Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
Harriet had never recovered emotionally after Shelley abandoned her and their two children, Ianthe and Charles. As her hopes
for a reconciliation dwindled, Harriet’s depression deepened. In a letter to a friend in Ireland, she asked, “Is it wrong,
do you think, to put an end to all one’s sorrows? I often think of it—all is so gloomy and desolate. Shall I find repose in
another world? Oh grave, why do you not tell us what is beyond thee?”
On November 9, Harriet left her lodgings in London and was never seen alive again. She wrote to her elder sister Eliza, revealing
that she planned to kill herself and asking her forgiveness. As for her husband, “I have not written to Bysshe. Oh, no, what
would it avail, my wishes or my prayers would not be attended to by him, and yet should he receive this, perhaps he might
grant my request to let Ianthe remain with you always. Dear lovely child, with you she will enjoy much happiness, with him
none. My dear Bysshe, let me conjure you by the remembrance of our days of happiness to grant my last wish.” Her desperate,
pathetic tone should have moved even the hardest heart: “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 that happiness which you have deprived
me of.” If there was a reason for suicide, the letter expressed it: “Too wretched to exert myself, lowered in the opinion
of everyone, why should I drag on a miserable existence? embittered by past recollections & not one ray of hope to reason
on for the future.”
Harriet’s body was discovered on December 10, floating in the Serpentine in Hyde Park in London. She had been living by herself
under the name Harriet Smith, and a coroner’s jury looking into her death brought down the verdict “found drowned.” Mary and
Shelley did not receive the news for five days, and then only secondhand through a friend of theirs.
Harriet’s suicide brought out the worst in Shelley, as Fanny’s had in Godwin. The
Times
printed a brief notice of the coroner’s trial, noting that the deceased had been “far advanced in pregnancy.” Shelley, who
had gone to London after he heard the news, wrote Mary that Harriet had become a prostitute. He denied any responsibility
for her death, instead choosing to blame her family, the Westbrooks. He wrote,
It seems that this poor woman—the most innocent of her abhorred & unnatural family—was driven from her father’s house, & descended
the steps of prostitution until she lived with a groom of the name of Smith, who deserting her, she killed herself.— There
can be no question that the beastly viper her sister, unable to gain profit from her connexion with me—has secured to herself
the fortune of the old man—who is now dying—by the murder of this poor creature.
These lies only indicate Shelley’s inability to face up to the consequences of his own actions.
Many years later, Claire Clairmont told a different story. She described Harriet’s lover, presumably the father of her unborn
child, as a soldier who had been ordered abroad. His letters did not reach her and she became depressed that she had been
abandoned a second time by a man she had loved. She had remarked to her sister, “I don’t think I am made to inspire love,
and you know my husband abandoned me.” So on a gloomy, rainy day Harriet acted on the suicidal impulses that she had entertained
for a long time.
This suicide would haunt Mary, for in her mind Harriet’s fate was linked to her own. It hit her even harder than Fanny’s death
had, for she could more seriously blame herself for Harriet’s despair, and she felt keenly the guilt that Shelley repressed
or denied. Indeed, Mary would come to believe that this lonely death marked the beginning of a series of tragedies. Harriet
became Mary’s own personal ghost who returned to haunt her whenever she was at a low ebb, leading to Mary’s belief that her
happiness always came at the expense of someone else. In her journal in 1839, twenty-three years later, she would write, “Poor
Harriet to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows as the atonement claimed by fate for her death.” An
attempt to cross out the last nine words was made later, in a different color ink.
Shelley now filed suit to gain custody of his children, who were with Harriet’s sister, but Harriet’s family took steps to
block him. Shelley’s lawyer suggested that his case for regaining the children would be stronger if he were a married man,
so on December 30, less than a month after the discovery of Harriet’s suicide, Mary and Percy pledged their vows in a London
church. The unseemly haste with which this was done was also a result of pressure by the Godwins. Mrs. Godwin had told Percy
that her husband would commit suicide if they did not marry.
Shelley presented the idea of marriage to Mary in a letter containing probably the least romantic proposal in history—certainly
by a great poet: “[Y]our nominal union with me . . . a mere form appertaining to you will not be barren of good.” According
to Mrs. Godwin—not necessarily a reliable source, but she should have her say too—Mary told Percy, “Of course you are free
to do what you please . . . [but] if you do not marry me . . . I will destroy myself and my child with me.” In any event,
the knot was speedily tied. Percy wrote to Lord Byron that his marriage to Mary “was a change, (if it be a change) which had
principally her feeling in respect to Godwin for its object. I need not inform you that this is simply with us a measure of
convenience.” Claire was unable to appear at the wedding, for her advanced pregnancy was now impossible to conceal.
Godwin was by his account the happiest person at the ceremony. He wrote to his brother,
The piece of news I have to tell, however, is that I went to church with this tall girl some little time ago to be married.
Her husband is the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, of Field Place, in the county of Sussex, Baronet. So that, according
to the vulgar ideas of the world, she is well married, and I have great hopes the young man will make her a good husband.
You will wonder, I daresay, how a girl without a penny of fortune should meet with so good a match. But such are the ups and
downs of this world. For my part I care but little, comparatively, about wealth, so that it should be her destiny in life
to be respectable, virtuous, and contented.
Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.
As for the happy bride, she wrote a few lines in her journal summarizing everything that happened between December 16 and
the end of the month. Cryptically, she mentions “a marriage takes place on the 29th,” even getting the date wrong. Two weeks
later, she wrote Byron,
Another incident has also occurred which will surprise you, perhaps; It is a little piece of egotism in me to mention it—but
it allows me to sign myself—in assuring you of my esteem and sincere friendship—
Mary W. Shelley
So Mary had chosen to take the name from the tombstone rather than that of the father who had raised and educated her. Ever
after, she would call herself “Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley.” Even Godwin referred to her in his journals as “MWS.”
The greater part of the letter Mary sent Byron in January was concerned with another event. On January 12, 1817, Claire gave
birth to a girl she called Alba. The Shelley group’s nickname for Byron had been Albé (for L. B.). Claire had written Byron
at least four letters since she last saw him, typically alternating between teasing (she quoted from
Glenarvon
) and appealing for his love. It was Claire’s hope that the birth of the child would bring her and Byron back together. Mary’s
letter informed him that Claire “sends her affectionate love to you.” As with the letters he had received from Claire, Byron
did not respond to this one. Through Shelley, however, he made a request that Claire change Alba’s name. The child was later
baptized Clare Allegra Byron, and she would become known as Allegra.
Byron wrote to a friend giving his opinion about the affair with Claire.
You know . . . that odd-headed girl—who introduced herself to me shortly before I left England. . . . I never loved nor pretended
to love her—but a man is a man —& if a girl of eighteen comes prancing to you at all hours—there is but one way—the suite
of all this is that she was with
child
—& returned to England to assist in peopling that desolate island. . . . The next question is the brat
mine
? I have reason to think so—for I know as much as one can know such a thing.
Before their wedding, Mary had begged Shelley for “a house with a lawn a river or lake—noble trees & divine mountains that
should be our little mouse hole to retire to—But never mind this—give me a garden &
absentia Clariae
[“the absence of Claire”] and I will thank my love for many favours.” She would get the house, but not the absence.
The Shelleys took a lease on a house in Marlow, up the Thames River just far enough from London so that it had a rural feeling.
It had a large room that Shelley used as a library, and a backyard garden where Mary could putter. Life at Marlow was not
the private, quiet existence Mary had yearned for. Because they were so close to London, many friends and acquaintances came
to visit. The house was often filled with guests like Leigh Hunt, his wife, and their many children. Hunt and his brother
John had been imprisoned for two years for publishing attacks on the prince regent in their journal. Shelley had donated money
for their defense, and Hunt became an early enthusiast of Shelley’s poetry. Another regular visitor was Shelley’s old friend
Thomas Love Peacock, who lived nearby with his mother. Peacock and Mary did not like each other very much, for he felt loyal
to Harriet, whom he had known first. (Peacock was so attracted to Claire, on the other hand, that he proposed to her. Claire
turned him down; all her hopes were still on Byron.)
The Shelleys also went to literary gatherings at Peacock’s mother’s house and the home of the Hunts, where Shelley first met
John Keats, then also struggling to make his reputation as a poet. William Hazlitt, critic, essayist, and friend of Godwin’s,
described Shelley at this time as a man with “a fire in his eye, a fever in his blood, a maggot in his brain, a hectic flutter
in his speech, which mark out the philosophic fanatic . . . there is a slenderness of constitutional
stamina,
which renders the flesh no match for the spirit.”
Though their friends knew the truth, the Shelleys kept up the pretense that Claire’s baby belonged to someone else. “Claire
has reassumed her maiden character,” Shelley wrote Byron, as if posing as such made it so. When the Godwins came to visit,
Allegra was presented as a cousin of the Hunts that Claire was helping to care for. She was a beautiful child, quite like
her parents. Shelley told Byron, “Her eyes are the most intelligent I ever saw in so young an infant. Her hair is black, her
eyes deeply blue, and her mouth exquisitely shaped.”
Claire was fiercely proud of the infant. She wrote to Byron:
My affections are few & therefore strong—the extreme solitude in which I live has concentrated them to one point and that
point is my lovely child. I study her pleasure all day long—she is so fond of me that I hold her in my arms till I am nearly
falling on purpose to delight her. We sleep together and if you knew the extreme happiness I feel when she nestles closer
to me, when in listening to our regular breathing together, I could tear my flesh in twenty thousand different directions
to ensure her good.
Claire’s happiness increased when Percy bought her a piano at the end of April. She would play and sing by candlelight in
the evenings, and Percy liked to sit and listen. Percy—as Byron had earlier—wrote a lyric poem celebrating Claire’s voice.
Contrary to his usual procedure, Shelley did not show the poem to Mary but sent it to the
Oxford Herald
to be published under a pseudonym. Even the title, “To Constantia,” was intended to conceal the identity of the author and
his subject. Marriage did not end the secrets that existed between Mary and Shelley.
Those secrets may have been easier to keep since Mary had many distractions. She was working hard to finish her novel, she
had a young child, and now she found herself pregnant again as well. The eldest Hunt son, Thornton Leigh Hunt, years later
described his youthful impressions of Mary at this time:
Shelley’s fullness of vitality did not at that time seem to be shared by the partner of his life . . . she did not do justice
to herself either in her aspect or in the tone of her conversation. . . . With a figure that needed to be set off, she was
careless in her dress; and the decision of purpose which ultimately gained her the playful title of “Wilful Woman” then appeared
. . . her temper being easily crossed, and her resentments taking a somewhat querulous and peevish tone.
Peacock, perhaps more perceptively, drew a literary portrait of the relationship between Mary and Percy (who was thinly disguised
as Scythrop in Peacock’s novel
Nightmare Abbey
). Of Mary: “She loved Scythrop, she hardly knew why . . . she felt her fondness increase or diminish in an inverse ratio
to his. . . . Thus, when his love was flowing, hers was ebbing; when his was ebbing, hers was flowing. Now and then there
were moments of level tide, when reciprocal affection seemed to promise imperturbable harmony.”
Mary’s work on
Frankenstein
may have accounted for the “peevishness” that young Thornton Hunt noticed in her. On March 5, 1817, she had a significant
dream that she mentioned to Leigh Hunt. She explained the abrupt ending of the letter she sent him by writing, “I had a dream
tonight of the dead being alive which has affected my spirits.” It had been exactly two years since the death of her first
child, and Mary was still haunted by the desire to bring her daughter back to life.
Mary came up with a new structure for her book; it now became a story within a story within a story. One reason for this was
to pad the manuscript to novel length, but it was also a way to distance herself from the emotions at the heart of the tale.
The book has three narrators—all male. Captain Robert Walton, who serves as a neutral observer, begins the tale in letters
to his sister, Margaret Walton Saville, a woman with the same initials as Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The recipient of the
letters never appears or takes a role in the action; the reader only assumes she received the letters her brother writes.
Mary drew her model from both Goethe’s
The Sorrows of Young Werther,
and Rousseau’s
Julie,
as well as Samuel Richardson’s works. At the time, the epistolatory form was thought to add to a novel’s verisimilitude.
Goethe was frequently asked whether the letters that make up his novel were real.