at the age of five.
Astonished researchers read for the first time in her autobiography that she experienced Shelley in the same way as Byron. “I saw how two of England’s most important poets, under the influence of doctrine and belief in free love … turned into monsters,” she wrote. Both were “lying, wicked, cruel and deceitful monsters”.
She described Byron as “a human tiger quenching his thirst for inflicting pain on helpless women”, as if she had forgotten that in her day she too was a worshipper of free love. Claire renounced her past, Mary Shelley never did.
When she was left penniless in Italy, she returned to England at the age of 25. Her wealthy father-in-law refused to help her financially. He was prepared to take her child but not to pay child support. When she firmly refused, he softened a little, but not enough to provide for her and her son. She could not count on her friend Lord Byron. In April 1824, the same year, he died in Greece, aged 36.
She tried to cash in on her husband’s reputation for her livelihood. She published a collection of his poetry, but her furious father-in-law threatened to cut off all financial support if she published anything more of his son’s during his lifetime. He softened only shortly before his death, but she was allowed to publish a volume of poetry in 1839 and Shelley’s essays and letters from abroad the following year.
Like her mother in the past, she now supports her son and father with royalties. There was no time for novels. She wrote short stories, travelogues and extremely good literary-historical biographies. She became a skilled editor and a respected critic, and wrote a poem here and there, even though she did not like poetry.
In September 1826, her life path was once again interrupted by death: the death of Percy’s half-brother Charles, the first son of her late husband and the rightful heir to the Shelley fortune. Not yet 7 years old, this now became Mary’s son. Her father-in-law gave them a higher maintenance allowance and Mary was able to travel again. She was also able to take part in the publication of her husband’s poems in Paris, which her father-in-law had no influence over.
At the age of 42, her health began to fail, but within two years she had recovered sufficiently to set off with her son and his friends on a journey through Europe. For a year she kept a diligent diary, kept copies of her letters and resold her experiences in a book, just as she had done almost 30 years earlier when she had eloped with her then-lover.
At the age of 47, after the death of her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, she finally had a more peaceful and secure life: her son Percy Florence inherited the title of Baronet and the family fortune. She passed the two blackmail attempts without much difficulty and was overjoyed in June 1848 when she was convinced that her son would not follow the family tradition: he would marry a chosen man and live a traditional life. She was rejected by the respectable bourgeoisie until her death in 1851 at the age of 53.
They have not forgotten her youth, nor Shelley’s, but Shelley was luckier than his late mother-in-law, Mary Wollstonecraft. Her husband had ruined her reputation, and Shelley’s respected daughter-in-law thoughtfully restored it so subtly that people slowly forgot his controversial life and saw in him only a great poet.
