Chapter C: KEGAN PAUL: Prefatory Memoir to ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters to

Imlay.’

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[Sidenote: An ‘Alecto.’]

Adieu, thou excellent woman! thou reverse of that hyena in petticoats, Mrs. Wollstonecraft; who to this day discharges her ink and gall on Maria Antoinette, whose unparalleled sufferings have not yet stanched that Alecto’s blazing ferocity.

HORACE WALPOLE: _Letters to Hannah More_, 1795, in the former’s ‘Letters,’ edited by Peter Cunningham. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1861.

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Thank Providence for the tranquillity and happiness we enjoy in this country, in spite of the philosophizing serpents we have in our bosom, the Paines, the Tookes, and the Wollstonecrafts.

HORACE WALPOLE: _Letter to Hannah More_, 1792, in ‘Memoirs of Hannah More,’ by W. Roberts. New York: Harper & Bros., 1834.

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[Sidenote: An opposite view.]

I saw her three or four times when she was Mrs. Godwin, and never saw a woman who would have been better fitted to do honor to her sex, if she had not fallen on evil times, and into evil hands. But it is hardly possible for any one to conceive what those times were, who has not lived in them.

ROBERT SOUTHEY: ‘Correspondence with Caroline Bowles.’ Dublin: Hodges, Figgis & Co. London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1881.

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Southey is said to have had her portrait hanging in his study; and he wrote of her as one

“Who among women left no equal mind
When from the world she passed; and I could weep
To think that _she_ is to the grave gone down!”

FOOTNOTES:

[4] While denying herself gowns and wine-glasses Mary was, however, generously assisting her father, brothers and sisters.

MARY W. GODWIN (SHELLEY).

1797-1851.

MARY W. GODWIN (SHELLEY).

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born on the 30th of August, 1797. “Two angels, one of Life and one of Death,” together entered the door of William Godwin. Long after, Shelley wrote:

“They say that thou wert lovely from thy birth,
Of glorious parents thou aspiring child:
I wonder not--for One then left this earth
Whose life was like a setting planet mild,
Which clothed thee in the radiance undefiled
Of its departing glory.”

A spirit akin to that of Greek tragedy informs the double story of mother and daughter. Mary Godwin inherited her fate. The peculiar reverence in which she must necessarily have held the mother who had died to give her life, the implicit confidence with which she must have received that mother’s doctrines, as set forth in her life and preserved in her books,--this was the strongest determining influence in the life of the girl, Mary Godwin. When, at the age of seventeen, she unhesitatingly plighted her faith to a man already bound by the laws of society to another, there is significance in the fact that their hands were clasped over her mother’s grave--the spot which a woman of opposite traditions must have shunned with shame at such a moment. That sacred place seemed fittest for the strange betrothal of Mary Godwin, who had no doubt that the mother who there slept would have smiled upon the lovers. Censure of this step has properly no place in a sketch of Mary Godwin Shelley; the entire responsibility rests with Shelley and her parents; her action was simply an inevitable result.

From July 28, 1814, till the fatal 8th of the same month in 1822, her life was one with Shelley’s. Immeasurably greater as he was, we may yet claim for his wife that she influenced his genius in one respect and in one instance: it was her persuasion that led him, in ‘The Cenci,’ closer to realities, and she regarded that work as a promise of the warmer grasp of human interests on his part that might at last “touch the chord of sympathy between him and his countrymen.”

She was formally married to Shelley in 1816, on the death of Harriet Shelley. Robbed of her husband by death in 1822, Mary returned to London in the following year for the sake of Percy, her only surviving child. Her own wishes would have led her to remain in Italy. For some time she resided with her father, but subsequently removed to Kentish Town, and then to Harrow, that she might be near her boy at school.

FRANKENSTEIN had been published in 1818; and Godwin saw in it that power which induced him to advise her, in this her time of need, to turn to literature as a resource. She worked hard with her pen to meet the expenses of her son’s education, and also contributed to the support of Godwin, now old and failing. She sent her father, at a time when he was greatly embarrassed, her novel _Valperga_ in MS., begging him to publish it and use the proceeds as his own. The generosity of this gift reminds us of her dead mother. This novel was published in 1823; _The Last Man_, in 1824; _Perkin Warbeck_, in 1830; _Lodore_, in 1835; and _Falkner_, in 1837. Mrs. Shelley also wrote most of the Italian and Spanish lives in Lardner’s Encyclopedia, and two volumes of travels entitled _Rambles in Germany and Italy_; and edited (1839-40) Shelley’s works and his letters, by far her most important service to literature. Her son became Sir Percy Shelley on the death of his grandfather in 1844.

On the 21st of February, 1851, Mary Shelley closed a life that long had “crept on a broken wing.” We may believe that she rejoiced at the coming of the hour, when, in Shelley’s own words, “Life should no more divide what death could join together.”

She appears to have differed from her mother in possessing a greater delicacy, more imaginativeness, something less of intellectual boldness and independence. She had, however, all Mary Wollstonecraft’s tendency to melancholy: “I fear you are a Wollstonecraft,” the equable Godwin wrote her. She endeavored, in her happier days, to guard against this evil by mingling in society, where she was animated and charming. Henry Crabb Robinson mentions her at Godwin’s in 1823, looking “elegant and sickly and young”; one calls to mind the description of Shelley, “like some elegant flower drooping on its stem.” Robinson also relates what he had heard from Harriet Martineau, that Mrs. Shelley “never had asked a favor of any one, and never would.” This is a touch of her mother’s pride, intensified.

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[Sidenote: Godwin’s account of Mary and her sister.]

Your enquiries relate principally to the two daughters of Mary Wollstonecraft. They are neither of them brought up with an exclusive attention to the system and ideas of their mother. I lost her in 1797, and in 1801 I married a second time. One among the motives which led me to choose this was, the feeling I had in myself of an incompetence for the education of daughters. The present Mrs. Godwin has great strength and activity of mind, but is not exclusively a follower of the notions of their mother; and indeed, having formed a family establishment without having a previous provision for the support of a family, neither Mrs. Godwin nor I have leisure enough for reducing novel theories of education to practice, while we both of us honestly endeavor, as far as our opportunities will permit, to improve the mind and characters of the younger branches of our family.

Of the two persons to whom your inquiries relate, my own daughter is considerably superior in capacity to the one her mother had before. Fanny, the eldest, is of a quiet, modest, unshowy disposition, somewhat given to indolence, which is her greatest fault, but sober, observing, peculiarly clear and distinct in the faculty of memory, and disposed to exercise her own thoughts and follow her own judgment. Mary, my daughter, is the reverse of her in many particulars. She is singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in every thing she undertakes almost invincible. My own daughter is, I believe, very pretty; Fanny[5] is by no means handsome, but in general prepossessing.

WILLIAM GODWIN: _Letter to an unknown correspondent_, in ‘William Godwin, His Friends and Contemporaries,’ by C. Kegan Paul, Boston: Roberts Bros., 1876.

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[Sidenote: Her stepmother.]

Mrs. Godwin [formerly Mrs. Clairmont], was a harsh stepmother.... She had strong views, in which many would agree, that each child should be educated to some definite duties, with a view of filling some useful place in life; but this arrangement soon had at least a show of partiality. It was found that Jane Clairmont’s mission in life, according to her mother’s view, was to have all the education and even accomplishments which their slender means would admit; while household drudgery was from an early age discovered to be the life-work of Fanny and Mary Godwin. That Mary Shelley was afterward a worthy intellectual companion to Shelley, is in no degree due to Mrs. Godwin, and little to her father’s direct teaching. All the education she had up to the time when she linked her fate with Shelley’s, was self-gained; the merits of such a work as ‘Frankenstein’ were her own; the faults were those of her home-training.