The actual lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley intersected only briefly, for Wollstonecraft died of septicaemia in 1797, shortly after giving birth. Yet, as Charlotte Gordon’s book makes clear, Shelley’s life was inextricably bound to the mother she never knew. How could it not be? Wollstonecraft’s career as a journalist, polemicist, freethinker and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman fired her daughter’s ambition as a writer. Furthermore, as the child of two radical freethinkers (her father was the political philosopher William Godwin) who disapproved of marriage, the younger Mary was almost duty-bound to elope at a young age. Yet when, aged 17, she ran off with the poet Shelley, her father was furious, only reconciling with her when Shelley’s wife, Harriet, killed herself and the couple could be respectably married. Harriet is one of several female casualties who litter these pages (Fanny, Wollstonecraft’s daughter by her lover Gilbert Imlay, was another), the Romantic project of free love being strewn with troublesome contradictions.
Many books have been written on both Wollstonecraft and Shelley, and Gordon acknowledges her debt to them – but her hefty double biography is the first to examine the women’s lives in tandem, with alternate chapters on each, working chronologically. For the reader, this means darting back and forth in time, of necessity often covering ground in one life that has been covered in the other. But it does successfully build up a sense of the striking differences, as well as the similarities, in the lives of mother and daughter, one dying as the other was born on the cusp of the 19th century. Mary Wollstonecraft visited Paris in the blood-stained years of a revolution she had celebrated, but the deep pessimism of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein reflected the anxieties of a new industrial age.
Related: The 100 best novels: No 8 – Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818)
Continue reading...
No comments:
Post a Comment