The book:
Despite spending their lives apart, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley share long-lasting impacts on both literature and feminism. Charlotte Gordon’s wonderful double biography, Romantic Outlaws, reunites mother and daughter.
Wollstonecraft was a radical writer who advocated – and lived a life of – equality for women. She was also a fearless and intrepid character, chasing pirates in Sweden and sailing to Paris for the French Revolution. She sadly died shortly after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Godwin – later known as Mary Shelly.
Shelly was equally forthright in commanding her own destiny, as entwined as it became with her husband, Percy Shelly, with whom she eloped aged 16. Before his death at 29, she toured Italy with him and Lord Byron, travels which led to the writing of her classic novel Frankenstein.
Romantic Outlaws is a fascinating account of two vastly influential lives. We hope you enjoy this month’s choice.
What the Guardian thought:
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 Gordon 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, 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.
Wollstonecraft’s abject, possessive love affair with Imlay contrasted agonisingly with her belief that women should never be dependent on a man. Her daughter, widowed by the age of 25, spent much of the years of her life with Shelley in a state of depressive anxiety as to his faithfulness – particularly regarding his attachment to her stepsister Claire Clairmont, who had a daughter by Byron. Both Marys were left to bring up their children largely alone – and Gordon details the domestic drudgery of trailing round Europe with babies, hangers-on and not much money.
Godwin published a hasty memoir of his wife in which he included her correspondence with Imlay – therefore consigning her for years to be characterised chiefly as a clingy hysteric. Shelley, on the other hand, having established her husband’s posthumous reputation with her discreetly edited collection of his poems, was scrubbed up for posterity (largely at the hands of her respectable daughter-in-law) as a model Victorian literary lady. Romantic Outlaws does a creditable job of binding mother and daughter together again.
Lucy Lethbridge - Read the full review
To order a Shelf Improvement subscription, please ring our Shelf Improvement Order Hotline on 0330 333 6868. We are waiting your call to spruce up old bookshelves.
