Vindication (58 page)

Now and then, a confession breaks, volcanic, through the orchestration of her control. ‘From Morning till Night, month after month and year after year never to see a person one cares a pin to see…to have one's soul ever full of rage and despair…Has Hell any thing worse to offer?' As one
who had spent her youth in the company of Godwin and the Shelleys, it was nothing less than ‘misery' to endure talk of cards and servants. She hoped to cultivate ‘philosophic indifference to all external circumstances'.

Her relief was writing. Claire's private writings–her journals and letters to the friends of her youth–are earthquakes of unspoken words. When Mrs Godwin blurted out her daughter's past to a fellow-teacher in Russia who visited London, Claire's reputation as a teacher collapsed. Again, scandal; again, Claire moves on; again, she learns the prudence of keeping her past to herself. In 1827, the fifth year of her exile, she writes in her
Journals
: ‘The world is closed in silence to me.'

 

What caught the public eye, of course, were sexual freedoms. By flouting discretion, Wollstonecraft, her daughter Mary, and followers Margaret Mason and Claire all appeared to confirm licentious womanhood. In the privacy of her journal, Mary Shelley defends her attempt to act out women's desires despite the prospect of disappointment: ‘the most contemptible of all lives is where you live in the world & none of your passions or affections are called into action'.

Passion has tended to obscure what else Wollstonecraft passed on to the next generation: intellectual ambition and independence through work. Public events like the Terror had their enormous impact, but in another sense never distracted Wollstonecraft from the cumulative strength of continuing education. Self-teaching and the tests of expatriation were central to her life, and to those of the next generation who consciously re-enact and re-explore the course of existence she had pioneered. ‘I believe that we are sent here to educate ourselves,' Mary Shelley says in her
Journals
. After Shelley died, she earned her living by her pen, encouraged by Mrs Mason: ‘Composing is certainly the best antidote to melancholy.' Mary preferred to support Percy Florence herself, rather than surrender him to the Shelley family. When Byron advised the opposite course, she was shaken.

‘I can, I do, live in solitude, I can act independently of the opinion of others; but the expression of that opinion if it be in opposition to mine shakes my nature to its foundations. I differed from L[ord] B[yron] entirely,'
she confided to Jane Williams, ‘but I literally writhed under the idea that one so near me should advise me to a mode of conduct which appeared little short of madness & nothing short of death.' Byron had not taken in Mary Shelley's point in
Frankenstein
: to create and not to nurture one's creature is nothing short of monstrous. It was hard to go alone yet retain Mary's degree of sensitivity. Godwin indeed reproached her, saying ‘you are a Wollstonecraft'; but this reproach of mother and daughter could take a different colour. These resourceful natures who don't lose their sensitivities pose the possibility of an improved breed over hardened people who seek power.

Generosity was another trait. Mary sent Claire £12 when the two went separate ways after Shelley's death, even though Mary's own situation at the end of 1822 was equally threatened by the scandals of the past eight years. In contrast, Jane Williams wheedled sums of money from Claire, while shunning contact. As an Englishwoman who had left her husband for a lover, Jane Williams had lived amongst the outcasts in Pisa, but did not take on their character. She betrayed Mary's friendship, perpetuating the myth of a cold wife, despite Mary's confidence to her a year after Shelley's death: ‘I cannot live without loving and being loved, without sympathy; if this is denied to me, I must die. Would that the hour were come.' Though Mary Shelley had more reserve than her mother, there is the same depth of feeling–the voice is the same. The myth of coldness fused with slander of Mary Shelley as social climber, betrayer of her radical inheritance. ‘I have ever defended women when oppressed,' she protested. It was not so in every instance: she had been blind to Shelley's first wife, Harriet; she had not encouraged him to visit the children of that marriage; and she had been unfeeling to Fanny, left to bear the domestic tyrannies of their stepmother. Yet during her lonely years back in England, Mary Shelley did indeed befriend women like Caroline Norton, who fought the law that deprived separated wives of the right to their children. She also proposed to her publisher a history of women or a book on the lives of celebrated women.

Margaret Mason too confirmed the formative sway of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose ‘mind appeared more noble & her understanding more cultivated
than any others I had known'. Her
Advice to Young Mothers
‘by a Grandmother'(1823) might be said to complete the work Wollstonecraft had outlined at the time she died. Mrs Mason invented a gentle form of paediatric practice long before paediatrics was established as a branch of medicine. Much illness, she thought, was the result of neglect in childhood. No sign of trouble in a child should be thought trifling; it was dangerous for children to exercise a stiff upper lip. Clearly,
Advice
did not reach British boarding-schools like the Clergy Daughters' School at Cowan Bridge whose repressive ethos killed off two coughing Brontë girls in 1825.
Advice
predicts a future when preventative medicine should be the pre-eminent treatment.

The far-sightedness of its cures is most apparent in what it has to say about mental health. Mrs Mason recognised that a child's state of mind affects physical health. No punishment, she says, should make a child feel contemptible: ‘Teach a being to despise himself, and prepare the mind for the reception of every vice.' She forbids adults to lock children in the dark. ‘Terror is a sensation against which they should be protected with the greatest care: the injuries done by fear, to the physical and moral health, are incalculable.' At the same time, courage should be the first quality to be cultivated, in girls as much as boys.
Advice
rejects the notion ‘that all women have a right to be cowards. This opinion is extremely injurious to the health of young girls, who would often try to conquer their fears, if they were not taught to believe it a thing impossible, and that they even appear more amiable as helpless than as independent beings.' Older girls must be relieved of ‘the tortures of fashion'. Mrs Mason deplores constricted or down-sized constructions of womanhood. Attempts to produce excessive smallness were more likely to produce the ‘ugliness' of bad health. Many handsome women, she insists, have broad hips.

Mrs Mason gave her royalties to Claire. What she wanted was recognition, as when Vaccà and other doctors praised her medical stance. ‘A woman of good sense, who studies that book will want no physician for her children,' Vaccà said, and added, ‘there is a great deal in this book of which many physicians are ignorant'.

‘Yes,' Mrs Mason agreed, ‘–for it is impossible for any man to know all
those little things which a mother who watches her children carefully can observe.'

‘I don't mean that,' Vaccà said. ‘I mean the medical part of the book. None but a medical man could be perfectly aware of the merit of that part of the book which treats of diseases.'

In 1825–6 she corresponded about
Advice
with George Parkman of Boston who sent doctor-to-doctor comments: ‘here's my variation on your remedy…I'd try…' and so on. As a young Harvard graduate, Dr Parkman had accompanied Joel Barlow when he had sailed for France in 1811 as US Ambassador. There, Parkman had studied mental illness in women, under the aged Pinel at the Salpêtrière. He had returned to Boston determined to introduce optimism about recovery and a similar humane mildness in the mental hospital he established (now merged with Massachusetts General Hospital). His colleagues, he tells Mrs Mason, shunned him for opposing their lucrative links with drugstores. (And later, a fellow-physician went so far as to murder him.) He questioned the doses doctors, in their ignorance, administered, and his letters concur with Mrs Mason that doctors' intervention too often denied the body's capacity to heal itself. In this way,
Advice
opened up a dialogue with a world that had cast her out.

 

‘Vesuvius' subsided early in Tighe's relations with Margaret Mason. He regarded Wollstonecraft's ideas of equality as suitable only for a small percentage of the upper class. Sex should be moderate: an ‘emission' once a week sufficed. It was an urge to be curtailed as long as possible, and when it had to happen, offered no more than physical relief. He didn't share Margaret's exalted views of Italy. To Tighe, it was as small-minded, as given to social pretension, as any other country. No radical, he believed with Margaret they had been at fault in cutting loose from the laws of their society.

Tighe remained an exile who tried to put down roots in his adopted country. He composed travel pieces suitably embellished with Latin tags, and embarked on a year-by-year history of Pisa. But his favourite occupation was growing potatoes, reminiscent of Ireland. Though he was scientific
and wished his variety of potato to advance agriculture in Italy, he blinded himself to the Italian habit of feeding
patate
to animals. His family nicknamed him ‘Tatty'. Increasingly reclusive, Tatty lived on his own floor of their rented house, and his scaled-down needs made him think his retired way of living must suit them all.

Though Tatty was fond of his daughters, their mother became uneasy about her will leaving all she had to him. She feared his absorption with potatoes might lead him to discount what was due to their daughters if she should die–as her continued ill health seemed to threaten. She therefore took two steps.

In April 1818 she revealed her real identity to Laurette and Nerina, and related how Mary Wollstonecraft had changed her. It was a sombre declaration: she blamed herself for her marriage, and said that she had deserved to suffer as she did. Tight-lipped about the loss of her Mount Cashell children, she warned the girls, then aged nine and three, they must expect nothing from their grand relations. After the death of Mount Cashell in 1822 she was free to marry Tighe, but though she did need to legitimise their daughters, it was more urgent to secure them financially. In 1823, she inherited £6000 on the death of her mother. There are further indications that she was not as cut off as she gave out. She retained ties with her second son, Robert Mount Cashell; with her sister Diana who lived in Florence; and with her cosmopolite brother, John King. Then, in 1824, she contacted her eldest daughter, Helena, who had married Richard Robinson of Rokeby Hall, County Louth, in 1813.

Before Margaret married Tighe, granting him legal authority over their children and all she owned, she took her second decisive step. On 15 June 1824 she made a new will in her real name as the Dowager Countess of Mount Cashell, leaving everything she owned to ‘my excellent and beloved daughter Helena' in trust for ‘two young friends' of the Countess who were residing with her at Pisa in Tuscany. The Countess made this bequest, ‘relying on my beloved daughter the said Helena Eleanor Robinson to act in this matter as she knows I should wish her to do'. The will was witnessed by the Honourable John Harcourt King, who resided in Paris. The ‘young friends' were, of course, her illegitimate daughters and Helena's half-sisters, Laurette
and Nerina. The will proves that Margaret had complete trust in her thirty-year-old-daughter. A stray scrap amongst the Tighe papers records the expenses of a twenty-day journey that Helena, her husband and two little girls, together with governess and servants, undertook from Paris to Pisa.
Advice
, the previous year, had called its author ‘a Grandmother' but this grandmother had never seen her grandchildren. Now she met them. Behind the bare statements of £120 for two carriages with stops in Turin and Genoa, is this dramatic meeting with a daughter who had been eleven years old when she parted from her mother in Dresden nearly twenty years before. When mother and daughter evade the bias of the law, which kept money as far as possible in male hands and punished the illegitimate, they move united in the underworld of
The Wrongs of Woman
.

 

In Margaret Mason's anonymous novel,
The Sisters of Nansfield
(1824), an outcast mother, Mrs Maynard, has two daughters called Harriet and Fanny who grow up aware they have noble relations who will not recognise them. Harriet is an indolent beauty who elopes–disastrously–with a nobleman, while Fanny is a brown girl whose animated and intelligent expression makes her more attractive as a person. Sensitive Fanny is a comfort to her mother and attached to home. Why did Margaret Mason call the sisters ‘Harriet' and ‘Fanny', the names of the two young women lost to the post-Wollstonecraft milieu? In her Lady Mount Cashell days, Margaret had met Fanny Imlay on her visits to the Godwins, and she could well have met Harriet Shelley there in 1812. Odder, even, is that the characters and to some extent the fates of the fictional sisters forecast those of Laurette and Nerina who were at the time fifteen and nine.

By the age of eighteen, Laurette was bored. She was a beauty. The elaborate coils of her high-piled hair recall the abundant tresses of her grandmother, Lady Kingsborough, and her runaway aunt, Lady Mary. She was a fashionplate with sloping shoulders and balloon sleeves tapering to a tiny, belted waist in the style of the magazines that, at this time, captivated the Brontë children. A portrait of Laurette bears an ominous similarity to the languid ladies of Charlotte Brontë's imagination, who wait around for Byronic poseurs to spoil their lives.

In 1827 the Tighe family was living at Villa Archinto in the suburb of San Michele degli Scalzi. It was an unsuitable place for girls reaching marriageable age. Tighe and his wife, on their separate floors, were quarrelling over the future of Laurette and Nerina. At this point Mrs Mason (as she continued to be called–though now married to Tighe) made the most crucial of her decisions relating to her daughters. She must take them back to Pisa, leaving Tatty in the suburb. Since Tatty opposed this move, she would use all her own income to dress and present them well. They had to mix in society if they were to marry.