Shelley and the Marriage Question

This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft , and the first child of the philosopher, novelist, and journalist William Godwin. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. Godwin was left to bring up Mary, along with her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay , Wollstonecraft's child by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay.

Marriage was created for the pleasure of both

However, because the Memoirs revealed Wollstonecraft's affairs and her illegitimate child, they were seen as shocking. Mary Godwin read these memoirs and her mother's books, and was brought up to cherish her mother's memory. Mary's earliest years were happy, judging from the letters of William Godwin's housekeeper and nurse, Louisa Jones. Together, the Godwins started a publishing firm called M. Godwin, which sold children's books as well as stationery, maps, and games. However, the business did not turn a profit, and Godwin was forced to borrow substantial sums to keep it going. By , Godwin's business was close to failure, and he was "near to despair".

Though Mary Godwin received little formal education, her father tutored her in a broad range of subjects. He often took the children on educational outings, and they had access to his library and to the many intellectuals who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States Aaron Burr. She had a governess , a daily tutor, and read many of her father's children's books on Roman and Greek history in manuscript. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible. In June , Mary's father sent her to stay with the dissenting family of the radical William Baxter, near Dundee , Scotland.

It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered. Mary Godwin may have first met the radical poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley in the interval between her two stays in Scotland.

Percy Shelley therefore had difficulty gaining access to money until he inherited his estate, because his family did not want him wasting it on projects of "political justice".

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After several months of promises, Shelley announced that he either could not or would not pay off all of Godwin's debts. Godwin was angry and felt betrayed.

Mary and Percy began meeting each other secretly at Mary Wollstonecraft 's grave in St Pancras Churchyard , and they fell in love—she was nearly 17, he nearly At about the same time, Mary's father learned of Shelley's inability to pay off the father's debts. She saw Percy Shelley as an embodiment of her parents' liberal and reformist ideas of the s, particularly Godwin's view that marriage was a repressive monopoly, which he had argued in his edition of Political Justice but since retracted.

After convincing Mary Jane Godwin, who had pursued them to Calais , that they did not wish to return, the trio travelled to Paris, and then, by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot, through a France recently ravaged by war, to Switzerland. They travelled down the Rhine and by land to the Dutch port of Marsluys , arriving at Gravesend, Kent , on 13 September The situation awaiting Mary Godwin in England was fraught with complications, some of which she had not foreseen. Either before or during the journey, she had become pregnant.

She and Percy now found themselves penniless, and, to Mary's genuine surprise, her father refused to have anything to do with her. They maintained their intense programme of reading and writing, and entertained Percy Shelley's friends, such as Thomas Jefferson Hogg and the writer Thomas Love Peacock. Pregnant and often ill, Mary Godwin had to cope with Percy's joy at the birth of his son by Harriet Shelley in late and his constant outings with Claire Clairmont.

My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can.

I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. The loss of her child induced acute depression in Mary Godwin, who was haunted by visions of the baby; but she conceived again and had recovered by the summer. At Bishopsgate, Percy wrote his poem Alastor ; and on 24 January , Mary gave birth to a second child, William, named after her father, and soon nicknamed "Willmouse".

They planned to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron , whose recent affair with Claire had left her pregnant. Byron joined them on 25 May, with his young physician, John William Polidori , [54] and rented the Villa Diodati , close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny ; Percy Shelley rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront nearby.

I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative. I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus , published in In September , the astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year, and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her waking dream took place "between 2am and 3am" 16 June , several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story.

Mellor later argued Percy only "made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text. Robinson, editor of a facsimile edition of the Frankenstein manuscripts, concluded that Percy's contributions to the book "were no more than what most publishers' editors have provided new or old authors or, in fact, what colleagues have provided to each other after reading each other's works in progress.

On the morning of 10 October, Fanny Imlay was found dead in a room at a Swansea inn, along with a suicide note and a laudanum bottle. His lawyers advised him to improve his case by marrying; so he and Mary, who was pregnant again, married on 30 December at St Mildred's Church, Bread Street , London. Claire Clairmont gave birth to a baby girl on 13 January, at first called Alba, later Allegra.

There Mary Shelley gave birth to her third child, Clara, on 2 September. At Marlow, they entertained their new friends Marianne and Leigh Hunt , worked hard at their writing, and often discussed politics. Early in the summer of , Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein , which was published anonymously in January Reviewers and readers assumed that Percy Shelley was the author, since the book was published with his preface and dedicated to his political hero William Godwin. That autumn, Percy Shelley often lived away from home in London to evade creditors.

The threat of a debtor's prison , combined with their ill health and fears of losing custody of their children, contributed to the couple's decision to leave England for Italy on 12 March , taking Claire Clairmont and Alba with them. One of the party's first tasks on arriving in Italy was to hand Alba over to Byron, who was living in Venice. He had agreed to raise her so long as Claire had nothing more to do with her. The couple devoted their time to writing, reading, learning, sightseeing, and socialising.

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone, And left me in this dreary world alone? Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one— But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode. For thine own sake I cannot follow thee Do thou return for mine.

For a time, Mary Shelley found comfort only in her writing. Italy provided the Shelleys, Byron, and other exiles with a political freedom unattainable at home. Despite its associations with personal loss, Italy became for Mary Shelley "a country which memory painted as paradise". While Percy composed a series of major poems, Mary wrote the novel Matilda , [87] the historical novel Valperga , and the plays Proserpine and Midas. Mary wrote Valperga to help alleviate her father's financial difficulties, as Percy refused to assist him further. In December , the Shelleys travelled south with Claire Clairmont and their servants to Naples , where they stayed for three months, receiving only one visitor, a physician.

After leaving Naples, the Shelleys settled in Rome, the city where her husband wrote where "the meanest streets were strewed with truncated columns, broken capitals The voice of dead time, in still vibrations, is breathed from these dumb things, animated and glorified as they were by man". Once they were settled in, Percy broke the "evil news" to Claire that her daughter Allegra had died of typhus in a convent at Bagnacavallo.

Rather than wait for a doctor, Percy sat her in a bath of ice to staunch the bleeding, an act the doctor later told him saved her life. The coast offered Percy Shelley and Edward Williams the chance to enjoy their "perfect plaything for the summer", a new sailing boat. Ten days after the storm, three bodies washed up on the coast near Viareggio , midway between Livorno and Lerici.

After her husband's death, Mary Shelley lived for a year with Leigh Hunt and his family in Genoa , where she often saw Byron and transcribed his poems. She resolved to live by her pen and for her son, but her financial situation was precarious. On 23 July , she left Genoa for England and stayed with her father and stepmother in the Strand until a small advance from her father-in-law enabled her to lodge nearby.

Mary Shelley rejected this idea instantly. Mary Shelley busied herself with editing her husband's poems, among other literary endeavours, but concern for her son restricted her options. Sir Timothy threatened to stop the allowance if any biography of the poet were published. She also felt ostracised by those who, like Sir Timothy, still disapproved of her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley. She may have been, in the words of her biographer Muriel Spark , "a little in love" with Jane. Jane later disillusioned her by gossiping that Percy had preferred her to Mary, owing to Mary's inadequacy as a wife.

Payne fell in love with her and in asked her to marry him. She refused, saying that after being married to one genius, she could only marry another. Mary Shelley was aware of Payne's plan, but how seriously she took it is unclear. In , Mary Shelley was party to a scheme that enabled her friend Isabel Robinson and Isabel's lover, Mary Diana Dods , who wrote under the name David Lyndsay, to embark on a life together in France as man and wife. Weeks later she recovered, unscarred but without her youthful beauty. During the period —40, Mary Shelley was busy as an editor and writer.

She also wrote stories for ladies' magazines. She was still helping to support her father, and they looked out for publishers for each other. By , Percy's works were well-known and increasingly admired. Mary found a way to tell the story of Percy's life, nonetheless: Shelley continued to practice her mother's feminist principles by extending aid to women whom society disapproved of. Mary Shelley continued to treat potential romantic partners with caution. Mary Shelley's first concern during these years was the welfare of Percy Florence.

She honoured her late husband's wish that his son attend public school , and, with Sir Timothy's grudging help, had him educated at Harrow.

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To avoid boarding fees, she moved to Harrow on the Hill herself so that Percy could attend as a day scholar. In and , mother and son travelled together on the continent, journeys that Mary Shelley recorded in Rambles in Germany and Italy in , and In the mids, Mary Shelley found herself the target of three separate blackmailers. In , an Italian political exile called Gatteschi, whom she had met in Paris, threatened to publish letters she had sent him. In both these books, though, failure is viewed with compassion, in the context of human dignity and ideals. Frankenstein , on the other hand, portrays it as the destructive result of overreaching.

Sure enough, this idealistic young daughter of a former dissenting minister believed that right and wrong were a matter of fact, not just opinion. Mary never had the chance to be a prig. She had been ostracised by family and friends for running off with Percy, a married man, and was subjected to sniggering speculation by male acquaintances. In future years, Mary would sit through a sermon preached against her, find her husband viewed as fair game by other women, and her in-laws would campaign to take away her surviving child. Even so, sincere and engaging as it may be, her moral stance is not what makes Frankenstein feel so contemporary.

Nor does its early 19th-century technology.

Frankenstein at 200 – why hasn't Mary Shelley been given the respect she deserves?

Mary imagined first a combination of maths and alchemy — and then electricity in her revised edition — animating her patchwork corpse. But in the novel, myth powers technology and not the other way around. Frankenstein shows us that aspiration and progress are indistinguishable from hubris — until something goes wrong, when suddenly we see all too clearly what was reasonable endeavour and what overreaching.

By the time she wrote her classic, Mary was aware that the man she had married was an emotional and philosophical overreacher. For all his family wealth, Percy was often in debt. And his timing was staggeringly poor: Moreover, for a soi-disant writer, remarkably little of his work had been published; Mary spent a lot of time fair copying it to send to publishers.

But Frankenstein is no memoir.

Catalog Record: Shelley and the marriage question | Hathi Trust Digital Library

Frankenstein identifies the mismatch between human experience and what we are expected to become as technology and science advance. As well as being emotionally expressive, Frankenstein was informed by contemporary intellectual debate. Amateur speculation could be cutting-edge. Those who were professional gave fashionable public lectures, which encouraged more amateur participation. Think of the widespread reception of that towering 20th-century writer Sylvia Plath — no less a transformative poet than her husband Ted Hughes — as simply expressing her feelings. Ask a question Ask a question.

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