The Lady and Her Monsters (20 page)

I
n the months following the summer of 1816, death seemed to shadow the members of the Lake Geneva party and all of those who were, in some fashion or another, affiliated with them.

Percy, Mary, their baby, and Claire returned to London during the first week of September. Percy headed to Marlow to find a home for them, while Mary and Claire made a quick dash to Bath, where they planned to sequester Claire so she could wait for the arrival of her baby. Claire wrote to Byron that Bath was “a very fine airy town, built up the sides of hills in high terraces.” But even with the beauty that surrounded her, she found it solemn and boring. The Godwins had not been told of her pregnancy.

Even though Byron had made it clear he wanted nothing to do with her, Claire continued to hope for a future with him, writing letters meant to sway him: “You should have a nice house to live in, my nice little girl (I hope it will be a girl) to educate & the friends who could best visit you & we should have nice poems written (to) by you & copied by little me to improve this vile world which always reviles in proportions to its envy.” Lord Byron did not reply to any of her letters.

Through it all, Mary continued to write her story.

Her father and stepmother had not changed their position toward Mary and Percy, and worst of all would not allow Fanny to visit them.

Finally, Fanny decided to take control of the direction of her life. In late September 1816, when she climbed aboard a coach bound for Bristol, everyone believed she was on her way to visit her aunts. But Fanny had already made up her mind about how this trip would progress and also how it was going to end. On reaching her destination, she wrote two letters, one for her sister Mary, and one for the only father she had ever known. The letters said she wished to “depart immediately to the spot from which [she] hope[d] never to remove.” Then, taking a deep swig from a bottle of laudanum, Fanny Imlay committed suicide, succeeding where her mother had failed twice.

These actions were those of a young woman who not only believed she was trapped in a bad situation, but also saw herself as a burden to those she loved and who loved her. Her conundrum was explained in a note she left on the bedside table: “I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed.”

When the letters arrived, William Godwin and Percy Shelley both set out for Bristol, but they arrived too late. By then,
The Cambrian,
the newspaper of the area, had already published the “melancholy discovery” of Fanny's body. The script told of how “a most respectable-looking female arrived in the Mackworth Arms Inn on Wednesday night by the Cambrian coach from Bristol . . . Much agitation was created in the house by her non-appearance yesterday morning and in forcing the chamber door, she was found a corpse, with the remains of a bottle of laudanum on the table, and a note.” At the time of her death she had been wearing a “blue-striped skirt with a white body . . . & appeared 23 years of age, with long brown hair, dark complexion.”

Godwin and Shelley returned to London with the news. Mary was eager to go to Bristol and see her sister, but her father warned her not to. He did not want their extended family and acquaintances to know that Fanny had taken her own life. Instead he wanted them to believe she had been struck down by a fatal illness while on her journey. Godwin instructed Mary to let things be.

It wasn't long before the Godwins began to place blame on Mary and Percy for Fanny's suicide. “From the fatal day of Mary's elopement, Fanny's mind had been unsettled,” Godwin wrote to a friend. “Her duty was with us; but I am afraid her affections were with her.” They felt that Fanny's split loyalties between her sister and Shelley and her stepfamily had caused Fanny to break apart.

Mrs. Godwin, as always, was more vocal. In her opinion it was not so much broken loyalties that had destroyed Fanny, but rather a broken heart. Years after the event, the Godwins wrote to Maria Gisborne, a friend of the family. In the letter they detailed how in love Fanny had been with Percy, how broken she had become when she learned her affections were not reciprocated. “Mr. G. told me that the three girls were all equally in love with ——,” wrote Maria Gisborne, “and that the oldest put an end to her existence owing to the preference given to the younger sister.”

As those rumors spread, Fanny became pitied by some, mocked by others, and referred to as “a very plain girl and odd in her manners and opinions,” though she had been “upright and generous. She was pitied and respected.”

Blaming Mary and Percy allowed the Godwins to distance themselves from the act and the situation. They did not have to think themselves partly responsible, as they were, for what Fanny had endured.

Mary, Percy, and Claire secluded themselves to mourn Fanny, a sense of melancholy settling upon Mary's household. They must have known that while they weren't to blame for Fanny's suicide, they weren't completely innocent either. They had expressed a certain degree of callousness toward Fanny, and Mary must have felt a deeper sense of guilt than the rest.

More shocking news came when they learned of another death. And while it was tragic, they had to admit (although never aloud) that this passing came with a certain measure of advantage, if one could call it that. On December 10, the body of Harriet Westbrook, Percy Shelley's legal wife, was found in tattered clothes, bloated and floating in the Serpentine River. No one recognized her right away, and only later was the body identified. She had also committed suicide, and Shelley received the news from his friend Thomas Hookman Jr.

Harriet Westbrook had also left a note, but unlike Fanny's, this one was more bitter and meant to hurt, placing guilt and blame for her demise directly on Percy Shelley and his deeds: “My dear Besshee, let me conjure you by the remembrance of our days of happiness to grant my last wish. Do not take your innocent child from Eliza [Harriet's sister] who has been more than I have, who has watched over her with such increasing care. Do not refuse my last request, I never could refuse you and if you had never left me I might have lived, but as it is I freely forgive you and may you enjoy the happiness which you have deprived me of.”

At the time of her death, Harriet was carrying a child whose paternity was unknown. Rumors soon began to circulate that not long after Shelley left her, she became involved with several men at once and the child she had been carrying could have belonged to any one of them.

Shelley quickly went to London, intent on taking custody of his two children, Ianthe and Charles. He felt that as their father, he not only had a legal right to them but also a moral one. They would live in his household, which Mary supported. But Shelley had not considered that Harriet's family might disagree with him, and that is precisely what they did, taking Shelley to court and suing him for custody, which they won.

While in London, he finally realized what he had done to Harriet and how badly he had handled the events leading up to his departure from the marriage. Harriet and the children had been forced to return to her father's home, but they were driven away for monetary reasons. Penniless and virtually without options, Harriet could only care for herself and the children by using her body as a prostitute. She had lived for a time with a man named John Smith, but he had also abandoned her, causing her further emotional upset. Unable to withstand the humiliating desertion of another man, she had jumped into the river. Even worse, in a letter, Shelley accused Harriet's sister, Eliza, of murder, saying it was her desire for Mr. Westbrook's money that had killed her sister, Harriet.

Of course, the last comment was not true. Eliza was overbearing and always in the way, but she had not killed her sister any more than Percy had. But just as the Godwins had done with Fanny's death, placing blame on Eliza for Harriet's passing allowed him to think of himself as blameless.

On December 30, 1816, just weeks after Harriet's death, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin became husband and wife in the halls of St. Mildred's Church in London. It appears that a very eager Mary pressured Percy to marry her soon after Harriet's passing. Later in life, during her interview with Captain Silsbee, Claire Clairmont reported that Mary had threatened to commit suicide if Shelley did not marry her. “Mary sat at the end of room . . . When Shelley objected he cd not marry against his principles . . . She advanced put her hand on his shoulder said . . . if you don't marry me I'll do as Harriet did.” Silsbee's notes continued: “S. turned very pale Miss C. says after these 2 deaths/suicides one summer one in Dec. Shelley was never the same.”

William and Mrs. Godwin acted as witnesses. Godwin was pleased that his daughter had finally married, though he played coy about the marriage and the man she had married. “Her husband is the oldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley . . . ,” he wrote to Philipp Huel Godwin, “so that according to the vulgar ideas of the world, she is well married; I have great hopes that the young man will make a good husband. You will wonder how a girl with not a penny of fortune, should meet with so good a match. But such are the ways . . . of this world. For my part, I care little about wealth.” In the letter, he clearly lied. Always destitute, he wrote to family, friends, and acquaintances in what he termed “begging letters,” trying to find those who could provide him with support.

O
n January 12, 1817, Claire gave birth to a baby girl. Mary, proud of her new status as a married woman, wrote to Lord Byron about the birth and told him about her marriage to Percy. “I took it upon myself the task & pleasure of informing you that Clara was safely delivered of a little girl yesterday morning . . . at four . . . Another incident has also occurred which will surprise you, perhaps. It is a little piece of egotism on me to mention it—but it allows me to sign myself—in assuring you of my esteem & sincere friendship, Mary W. Shelley.”

Although the last months of 1816 had been full of sorrow and personal calamities, Mary continued to write her book. By the time spring arrived, she already had a first draft, and by the middle of May 1817, she felt the hardest job had been done. In a diary entry of Wednesday, May 14, 1817, she wrote, “Read Pliny and Clarke—S. reads Hist of Fr. Rev. and corrects F. Write Preface—Finis.” It was now time to find a publisher.

A
s summer neared, work began in earnest to find a home for
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.
This fictional tale of a zealous scientist raiding graveyards in order to build a creature did not immediately find a publisher, and by the middle of June, rejections began to trickle in. John Murray, the well-known publisher and friend of Byron, was the first to say no. Although Mary always maintained that it had been more her husband's idea to seek publication, she had to admit that those rejections stung. The whole ordeal put Mary in a bad mood.

At the end of summer, the manuscript was finally accepted by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and James, and was published in January 1818. The firm was neither a newly established nor a disreputable one; Shelley had done some deals with them previously. As the year of 1818 began, copies of the book were sent to family and friends, and critiques were eagerly awaited.

According to the
Quarterly Review,
Frankenstein
“inculculates no lesson of conduct, manners, or morality . . . it fatigues the feelings without interesting the understanding; it gratuitously harasses the heart, and only adds to the store, already too great, of painful sensation . . . the reader [is left,] after a struggle between laughter and loathing, in doubt whether the head or the heart of the author be most diseased.” Other journals were quick to point out the flaws, the abundance of gory details, and what they felt was the somewhat amateurish writing. Some were slightly gentler, lauding the author's imagination and the style of writing.

There was also the mystery of authorship, because the book had been published anonymously. This was not an uncommon occurrence in the 1800s, particularly when a woman was the author. Given that Mary was writing about subjects usually reserved for scientific men, it had been decided to leave the authorship of
Frankenstein
blank. Thus, readers were left to wonder and guess at the mind lurking behind those pages. Earlier in his career William Godwin published a novel,
St. Leon,
that spoke to similar themes, and many critics now questioned if he was the author of
Frankenstein
. Others felt that not Godwin but his onetime disciple and now son-in-law, Percy Shelley, had.

Shelley was known to have an affinity for such subjects, and his published works—the direction they took and the way he expressed those ideas—made the comparisons to
Frankenstein
obvious.

In 1815 Percy Shelley had published a poem titled “Alastor
.
” In it, a young and idealistic narrator seeking wisdom, truth, and knowledge questioned Nature in order to find the answers to his ever-increasing inquiries and musings. Like Victor Frankenstein, the poem's narrator has been on a journey in search of inner and outer guidance, but has discovered nothing. Such a search had brought the “Alastor” narrator, just like Frankenstein, to question death, both figuratively and literally:

And my heart ever gazes on the depth

Of thy deep mysteries. I have made my bed

In charnels and coffins, where black death

Keeps record of the trophies won from thee.

Hoping to still the obstinate questioning

Of thee and thine, by forcing some lone ghost