Vindication (56 page)

 

Fanny continued to worry about Godwin's poverty, and saw herself as an extra burden. Imlay never showed any wish to know her, and she remained as unaware as her mother of a flourishing clan of Imlays across the
Atlantic. If this were a romance, the modest English girl would have arrived on the doorstep of the Imlay Mansion in Allentown, New Jersey, and lived happily ever after. In actuality a harder fate awaited. In the spring of 1816, when she was almost twenty-two, Aunt Everina proposed that Fanny join her and ‘Aunt Bishop', by now in their fifties. Everina detailed her ‘sufferings' and Aunt Bishop's poor health. Hardly an enticing prospect, but Fanny expressed a suitable gratitude, and hoped, she added humbly, to deserve her aunt's affection as long as she lived. Fanny could now contemplate, as she put it to Mary, ‘my unhappy life' as her aunts' drudge.

The Wollstonecraft sisters arrived in London later in the summer, and it's possible that by the time they departed on 24 September, it was settled that Fanny would leave Godwin's household and join their schools in Dublin. Fanny may have met Shelley on a visit to London–if so, she would have relayed her aunts' plans and her own reluctance. The Shelley party had its own troubles. During the second half of 1816, they were living in Bath to keep Claire's pregnancy a secret from her London circle. In Bath she styled herself ‘Mrs Clairmont'. Unfortunately, Shelley's withdrawal of financial help from Godwin in late September moved Fanny to write to Mary, on 3 October, to defend Godwin's philosophy that those with means are obligated to support worthy ones who are in want.

‘Forgive me if I have expressed myself unkindly,' she wrote. ‘My heart is warm in your cause–and I am
anxious most anxious
that papa should feel for you as I do both for your own, and his sake–I have written in a great hurry and have not had time to consider and round my sentences–But I am so direct in all my thoughts and opinions that I cannot but believe every one must like frankness as much as myself.' The following day Mary received this ‘stupid letter from F'.

Fanny was trapped between warring Godwins, their love conditional on her serving their wills. Four days later, on 8 October 1816, Fanny passed through Bath, on a westward journey. She had dressed carefully in a blue striped skirt and white bodice, with a brown pelisse and brown hat. She took the Swiss watch Mary had given her, and put a meagre eight shillings–not enough for a passage to Dublin–in her reticule. Next to her skin, she wore her mother's stays.

There's a gap in what's known when Fanny stops in Bath. What happens during that hour or two when she arrives by the morning mail in the fashionable spa where her mother had served long ago as a companion and where her sister is now living? She has wished to see Mary, for that very day Mary receives word from Fanny, presumably about her arrival. Godwin, who banned all contact, is too far away to know. But Mary can't invite her sister to their lodgings because she can't reveal that Claire is six months pregnant. And Mary may still be annoyed with ‘stupid' Fanny whose compassion for Godwin can't fail to touch a daughter who has also worshipped him–and who, in his eyes, is disgraced and banished. Fanny has taken her place as prime daughter. Not Mary, then, but Shelley–possibly–comes to see Fanny at the inn. There's no invitation to join him, no alternative on offer. This would have been her last hope of rescue from the ‘sufferings' Aunt Everina has invited her to share.

From her next stop in Bristol, she sends warning notes to Shelley (to come and see her buried) and to Godwin (‘I depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove'), but she doesn't say where she is. Both, alarmed, set out to trace her. Fanny, in the meantime, has taken a coach to Swansea. There, at the Mackworth Arms, she sips some tea. By now it is night, and she asks for her candle. By its dim light she writes:

Before she swallows the overdose of laudanum or before oblivion overtakes her, she thinks of those she loves, and to save further trouble, she tears off her name and lets the candle consume it.

Next morning, Fanny's body was discovered. It was not identified, not the stockings marked ‘G', nor the stays marked ‘MW'. Godwin gave out that Fanny had gone to join her aunts in Dublin. Privately, he told Mrs
Gisborne (who had looked after Fanny and baby Mary) ‘that the three girls were all equally in love with [Shelley] and that the eldest put an end to her existence owing to the preference given to her younger sister'. This has to be a simplification, distancing the suicide from any responsibility on Godwin's part, though it may explain why he ‘half-expected it'.

Shelley recalled their last meeting in ‘On Fanny Godwin' (1816):

On the back of the fragment is a sketch, maybe a design for a grave under a tree and surrounded by urns with flowers. On this Shelley has scrawled: ‘It is not my fault–it is not to be alluded to.'

This was not the only casualty (in whatever sense) of Shelley's and Mary's union. Two months later Harriet Shelley, who thought her husband a ‘monster', drowned herself and her unborn child in the Serpentine in Hyde Park. Shelley was more distressed by Fanny's death, he confided to Byron. Another poetic fragment pictures Fanny as the child reunited with Mary Wollstonecraft on her return to Gothenburg from Norway in the summer of 1795:

Mary, her sister, dressed in mourning, reread their mother's
Rights of Woman
, and continued to work on her novel
Frankenstein
. Did Fanny's ‘unfortunate' birth strike Mary and Claire, who were bearing children outside marriage? Mary, with a year-old son, William (‘Will-Mouse')–called after her father, despite his refusal to see her–now wished to be married, and Shelley consented out of consideration for her, much as Godwin had consented, long ago, to marry Mary's mother.

Byron, who was married already (though separated from his wife), chose to believe that only a bad girl from a Godless background would have offered him her virginity.

Claire protested, ‘I cannot pardon those who…believe because I have unloosed myself from the trammels of customs & opinion that I do not possess within[,] a severer monitor than either of these.'

Byron dismissed Claire's novel ‘The Ideot', about a Robinson Crusoe sort of girl, isolated from social conditioning. Acting on impulses that arise from herself alone, Claire's heroine flouts custom, yet is filled with affections and sympathies. The narrator, an old clergyman, attributes the girl's errors to a neglected education, but sophisticated readers were expected to grasp what looks like a gender experiment in authenticity. Byron's derision led Claire to kill her work as ‘that hateful novel thing I wrote'.

Some of Byron's women were of his own class, protected by money and privilege, and accustomed to casual adultery. Claire, by contrast, had been a virgin in love with a jaded Don Juan. Ten years later she looked back on herself as the ‘victim' of ten minutes' happy passion that had withered any other possibility.

If passion withered, other kinds of love flourished. She had two near-perfect attachments, the first to Shelley who opened her mind to a freedom that breathed through his looks and manners with a beauty, she said, no picture could express. Claire lived out an unconventional scenario Wollstonecraft had conceived but could not put into practice: her plan to join the Fuselis. Claire's triumph was her sustained closeness to a protector-genius without the drawbacks of being his wife. Mary was depleted by sick and dying children, and also had to bear Shelley's romantic enthusiasms for
other women, his irresponsibility, and the self-centredness that left Mary to her griefs, then blamed her for coldness. Mary saw herself rather as a person whose eager sympathies entangled her, and her love for women friends became intense in later years. Her letters have a beating pulse like her mother's, a similar playfulness and candour, with a learned edge from her Godwinian education. Mary Shelley was always political, an opponent of tyranny and monarchy and a supporter of individual liberty, but she was also open to rarer influences: her mother's ‘greatness of soul' and Shelley's search for knowledge.

Shelley had encouraged her to expand her idea for
Frankenstein
, conceived on Lake Geneva when she was nineteen. Dr Frankenstein, a solitary scientist, expects to invent a man, and finds that he's made a monster. This killer is the unnatural son of an unnatural father, for Frankenstein has detached himself from domestic ties, relying on ingenuity alone. In dramatising this point, the young author confirms her mother's case for parental nurture, together with Wollstonecraft's attack on ‘the cold workings of the brain'. Frankenstein is an irresponsible creator who abandons his creature. The monster's testimony is similar to that of the criminal Jemima in
The Wrongs of Woman
: deprived of domestic affections, Jemima perceives herself ‘an outcast from society'. ‘I hated mankind,' she says. ‘Whoever acknowledged me to be a fellow-creature?' It's now thought that the primary pattern underlying feminist writing ‘is that of
Frankenstein
', a world in which cerebral man and monster are one. The oneness of uncaring creator and killer-creature aims at ‘refashioning an entire sex'. The uncaring might of democracy corrupting its hideous progeny and the monster-Moslem who is careless of life, reflect each other's fantasy of power, bearing out the continuing relevance of Mary Shelley's fable where the natural alternative of maternal nurture has no public status. Its very absence from the political arena, the horrors its absence inflicts, call for an alternative order that can collapse the boundaries between the domestic and the cerebral–in a sense, the lost but retrievable possibilities of the Godwin–Wollstonecraft union.

Claire owned to envy of Mary's achievement, but found that envy ‘yields when I consider that she is a woman and will prove in time…an
argument in our favour. How I delight in a lovely woman of strong & cultivated intellect.'

Shelley praised the recessed stories and framing plot of exploration. They seemed to emanate from the buried nature of the author. ‘What art thou?' he asks at the time she completes
Frankenstein
in 1817. ‘I know but dare not speak.' It is something for the future to define. Her distinction burns ‘internally', seen in eyes ‘deep and intricate from the workings of the mind'; in ‘thy gentle speech, a prophecy/ Is whispered'. This alertness, his wish to know women worth knowing, made Shelley irresistible–irreplaceable–to les Goddesses.

During the restless years when Claire and Mary moved with Shelley from place to place–France, the Rhine, London, Geneva, Bath, Naples, Rome, Pisa–they learnt Greek and Latin, and read history and literature day by day. Both undertook a programme of reading, copying, letter-writing and journal-keeping. While Mary Shelley wrote fiction, Claire Clairmont produced two lost works: a satire on Byron called ‘Hints for Don Juan' (conceived in February 1820) and ‘Letters from Italy' (between April and August 1820). But her public triumph lay in music. Her voice inspired one of Shelley's greatest poems, ‘To Constantia
*
, Singing':

Where Byron jeered at the ‘prancing' advances of ‘the odd-headed girl' with her black curls, Shelley recognised yet another creature ‘Upon the verge of Nature's utmost sphere'.

‘Constantia turn!' he commands. ‘Yes! In thine eyes a power like light doth lie.' Even as her voice is laid to sleep between her lips, that power lingers in her breath and springing hair. In Pisa, Shelley hired a music master, Zannetti, who trained Claire to performer's standard. She tries out the overture to Rossini's new opera,
La Cenerentola
; she sings arias from Mozart; and her voice is like ‘the breath of summer's night' on starry waters. Her lingering breath suspends a poet's soul ‘in its voluptuous flight'.

Claire was too close to Shelley for Mary's comfort. Mary could never forget the ease with which he had left his first wife. It's not known if Claire and Shelley were lovers, but undoubtedly there was some understanding. Claire claimed that she knew Shelley in some ways more than his wife did. When Mary's grief for her dead children displaced Shelley from the centre of her attention, he thought of going off with Claire to the Middle East.