Mary Shelley: A Biography

Mary Shelley: A Biography

by Muriel Spark
Mary Shelley: A Biography

Mary Shelley: A Biography

by Muriel Spark

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Overview

At the age of twenty, Mary Shelley secured her place in history by writing Frankenstein (1818), now acknowledged as one of the great literary classics. The daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley lived an unconventional life dogged by tragedy. At sixteen she scandalised England by eloping with her married lover, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but was widowed after only a few years of marriage. She went on to survive her husband by nearly thirty years and to support herself and her son as a writer. Here the great twentieth-century novelist Muriel Spark paints a portrait of a gothic icon. First published in 1951, this remarkable biography, reissued with previously unpublished material, recounts Mary Shelley's dramatic life, from her youth and turbulent marriage to her career as writer and editor. The young Spark, who would write The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie ten years later, discovered her vocation as a novelist in this study.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781847777676
Publisher: Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date: 04/01/2013
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 266
File size: 3 MB

About the Author

Muriel Spark was an award-winning Scottish novelist and poet, whose works include The Abbess of Crewe, A Far Cry from Kensington, The Finishing School, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She was also the editor of Poetry Review, a Dame of the British Empire, and a Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. Penelope Jardine is an artist and sculptor who lived with Muriel Spark for around 30 years.

Read an Excerpt

Mary Shelley


By Muriel Spark

Carcanet Press Ltd

Copyright © 2013 Administration Limited
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-768-3


CHAPTER 1

... ere my fame become
A star among the stars of mortal night,
If it indeed may cleave its natal gloom,
Its doubtful promise thus I would unite
With thy beloved name, thou Child of love and light.
SHELLEY, The Revolt of Islam
(dedication to Mary Shelley
)


We are hardly impressed with a sense of love and light when we look back now on that period of transition between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – the period of revolution and reaction which gave effect to the fame of Mary Shelley's parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Reason had not yet given way to feeling as the cult of the elect; and if we think now of the rationalist tracts, the elaborate arguments to prove man's perfectibility, the manifestos on the Rights of Man and the vindications of the Rights of Woman which drained their most vehement passions, love, we feel, had little place there, As for light, we are more likely to note its absence than otherwise, if at all we trouble to picture the atmospheric environment in which the progressives of the day progressed. In retrospect, Godwin as a man seems arrested always in a gloomy monochrome of thought, while Mary Wollstonecraft, warmer and more reckless, flounders through a monotonous series of misfortunes. But the importance of both William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft is enormous. They both wrote effective propaganda. It is a promotional genre which acts on its own time, and may or may not pioneer whole future ways of life. Reason and justice were their literary themes. When they attempted to put their theories into practice they often had to modify their theories. Thoughts had to be expressed in the light of what ought to be; life had to be lived in the untidy actuality that it is.

To visualise Mary Shelley's parents in the actual setting they occupied, we find them, as they were, celebrated figures in the cause of enlightenment, conscious of no gloom but that of the ignorance surrounding them, and confirmed in the belief that they bore a light to emblazon history. And in fact, the light has in some manner sifted on to history, so that we no longer notice the original torch-bearers; reform has deprived the reformers of their justification. In the same way, we should be wrong to assume that the brief union between Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, strangely dispassionate and calculated as it appears, is indescribable as love. The way of life they discovered together for a short time had a softening influence on both; they were devoted to the same cause, and two people who love the same thing find it easy to love each other.

When Mary Wollstonecraft became Godwin's mistress, she had already made her name as a pioneer feminist, with her book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; it is now, more than ever, required reading for studies in women's rights. To the large public, this was a monstrously wanton piece of literature; while the intelligentsia considered it a daring thrust for the rational liberation cause.

Born in London in 1759, Mary Wollstonecraft belonged to that type of family whose social category was then becoming difficult to define. The Wollstonecrafts were impoverished to the point of want, yet their family connections bore that strain of gentility which banned them from giving their children an education and environment to suit them for work outside their home. Tied to household drudgery, the females of the family were yet neither of 'the leisured class' nor of 'the poor.' Mary Wollstonecraft's father was a spendthrift and a drunkard, moving whenever failing fortunes compelled him, from one hopeless enterprise to the other. Her mother, a weak type of woman, submitted to his continual bullying, and Mary from an early age acted as protector to the family, meanwhile seizing what fragmentary opportunities of education came her way. For a time she sought independence by becoming a companion to a rich, querulous lady; and here again she found herself in a mid-way position, being neither quite a domestic nor the equal of her mistress. It was not until she became friendly with a publisher who encouraged her to study French and German, and gave her translating work, that she began to feel herself a member of society. The circle which she now entered drew its spirit from the French Revolution, and Mary eagerly took its cause to herself.

Edmund Burke's retort to the famous pro-revolutionary sermon by Dr. Price at the Old Jewry in 1789 evoked, that same year, a spirited answer from Mary in her Letter to Edmund Burke. Though this publication was overshadowed by Tom Paine's Rights of Man, it served to confirm Mary as one of the set. The question of everyone's rights was in the air, and it was a salutary time for the appearance, two years later, of Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman. In all her main writings she gave vent to much pent-up indignation by drawing on her own early experience of a tyrannous drunkard father: one might imagine, from reading her account, that all fathers of the day were tyrants, all men seducers, all women miserable victims of the system. Mary Wollstonecraft understood the uses of overstatement as well as Jane Austen knew those of understatement. But it is on the important question of the education of women that she is most balanced and interesting.

All this time, Mary Wollstonecraft was by no means financially secure, but she was warm-hearted, and continued to share her small earnings with her needy family. Her attachment to Fuseli, the Swiss painter, should be mentioned, since it shows an impulsive, even reckless side of her nature that was noticeably inherited by Mary Shelley. Mary Wollstonecraft pursued a friendship she had made with the talented, witty artist, in terms that left her emotional disinterestedness in some doubt. Fuseli was already married, and Mary Wollstonecraft was firmly discouraged; and when, many years later, she attempted to retrieve the over-ardent letters she had addressed to him, Fuseli did not comply, either through wilfulness or indifference. The letters were found among the painter's papers after his death.

Her next enterprise was a visit to Paris to report on the Revolution. Here Mary Wollstonecraft met Gilbert Imlay, an American who had fought in the War of Independence and with whom she fell deeply in love. The affection was mutual at first, and before long they were living together. She might well have wished to be married, but was not unduly concerned that no legal tie bound her to Imlay, taking pride no doubt in the personal triumph of their voluntary relationship. But her nature, in spite of her intellectual ability, was predominantly coloured by passion, and she abandoned herself, her thoughts, and all her actions to the furtherance of their union. Imlay, however, was not an enduring type of lover. Attracted by Mary Wollstonecraft's manner and appearance – and she is described as having many personal graces – he does not seem to have been able to tolerate her company for long periods. Mary Wollstonecraft gave birth to their child, Fanny, while Imlay's absences from Paris became longer, his promises of return vaguer. The distracted exponent of the rights of woman was driven to attempted suicide for the sake of her lover.

After her second mishandled suicidal attempt, she made a suggestion to Imlay which may find an echo in Mary Shelley's behaviour, long after her mother's death. This suggestion, made by Mary Wollstonecraft under feverish stress, was that she should share a home with Imlay and his new mistress. To pacify her, Imlay agreed, but withdrew his acquiescence shortly afterwards.

Mary Wollstonecraft's love letters to Imlay and her sociological work make as antithetical reading as ever came from any one pen. They represent, in fact, two facets of character that were never reconciled, although to some extent they were modified by the exhausting quality of her experiences; her passion, after she was deserted by Imlay, became chastened; her social indignation, after the Rights of Woman, abated. But a certain habit of depressiveness which persisted from her early formative years may have been perpetuated in her daughter Fanny Imlay. Her daughter by Godwin, the later Mary Shelley, also acquired from her mother a strong pessimistic strain, but in her Godwin's intellectual stoicism tempered the passionate pessimism which finally drove Fanny Imlay to suicide.

Mary Wollstonecraft had met William Godwin in her earlier days, when, though mainly occupied in writing and translating for a publisher, she had begun to acquire a reputation for talent. Godwin had not been greatly impressed by her, but upon their renewed acquaintance, shortly after Mary's spiritual defeat at Imlay's hands, Godwin wrote,

The partiality we conceived for each other was in that mode which I have always considered as the purest and most refined kind of love. It grew with equal advances in the minds of each. ... One sex did not take the priority which long established custom has awarded it. ... When in the course of things the disclosure came there was nothing in the matter for either party to disclose to the other. There was no period of throes and resolute explanations attendant upon the tale. It was friendship melting into love.


It would be difficult to say how accurately Godwin expressed Mary Wollstonecraft's feelings in these sentences, which certainly bear the bleak authenticity of his own experience. Most probably he was not far wrong. Godwin knew of Mary's recent humiliations; and his non-moralising attitude must have soothed her. We dearly love to see our follies and weaknesses promoted to a theoretical rectitude; we feel warmly towards those who can offer a meaning for our suffering and ignominy. All this Godwin was in a position to do, and it is most likely that Mary Wollstonecraft, drained of passion and disillusioned about female emancipation, loved him because he reinstated her confidence and pride.

William Godwin was over forty years of age when he and Mary Wollstonecraft embarked on their union, setting up each in a separate house in Somers Town, in deference to their ideas of independence. She, with her child Fanny Imlay, lived but a few doors away from Godwin, and the couple formed the habit of sending notes to each other, some of which survive to show their arrangement working to all apparent satisfaction.

Godwin was brought up in a Nonconformist environment. His father was a dissenting minister and he himself was a practising 'reverend' until the age of twenty-nine when he dropped the title. In his later emancipation which came to maturity in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, published in 1793, some writers have seen an emotional revolt against puritanical restraint, rather than a reasoned arrival at a rationalist philosophy. If this is so, it provides a temperamental parallel with Mary Wollstonecraft and her subjective approach; but in Godwin's case the subjective element is far more difficult to detect and is so strongly restrained in fact, that his remorseless logic hardly makes reasonable human reading. So far as his influence on Mary Shelley is to be sought in Godwin's early life, it is worth noting that he was remarkably addicted to study, pursuing knowledge of all varieties of literature from the classics to contemporaneous thought, with none but inner compulsion.

His friends were drawn from those who espoused the dangerous objectives of the Revolution, and Godwin showed no small personal courage in supporting them on many occasions and in publicly recording his opinions on human liberty, before Political Justice presented his comprehensive proposals for a reformed social system. This work immediately raised him from obscurity to the level of a modern sage. 'No one,' wrote Hazlitt some years later, 'was more talked of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth, justice was the theme, his name was not far off. ... No work in our time gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the celebrated Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.'

The principle that concerns us most here is that which bears on Godwin's attitude to property, since it is a prominent factor in his relationship with his daughter and the poet Shelley. Godwin envisaged a system whereby property should be distributed according to each man's reasonable needs. And the just administration of property, Godwin said, does not stop there. 'Every man is entitled, so far as the general stock will suffice, not only to the means of being but of well-being.'

Godwin did not hesitate to apply this doctrine to himself, and if we understand this we can encounter without shock the frequent money demands that Godwin made, as though by prerogative, on his daughter and Shelley, while refusing to condone their behaviour. Godwin was merely fulfilling one set of his principles: a courageous and original thinker, he had made certain valuable contributions to society, and he accepted the idea that Shelley, the son of a wealthy baronet, should provide him with the means of well-being. Shelley, who had approached the philosopher with the offer of means, and who held Political Justice as something sacred, was never really in doubt that Godwin was later entitled to the money he asked. Many of Shelley's biographers have not grasped the fact that Godwin and Shelley were putting into practice a law, which, while outside the Law, was respected by both of them. Of course, this arrangement did not allow for the very human circumstance that people prefer to be generous to people they like; Shelley lost his personal respect – though never his intellectual regard – for Godwin and was very short of money himself, and so Godwin's demands very often annoyed him. But in justice to Godwin we should not consider whether his view is an acceptable one to ourselves, but remember that he was himself generous to others, when he had the means, in accordance with his principles. In this, his daughter Mary resembled him. And to be sure, there are other aspects of Godwin's relationship with Shelley which merit such indignation that it is strange and perhaps significant that Shelley's supporters have chosen this material issue as a wholehearted theme of contempt for Godwin.

The reaction that followed the war with revolutionary France had set in by the time Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft set up together in Somers Town. It was no longer possible to repudiate the law, to strike at the roots of government, to dangle before men's eyes the ideal of a perfected society liberated from coercive rule, without incurring more than a frown from authority. Public tolerance of Godwin swung to a general hostility. To his friends, among the left-wing thinkers of his time, and to many of the rising generation, Godwin continued to occupy his lofty position, instructing, writing and studying with all his former industry. He first entered on an unconventional union with Mary Wollstonecraft, then married her conventionally at Old St. Pancras Church: a child was coming, and Godwin was moved to waive his disapproval of marriage for Mary Wollstonecraft's sake. He still stood by his principles, he told a friend, though 'nothing but a regard for the happiness of the individual, which I have no right to injure, would have induced me to submit to an institution which I wish to see abolished.'

It seems clear that Mary Wollstonecraft's distrust and fear of men, aggravated by Imlay's treatment of her, was still latent within her. She had known life as a discarded mistress, as the mother of an illegitimate child, and she ardently desired this marriage before her next child was born. None the less, this tends to support the view that Mary Wollstonecraft's character never achieved integration. She was attracted towards the unconventional mode of life and the type of mind that embraced it; but life had taught her that convention was a protector, and she was equally attracted towards the security it offered. It is to Godwin's credit as a human being, if not as a practitioner of his own faith, that he recognised her anxiety and alleviated it at the cost of abstract principles. Especially is this so when Godwin must have felt the criticism of his intellectual friends as keenly as he did the congratulations of others. 'Your broken resolution in regard to matrimony encourages me to hope that you will ere long embrace the Gospel ...,' wrote his mother, whose gentle words must have fairly tried the philosopher.


(Continues...)

Excerpted from Mary Shelley by Muriel Spark. Copyright © 2013 Administration Limited. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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