Mary Shelley Read online

  The Godwins had good cause to oppose Mary’s involvement with Percy Shelley. Not only did he have a wife and family, but he had shown himself to be unstable. Also, Mary needed to protect her reputation. For a young man to sow some wild oats was accepted and considered natural. Society judged him on his wealth and his work, if he had a profession. But the public’s opinion of a girl rested on her innocence. By tarnishing her reputation—even through an unwise flirtation—she risked spoiling her chances of marrying well. Sharing intimacies with a married man was especially ruinous. Polite society would shun her. Genteel ladies would turn their backs to her, now and for years to come.

  Mary understood these things, but her heart was in turmoil. She had fallen in love, deeply and unexpectedly, at a young age, and she struggled with new feelings and priorities. One future mattered to her, a life with Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley meant everything; she could be happy only with him. When she wrote years later that “love, though young and unacknowledged, will tyrannise from the first, and produce emotions never felt before,” she drew on her youthful experience.

  After Jane’s role as messenger came to light, she, too, was confined to the house. Shelley then bribed a servant to carry his letters to Mary. In this clandestine way, he and the two girls hatched a plan.

  They put it into action on Thursday, July 28. At five a.m., with the sun about to rise, Mary placed a letter on her father’s dressing table, where he would see it when he woke up. She and Jane, wearing black silk traveling dresses, crept silently down the stairs and out of the house. The girls held bundles, and Mary carried a small box containing papers she treasured: stories she had written, letters from people dear to her, and old love notes that had been exchanged between Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. The girls hurried along sleeping streets to a corner where Shelley waited with a carriage and driver. “She was in my arms—we were safe,” Shelley said with relief. He and Mary were escaping to France and Switzerland to begin their life together. Foreign sights and experiences were going to open their minds—or so they hoped. “The art of travelling is only a branch of the art of thinking,” Mary Wollstonecraft had written.

  Why Jane went along is anyone’s guess. She may have craved adventure or had her own reasons for escaping home. She had been the lovers’ confidante since their romance began and may have hoped to continue in that role. She also believed her unknown father was Swiss and may have longed to see his homeland. Whatever her reason, Mary and Shelley welcomed her.

  The adventurers rode swiftly in case they were being pursued, pausing only when Mary’s motion sickness forced them to take a break. Every hour placed miles between their carriage and London. Twelve hours of travel brought them to the southern port of Dover, where they decided against waiting for the morning packet, the commercial vessel that carried mail and passengers across the English Channel. Instead they hired some sailors to take them to France overnight in a small open boat.

  A gentle breeze blew as they embarked, but toward daybreak they sailed into a thunderstorm, and their boat rose and fell with the swelling sea. Leaning against Shelley’s knees as waves washed over the sides of the craft, a seasick Mary felt him trembling. In time the squall passed, and Mary fell asleep. She woke hearing Shelley call softly, “Look, Mary, the sun rises over France.” Wind had pushed the boat onto a beach near the northern French town of Calais.

  That evening, the three were resting at a hotel when the innkeeper informed them that an English lady had arrived, seeking her daughter. Mary Jane Godwin had set out as soon as she and her husband read Mary’s note, which told them the trio was bound for France. Mary’s reputation was ruined, but Mrs. Godwin hoped she had time to save Jane’s. Having caught up with the runaways, she ordered Jane to spend the night in her room. She planned to return home the next morning with Jane, and all would be well, as far as her own daughter was concerned.

  Wind and rough waves could make crossing the English Channel difficult and even dangerous.

  All was well until daylight came and Shelley managed to speak to Jane. Emboldened by his urging, Jane defied her mother. She would stay right where she was, Jane declared. She was going to journey on with Mary and Shelley. Too angry even to speak, Mary Jane Godwin marched out of the hotel and sailed back to London alone.

  Journeying on meant venturing farther into France, where everything from food to fashion was strange and novel to the three young Britons. They poked at plates of fried artichoke leaves, thinking they might be frog meat. They stared at the people of northern France in their traditional clothes. Mary commented in a journal on “the women with high caps and short jackets; the men with earrings.” In Paris, she and the others wandered past paintings in the Louvre. They saw the great cathedral of Notre-Dame and walked in the famed Tuileries Garden, which Mary found formal and dull. She was happiest lying beside Shelley in their cheap hotel. Wrapped in his embrace, she lived in the moment, without a worry for the future. Said Shelley, “Our own perceptions are the world to us.”

  The traditional dress of northern France included high white caps for women and full breeches for men. These costumes appeared exotic to the trio of English travelers, who had seen very little of the world.

  Shelley had dashed off without the funds from his latest post-obit loan, so pretty soon the travelers were short of money. Shelley sold his watch and managed to borrow sixty pounds, and they used some of the cash to buy a donkey. For four days they walked south and east across the countryside toward Switzerland while the donkey carried their bundles.

  The long war with France had recently been won; Napoleon was exiled to Elba, an island in the Mediterranean Sea. Russian soldiers, retaliating for Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of their country, had ravaged the French landscape. Mary, Shelley, and Jane saw burned-out cottages, churches, and shops, and hungry, impoverished people. Where once there had been a large village, “now the houses were roofless,” Mary observed. “The ruins that lay scattered about, the gardens covered with the white dust of the torn cottages, the black burnt beams, and squalid looks of the inhabitants, presented in every direction the melancholy aspect of devastation.” They walked many miles before they spotted crops growing. One day, milk and sour bread was the only dinner they could buy. The inns where they slept were filthy and teeming with rodents. One night, Jane squeezed into bed with Mary and Shelley after a rat walked across her face and sent her scurrying from her own room.

  The donkey proved too frail for such a long trek, and pretty soon it refused to budge. The three runaways half carried it to a nearby village, where they sold it and bought a mule that they could ride. They took turns in the saddle until Shelley sprained his ankle and the girls insisted he do all the riding. After a week of this, Mary and Jane grew weary of trekking in the heat. The mule was sold and a small carriage purchased. Money also went to hire a driver.

  Shelley was flying high. He dreamed of forming a community of free spirits in Switzerland and wrote to Harriet, inviting her to come. “You will at least find one firm & constant friend, to whom your interests will be always dear, by whom your feelings will never wilfully be injured,” he assured her. He could not understand why Harriet found such a letter hurtful or why she never responded. When a beautiful little girl charmed Shelley in the town of Champlitte, he tried to talk her father into letting him adopt her. The father of course refused.

  Days and weeks passed in slow, steady travel. On August 19, Jane spotted something far off that looked like bright, flaky clouds. “What was my surprize when after a long & steady examination I found them really to be the snowy Alps,” she wrote. “Yes, they were really the Alps”—still a hundred miles distant. As they drew closer and made out the shapes of mountains, Shelley was overjoyed. “On every side their icy summits darted their white pinnacles into the clear blue sky,” he wrote. He imagined he was looking at the crumbling remains of ancient temples: “Blue vapours assumed strange lineaments under the rocks and among the ruins, lingering like ghosts with slow and solemn ste
p.”

  The beauty and grandeur of the Alps filled Mary, Percy, and Jane with awe.

  By the time they reached Switzerland, everyone was cross. It rained all the time. Mary’s stomach was upset. She realized that she had left her box of treasured papers at a hotel in France and would never see it again. Unable to find a cottage to rent, the three leased an ugly apartment. They were getting on one another’s nerves, and they were running out of money. By August 27, they had twenty-eight pounds, barely enough to get home. Everyone was ready to go.

  They returned by river because it was cheaper and faster than going overland. Mary turned seventeen in the northern Swiss city of Basel. She and Shelley read to each other from one of Mary Wollstonecraft’s popular works, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. This slim volume was more than a travel book. Wollstonecraft had used her time in Scandinavia to explore her inner life. She delved into the power of nature to inspire the imagination. A soul in harmony with nature “sinks into melancholy, or rises to extasy,” she wrote.

  Picturesque Germany made all three travelers ecstatic. Small islands rested in placid blue waters in some sections of the winding Rhine River. White rapids crashed against rocks in other spots. Hills rose along both banks, their thick covering of trees broken here and there by villages and steeples. In early September, the barge moored briefly at Gernsheim, near the ruins of Frankenstein Castle, the birthplace, in 1673, of the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel. Dippel was known for experimenting on dead animals and claimed he had discovered the elixir of life, a potion that made people immortal.

  Blustery, wet weather greeted Mary and her companions when they reached the Dutch port of Rotterdam. They boarded a packet bound for England on Friday, September 9, with the understanding that they would pay their fare when they reached their destination. Soon, wind and heavy seas forced the captain to turn back and seek safety in Maassluis, another Dutch town. Held up for two days by storms, Mary, Jane, and Shelley had almost nothing to eat. They wrote to pass the time. The titles of the girls’ stories reflected their moods: Mary’s was called “Hate,” and Jane titled hers “The Ideot.” Shelley worked on a longer, gothic tale that he was calling The Assassins.

  The ruins of medieval castles rose from rocky heights along the Rhine.

  At last, on Sunday, September 11, conditions had improved enough for the packet to set off again, although the North Sea was anything but calm. “The face of the Captain was all anxiety,” Jane saw. She was the only person on board to escape seasickness. Mary felt queasier than most, but her illness was due to more than the pitching of the boat. She was pregnant.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Life’s Lessons

  While we are young, we feel as if happiness were the birthright of humanity; after a long and cruel apprenticeship, we disengage ourselves from this illusion.

  When the packet reached England, Mary, Shelley, and Jane confessed that they had no money. The captain saw three young people who seemed too clever for their own good, and he was far from pleased. He sent a boatman with them to London, with orders to collect what the passengers owed. The boatman waited while Shelley went into his bank and was denied credit. He looked on as acquaintances turned down Shelley’s pleas for a loan. Finally, he sat for a long time with Mary and Jane in a coach outside Harriet’s father’s house while Shelley talked his wife into giving him the cash he needed.

  Their fare paid, Mary and her companions settled in dim, dirty rooms. They soon moved to an even cheaper place near the Polygon and St. Pancras Church. By choosing to be with Percy Shelley, Mary Godwin had embarked on a life of wandering and scraping by. She also was learning how it felt to be an outcast. When she first came back to England, her father had been ready to welcome her home. In his mind, William Godwin saw Mary coming to him and confessing her mistake. He imagined himself as an understanding father taking in his sorry, chastened child. But when time went by and Mary stayed with Shelley, he felt less forgiving. He and his wife toughened their stance and would have nothing to do with her. The Godwins were bowing to pressure from society. They wanted to keep their other children free from the taint of disgrace. Also, with a business to run, they feared driving off disapproving customers.

  Her parents’ hard line pained Mary, who believed she was following Wollstonecraft’s brave example. Unwilling to think that her father could take such a firm position on his own, she blamed her stepmother for swaying him. “I detest Mrs G.,” she told Shelley in anger. Mary felt further hurt when Isabella, her Scottish friend, failed to answer her letters. At last a reply came from a family member who wrote that the Baxters disapproved of Mary’s behavior; Isabella would not be corresponding with her. Mary sought comfort from the man she loved. “Dear good creature press me to you and hug your own Mary to your heart,” she bade him.

  Jane might come home, the Godwins said, if she promised to break off all contact with Mary and Shelley. She could go to the country and board with a family that had not heard her story. In this way, her reputation might still be protected. But again Jane opposed her parents; she insisted that she had done nothing shameful. Fanny bravely defied Mr. and Mrs. Godwin in her own way and made secret visits to Mary, Jane, and Shelley. She told worrisome tales of money troubles at home.

  This sketch is of Mary Godwin at the approximate age of sixteen.

  On November 30, Harriet gave birth to a son, whom she named Charles Shelley. She, too, had been ready to offer forgiveness. Instead Shelley asked her for his handkerchiefs and stockings. “He cares not for me now,” Harriet wrote to a friend. “He never asks after me or sends me word how he is going on. In short, the man I once loved is dead. This is a vampire.” Despite the separation and change in affections, there was never a question of divorce. Divorces were rare in England in the early 1800s, and a woman had no legal right to one. A man could obtain a divorce through an act of Parliament, but this cost a great deal of money.

  Shelley’s law-student friend, Thomas Love Peacock

  Mary, Shelley, and Jane spent happy days that fall, giving little thought to Harriet. With the writer Thomas Peacock, they took long walks that ended at a pond where they sailed paper boats. Dark-haired, sleepy-eyed Peacock was a cheerful companion who often joined them for meals. Some days, Mary brought a book to the St. Pancras churchyard and read at her mother’s grave. She would also be a mother before long; her baby was due to be born in April.

  Night was the time for fireside ghost stories. Shelley knew just what to say to arouse Jane’s active imagination. It amused him to remind her that the clock had struck one, the “witching time of night.” He then asked in an ominous voice “if it is not horrible to feel the silence of night tingling in our ears.” This was enough to send Jane to her room, too frightened to sleep. Within minutes she would be back, her expression wild, insisting that her pillow had moved from the bed to the chair unaided by human hands.

  Before long, Jane went too far with her show of fear. She rolled on the floor and moaned, forcing Shelley to stay up with her till dawn. Jane craved attention and might well have been pretending. She occupied an awkward position in a household with a pair of lovers who had a baby on the way, and she often felt left out.

  There were two anxious weeks when Shelley hid in the home Peacock shared with his mother, leaving Mary and Jane on their own. He was avoiding the authorities who sought to lock him away in debtors’ prison. According to the law, reneging on a debt was as wicked a crime as theft or fraud. If arrested, Shelley would stay behind bars until he found the means to repay what he owed. “Mary love—we must be united,” Shelley wrote to her from his hideout. “My mind without yours is dead & cold as the dark midnight river when the moon is down.” Mary illuminated his life, and in his poetry he compared her to the moon:

  . . . all my being became bright or dim

  As the Moon’s image in a summer sea,

  According as she smiled or frowned on me . . .

  Mary met Shelley secretly and hurriedl
y in dark places. She lived for Sundays, when the law forbade bailiffs from making arrests. Then he could be with her from one midnight to the next. These were days devoted to “Love in idleness,” as Mary called them, days of lying in bed and talking for hours, and she savored them. “To sleep & talk—why this is merely vegetating,” grumbled Jane, excluded and bored.

  In January 1815, Percy’s grandfather Sir Bysshe Shelley died. Feeling generous upon inheriting his father’s estate, Sir Timothy rescued Percy by paying his most pressing debts. He granted Percy a yearly allowance of a thousand pounds, of which two hundred went to Harriet. Sir Timothy was less concerned about his son and daughter-in-law than about his own money and property. He hoped to stop Percy from obtaining post-obit loans, which would drain the family wealth.

  Percy lied and told his father that he needed twelve hundred pounds to repay a loan from William Godwin. He then gave Godwin a thousand pounds and kept the remaining two hundred for himself. Shelley felt bound by his promise to help Godwin financially despite the older man’s treatment of Mary. Godwin had no difficulty taking the money, which he believed he had as much right to as anyone else. Yet if he encountered Mary and Shelley on the street, he passed as if they were strangers.