Vindication (55 page)

Formally, the girls were set apart from dutiful Charles Clairmont, who was sent for six years to Charterhouse, a London school for boys. Les Goddesses were taught largely at home–not necessarily a disadvantage with its publications, its political debate, and visitors like the Lambs and Coleridge. Godwin took them to Coleridge's lectures at the Royal Institution. Mary Godwin wrote later: ‘There is a peculiarity in the education of a daughter brought up by a father only, which tends to develop early a thousand of those portions of mind, which are folded up, and often destroyed, under mere feminine tuition.' Jane and Mary had alternate
spells at boarding-schools, and then in 1812–13 Mary joined the household of Godwin's friend Baxter in Dundee.

Fanny stayed at home, an unrescued Cinderella at the mercy of Mrs Godwin's temper–‘the bad baby', the Lambs called her. Someone–it sounds like Mrs Godwin–told Fanny that others wore themselves out working to keep her. Godwin's catalepsy came back; Fanny watched him anxiously. Henry Reveley, a playmate in childhood, recalled that this ‘amiable and loving little girl' was pitted with smallpox. It may not have been much, since to children any blemish looms large, but, if true, it would have been impossible to shield a girl. At some point Fanny began to suffer from depression. She apologised to her sister Mary for her ‘torpor', with resolutions to transform her ‘faults'. ‘So young in life & so melancholy'–Jane shook her head over Fanny. Without looks, dowry or feminine wiles, Fanny had small chance of marriage. The brutal economics of Jane Austen demonstrate the alternatives for young women of that generation. They are visible in
Emma
in the misery of the polished pianist Jane Fairfax who is due to become a governess, and in
The Watsons
a girl unable to contain her tears when her brother reproaches her as ‘a weight upon your family'. Fanny's charity status, compounded by her ‘torpor', licensed the similar reproach.

Godwin's answer to the enquiry about Wollstonecraft's daughters reflects the partisan atmosphere that had settled on a household where every child, bar Fanny, had a blood tie to one parent. Godwin pictures Mary–‘my own daughter'–as ‘bold', ‘imperious', ‘invincible' in her perseverance, and Fanny's superior in her appetite for knowledge. Fanny is ‘somewhat given to indolence'–hardly recognisable here as the lark-like child whose intelligence had intensified Mary Wollstonecraft's love for her. Godwin sees a subdued girl who is quiet, unshowy, observant, and disposed to follow her own thoughts. Though he wasn't asked about looks, he again puts forward his own daughter. She is ‘very pretty', compared with Fanny who, he allows, is ‘in general prepossessing'. Godwin boasted to Shelley that Mary was like her mother. Actually, Mary's pallor, high forehead, and long, elegant nose resembled her father's; and this resemblance would become more pronounced in her forties in the moon-pale Rothwell
portrait with the smoothed and parted hair of the Victorian period. But a miniature in her teens, angled to mirror her mother in the Opie portrait, does show the likeness at that time: the same heavily dented upper lip, curled at the left corner, the marked brows, the whisps of hair clustering on the forehead. Her grey eyes are dreamier than her mother's, her lips thinner, and she's more delicate, with fine, nut-brown hair that spun about and tangled as she turned her head.

 

In the spring of 1814, les Goddesses were all three at home when Shelley returned to Skinner Street. He came this time without his wife, who was in Bath. On 23 May, Fanny–just twenty–was sent off for the summer to Pentredevy, near Swansea. This fact gets passed over, but could be important. Until then, Fanny almost never left home–partly reluctance to leave what home she had; partly the legacy of her mother's protectiveness towards ‘Papa'–in his fits of sleep–as spelt out in Wollstonecraft's ‘Lessons'; and partly acquiescence in the lack of plans for her. So why Wales just now? One purpose was to meet her Wollstonecraft aunts who were to come over from Ireland, but that would hardly have occupied the whole summer. Another possible reason lies in a set of notebooks in the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. The notebooks belonged to a Shelley enthusiast, Captain Edward Augustus Silsbee, who elicited Jane's remarkably acute and detailed recollections in old age. She recalled that when her mother, Mrs Godwin, thought that ‘Shelley was in love with [Fanny] or might be', she sent Fanny away. Jane was not always reliable, but this sounds plausible, given Shelley's worship of Wollstonecraft and willingness to discern her in Fanny. Whatever the truth, Fanny's absence that June and July had life-changing repercussions for all three girls. Jane also recalled Shelley's telling Mary that his wife Harriet no longer loved him and that the child she was carrying was not his.

The more Mary loathed ‘Mamma', the more she took ‘pride & delight' in her real mother. At sixteen, it became Mary's habit to commune with her in St Pancras churchyard. On the plain table-tombstone, beneath the willows Godwin had planted, the girl saw the same name as her own:

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN

Author of

A VINDICATION

OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN:

Born 27 April, 1759:

Died 10 September, 1797.

 

Shelley, meeting her there on Sunday 26 June, embraced this imaginative inheritance. ‘I would unite/ With thy beloved name, thou Child of love and light,' he said in his secret self. Mary would recall ‘that churchyard, with its sacred tomb, was the spot where first love shone in your dear eyes'. She was to be his ‘spirit's mate', a channel of inspiration from a mother whose life and fame seemed to clothe this daughter in a ‘radiance' that shone also from the shelter of her father's own ‘immortal name'. This girl with her great white tablet of a forehead was beautiful and free as, calmly, she confessed her love, ready to break conventions for his sake. He thought she had ‘the subtlest & most exquisitely fashioned intelligence', and told her that ‘among women there is no equal mind to yours'. Poor Harriet could not compete.

‘I am in want of stockings, hanks, and Mrs W[ollstonecraft]'s posthumous works,' Shelley let Harriet know soon after he left her. Stockings and handkerchiefs were sent. Wollstonecraft's works Harriet retained.

His passion was for Mary's aura as Wollstonecraft's daughter, Harriet protested.

‘It is no reproach to me that you have never filled my heart with an all-sufficing passion,' he told her. Shelley expected his pregnant wife to condone his abandonment as the action of a higher being. ‘I murmur not if you feel incapable of compassion & love for the object & sharer of my passion.'

He had ‘no doubts of the evils of marriage,–Mrs Wollstonecraft reasons too well for that'. It would have been from Shelley that Mary, five years younger, learnt her mother's theory. Godwin was aghast at Shelley's blithe proposal to make off with his teenage daughter. Godwin argued for marital fidelity, he thought convincingly, ever ready to believe that reason
must carry the day. But the lovers, accompanied by Jane–Fanny was still in Wales–stole away at 5 a.m. on 28 July, and made for France. The girls wore black silk dresses, hoping to look grown-up, Mary in fact already pregnant and rather wan.

After a stormy Channel crossing she saw ‘the sun rise broad, red, and cloudless over the pier' at Calais, and stared at women in high bonnets with their hair pulled back. As they travelled on through France, they were appalled by the pillage of war: ‘a plague,' Mary wrote, ‘which in his pride, man inflicts on his fellow'. Like her mother twenty years earlier, Mary Godwin observed brutalised faces as well as roofless houses, gardens covered with the white dust of torn-down cottages, and sullen, filthy lodgings. All this she set down in a
History of a Six Weeks Tour
, modelled on Mary Wollstonecraft's
Travels
. Her party carried Wollstonecraft's writings and Godwin's
Memoirs
in their bags. As they travelled by boat along the Rhine from Basle to Baden, Shelley read the
Travels
aloud.

‘This is one of my very favorite Books,' Jane enthused in her new journal on 30 August 1814. ‘The language is so very flowing & Eloquent & it is altogether a beautiful Poem…The Rhine was extremely rapid–the Waves borrowed the divine colours of the sky.'

Mrs Godwin did not blame Jane for running away. She blamed Mary Godwin, in a moan to one of her authors, Lady Mount Cashell (as she continued to call her). From now on, Mrs Godwin set up Mary as the cause of everything that went wrong in her life and prime target for her rage. Jane, won over to the cause of free love, refused to go home, and to everyone outside that home became from this time ‘Clara', ‘Clare', ‘Clary' and eventually ‘Claire'. Mrs Godwin was no match for Shelley's high-flown eloquence backed by the starry shade of Mary Wollstonecraft. In truth, his self-righteousness over his susceptibility to a succession of women shows how far he mistook Wollstonecraft who never practised free love. Claire, aged seventeen, was a convert to this misapprehension when she approached Byron in the spring of 1816: she told him she believed in nature and detested marriage, reducing Wollstonecraft's reseeding of women's nature to an offer of guilt-free sex. ‘I shall ever remember the gentleness of your manners & the wild originality of your countenance,' she wrote to her lover afterwards.

In her sexual freedom did Claire model herself, not on the real Wollstonecraft, but on a dead celebrity distorted by report? What some see in Claire Clairmont is a perpetuation of a contemporary view of Wollstonecraft: a caricature of rash passion. Fanny, in contrast, had a deep-souled sense of her mother's ‘superior being'. In 1816 Fanny Blood's brother George returned to London after an absence of twenty-six years. ‘Everything he has told me of my mother has encreased my love and admiration of her memory,' Fanny wrote to Mary and Shelley. ‘I have determined never to live to be a disgrace to
such a mother
.' Only an inward ‘revolution' could overcome her ‘faults'–her ‘torpor'–and so find beings ‘to love and esteem me'. Fanny's depression is usually explained as an inheritance from her mother, though her status in the home is cause enough. This inferiority was reinforced by her exclusion from the Shelley party, underlined by her stepmother's report that Fanny was their ‘laughing stock'–intended to detach Fanny further from her sister.

Fanny did defend herself to Mary and Shelley, who had yielded to Claire's wish to follow Byron to Geneva.

‘Mary gave a great deal of pain the day I parted from you,' Fanny wrote on 29 May 1816, ‘believe my dear friend's that my attatchment to you has grown out of your individual worth, and talents, & perhaps also because I found the world deserted you I loved you the more. What ever faults I may have I am not
sordid
or vulgar. I love you for
yourselves alone
[.] I endeavour to be as frank with you as possible that you may understand my real character.'

Mary brushed off Fanny's pain with another reproach. A silence preceded Fanny's apology, on 29 July: ‘I plead guilty to the charge of having written in some degree in an ill humour.' She offered a summary of current events–‘mixed up with as little spleen as possible'. Spleen. Indolence. Torpor. Ill-humour. These were the words for what Fanny called ‘the dreadful state of mind I generally labour under & which I in vain endeavour to get rid of'.

Quickly, she shuts this off, and moves to the case for the unemployed in the riots following the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. She sees that talk of a change of ministers ‘can effect no good; it is a change of the whole system of things that is wanted'. She relays a conversation with Robert Owen, the Lanarkshire cotton manufacturer, factory reformer and pioneer trade
unionist. ‘He told me the other day that he wished our mother were living[,] as he had never before met with a person who thought so exactly as he did–or who would have so warmly and zealously entered into his plans.' Fanny was sceptical of Owen's optimism. His expectation ‘to make the rich give up their possessions and live in a state of equality is too romantic to be believed'. Fanny takes a dim view of Owen's rhetoric, and interjects with stuttering conviction: ‘I hate, and am am sick, at heart at the misery I see my fellow beings suffering–but I own I should not like to live to see the extinction of all genius, talent, and elevated generous feeling in great Britain, which I conceive to be the natural consequence of Mr Owens plan…' Here, Fanny demonstrates her own more sophisticated grasp of Mary Wollstonecraft's politics.

Fanny's letter slips in a covert plea to join her sister. ‘I had rather live all my life with the Genevese as you and Jane describe than live in London with the most bril[l]iant beings that exist.' Contrite, Mary bought Fanny a Swiss watch. It was a gesture–no more; Mary did not offer Fanny a home despite the comfort Fanny could offer. (A year and a half before, in London, Mary's first baby had died. While Claire and Shelley had skipped off as usual to town, Mary notes in her
Journals
, ‘Fanny comes, wet through; she dines, and stays the evening; talk about many things…') So it happened that a caring sister was ousted by a careless stepsister who confessed to Byron: ‘I cannot say I had so great an affection for [Fanny] as might be expected.' Though Claire and Mary quarrelled, Fanny was never preferred, for Shelley had come to need Claire, her vivacity and sense of adventure a complement to Mary's kindred spirit. This jostling but (for Shelley) fertile unit of Mary and Claire was therefore closed to Fanny, who had been the focus of Shelley's attention before and during his first visits to Skinner Street. Yet Fanny too continued to love poetry, and asked Shelley to send his work, saying in 1816, ‘It is only the poets who are eternal benefactors of their fellow-creatures'–a source for Shelley's famous words in 1821: ‘Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.'