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

636 Pages·2015·15.86 MB·English

by  Charlotte Gordon

Copyright © 2015 by Charlotte Gordon All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC,
New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Published in the United Kingdom by Hutchinson, a member of The Random House Group, London.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Gordon, Charlotte.
Romantic outlaws : the extraordinary lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley / by
Charlotte Gordon.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4000-6842-5
eBook ISBN 978-0-81299651-7
1. Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1759–1797. 2. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797–1851. I. Title.
PR5841.W8Z716 2015 828.609—dc23
[B] 2014014841
www.atrandom.com
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman
v3.1
memory of my mother has always been the pride and delight of my
life.
—M S
ARY HELLEY
C o n t e n t s

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 A DEATH AND A BIRTH [1797–1801]
CHAPTER 2 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE EARLY YEARS [1759–1774]
CHAPTER 3 MARY GODWIN: CHILDHOOD AND A NEW FAMILY [1801–1812]
CHAPTER 4 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: HOXTON AND BATH [1774–1782]
CHAPTER 5 MARY GODWIN: SCOTLAND, AN “EYRY OF FREEDOM” [1810–1814]
CHAPTER 6 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: INDEPENDENCE [1783–1785]
CHAPTER 7 MARY GODWIN: “THE SUBLIME AND RAPTUROUS MOMENT” [1814]
CHAPTER 8 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: ON THE EDUCATION OF DAUGHTERS [1785–
1787]
CHAPTER 9 MARY GODWIN: THE BREAK [1814]
CHAPTER 10 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: LONDON [1786–1787]
CHAPTER 11 MARY GODWIN: LONDON AND BISHOPSGATE [1814–1815]
CHAPTER 12 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE FIRST VINDICATION [1787–1791]
CHAPTER 13 MARY GODWIN: “MAD, BAD AND DANGEROUS TO KNOW” [1816]
CHAPTER 14 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A REVOLUTION IN FEMALE MANNERS”
[1791–1792]
CHAPTER 15 MARY GODWIN: FITS OF FANTASY [1816]
CHAPTER 16 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: PARIS [1792–1793]
CHAPTER 17 MARY SHELLEY: RETRIBUTION [1816–1817]
CHAPTER 18 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: IN LOVE [1792]
CHAPTER 19 MARY SHELLEY: MARLOW AND LONDON [1817–1818]
CHAPTER 20 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “MOTHERHOOD” [1793–1794]
CHAPTER 21 MARY SHELLEY: ITALY, “THE HAPPY HOURS” [1818–1819]
CHAPTER 22 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: ABANDONED [1794–1795]
CHAPTER 23 MARY SHELLEY: “OUR LITTLE WILL” [1818–1819]
CHAPTER 24 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “SURELY YOU WILL NOT FORGET ME”
[1795]
CHAPTER 25 MARY SHELLEY: “THE MIND OF A WOMAN” [1819]
CHAPTER 26 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: RETURN HOME [1795–1796]
CHAPTER 27 MARY SHELLEY: “WHEN WINTER COMES” [1819–1820]
CHAPTER 28 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A HUMANE AND TENDER CONSIDERATION”
[1796]
CHAPTER 29 MARY SHELLEY: PISA [1820–1821]
CHAPTER 30 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: IN LOVE AGAIN [1796]
CHAPTER 31 MARY SHELLEY: “LEAGUE OF INCEST” [1821–1822]
CHAPTER 32 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “I STILL MEAN TO BE INDEPENDENT” [1797]
CHAPTER 33 MARY SHELLEY: “IT’S ALL OVER” [1822]
CHAPTER 34 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: “A LITTLE PATIENCE” [1797]
CHAPTER 35 MARY SHELLEY: “THE DEEPEST SOLITUDE” [1823–1828]
CHAPTER 36 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE MEMOIR [1797–1801]
CHAPTER 37 MARY SHELLEY: A WRITING LIFE [1832–1836]
CHAPTER 38 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: THE WRONGS [1797–1798]
CHAPTER 39 MARY SHELLEY: RAMBLINGS [1837–1848]
CHAPTER 40 MARY AND MARY: HEROIC EXERTIONS
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE: PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY’S LETTERS
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
IMAGE CREDITS
OTHER BOOKS BY THIS AUTHOR
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I N T R O D U C T I O N

London, England, on August 30, 1797, a newborn baby fought
for her life. Small and weak, she was not expected to survive. Her mother
struggled to deliver the afterbirth, but she was so exhausted a doctor was called in
to help. He cut away the placenta but had not washed his hands, unwittingly
introducing the germs of one of the most dangerous diseases of the era—childbed
or puerperal fever. Ten days later, the mother died, and, to the surprise of
everyone, the baby lived. For the rest of her life, she would mourn her mother’s
loss, dedicating herself to the preservation of her mother’s legacy and blaming
herself for her death.
This is one of the most famous birth stories in literary history. The dead
woman’s name was Mary Wollstonecraft. Five years earlier, Wollstonecraft had
scandalized the public by publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—a
denunciation of the unfair laws and prejudices that restricted eighteenth-century
women’s lives. The daughter she left behind would become the legendary Mary
Shelley, the nineteen-year-old author of Frankenstein, a novel so famous it needs
no introduction.
Yet even those who are familiar with Wollstonecraft and Shelley are still
sometimes startled to learn they were mother and daughter. For generations,
Wollstonecraft’s premature death led many scholars to overlook her impact on
Shelley; they viewed mother and daughter as unrelated figures representing
different philosophical stances and literary movements. Shelley appears in the
epilogues of biographies of Wollstonecraft, and Wollstonecraft in the
introductory pages of lives of Shelley.
Romantic Outlaws is the first full-length exploration of both women’s lives. But
long overdue though it is, this book is deeply indebted to the work of earlier
scholars. Without their efforts, it would have been impossible to explore
Wollstonecraft’s contributions to Shelley’s life and work, or Shelley’s obsession
with her mother.
This might sound like an odd proposition. How could a mother who died ten
days after she gave birth have had such an inordinate impact on her daughter? But
strange though it may seem, Wollstonecraft’s influence on her daughter was
profound. Her radical philosophy shaped Shelley, sparking her determination to
be someone and to create a masterpiece in her own right. Throughout her life,
Shelley read and reread her mother’s books, often learning their words by heart.
A large portrait of Wollstonecraft hung on the wall of Mary Shelley’s childhood
home. The girl studied it, comparing herself to her mother and hoping to find
similarities. Mary Shelley’s father and his friends held up Wollstonecraft as a
paragon of virtue and love, praising her genius, bravery, intelligence, and
originality.
Steeped as she was in her mother’s ideas, and raised by a father who never got
over his loss, Mary Shelley yearned to live according to her mother’s principles,
to fulfill her mother’s aspirations, and to reclaim Wollstonecraft from the shadows
of history, becoming, if not Wollstonecraft herself, then her ideal daughter. Over
and over again, she reimagined the past and recast the future in a doomed effort
to resurrect the dead, gazing back at what she could never regain but sought to
duplicate in very different times.
As for Wollstonecraft, though she shared only ten days with her child, she was
profoundly influenced by the idea of children. She had directed most of her life’s
work toward the next generation, dreaming of what life might be like for them
and how she could help them inherit a more just world. Wollstonecraft’s earliest
works, written before her famous Vindication, were education manuals, books
about how to teach children, and what to teach children, especially daughters.
Condemned by her own era, she turned to those who would come after, drawing
inspiration from those who might read her books once she was dead, never once
dreaming that one of her most important readers would turn out to be the
daughter she left behind.
Romantic Outlaws alternates between the lives of Wollstonecraft and Shelley,
allowing readers to hear the echo of Wollstonecraft in Shelley’s letters, journals,
and novels, and demonstrating how often Wollstonecraft addressed herself to the
future, to the daughter she planned to raise. There are many comprehensive
biographies of both women, written by some of the most distinguished literary