Real Life Romance: Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Shelley

Back when I started the Real Life Romance column, I promised to bring you love stories that had an impact on history – but I never promised that those romances would be pretty. One of the messiest and most famous romances in literary history was between Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Their romance was full of tragedy and drama and mayhem, but it also gave us two literary geniuses who assisted and inspired each other in their work. Trigger warning for a lot of death, infidelity, and rampant romanticism in art and life, with mixed results.

A note: many biographers refer to “Mary and Shelley,” by which they mean Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley and Percy Shelley. It has been pointed out to me that this naming convention is sexist as fuck, so I’ll be referring to our heroes as Mary and Percy. I’ll also, for simplicity’s sake, refer to them collectively as “The Shelleys” and refer to their relationship as a marriage, even though they were not legally married until they had been living together for two years.

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. Mary W. and William were both writers who had championed radically progressive politics and free love. Mary W. had one baby (Fanny) out of wedlock and when she became pregnant (with Mary G.) by William Godwin, they decided to break their ideals of free love and become legally married to protect this second baby from the stigma of illegitimacy. Their marriage was brief, as Mary W. died giving birth to Mary G.

Mary Wollstonecraft was so freaking amazing that she’s our Kickass Woman this month – you can read more about her here. Both Mary W. and Mary G. believed that marriage was oppressive to women since a married woman became essentially the property of her husband. Unfortunately, they found that life for themselves and their children was also incredibly difficult if they avoided legal marriage. Both of the Marys found that they had an enormous amount of trouble, whether married or unmarried, in their lives once they became pregnant, for financial, emotional, and medical reasons, which proved fatal for Mary W. and almost fatal for Mary G. (she almost bled to death during a miscarriage).

Percy Bysshe Shelly was born into an aristocratic family. He was horribly bullied at school and at Oxford was said to avoid all classes entirely in lieu of reading sixteen hours a day. During the other sixteen hours, he fell in love a lot, got married, and angered his father so much that he was cut off from the family. Shelley could be a sweet and generous person, but he sure did like attention, and he particularly liked attention from doting young women.

Mary Godwin was brought up with her mother’s legacy very much before her. Everyone had high hopes that Mary Godwin would grow up to be a genius, like both of her radical parents. She learned to read at her mother’s tombstone and she and Percy had many of their dates at the gravesite. Her father loved everything about Percy, including his bohemian lifestyle and the hot rumor that because of his aristocratic background he might have some money to give away (William Godwin worked exclusively as a writer and struggled to make ends meet all his life). Given this background in which free love was praised to the skies, Mary figured her Dad would totally understand when she ran away with Percy Shelley, despite the following complications:

1. Percy was married to another woman and had two children.
2. They took Mary’s stepsister, Claire, with them, because they were heading for Switzerland and she spoke French, and because she herself had a crush on Percy and promised to be super helpful on the road trip.
3. Mary was only sixteen.

SURPRISE! William Godwin was not at all amused by the concept of free love when it involved his offspring! He was furious. He refused to see Mary for years and he refused to allow Mary or Claire to see Fanny, the half-sister that Mary left behind. However, Godwin did write to Mary, constantly exhorting her to make Percy send him more money.

Much of the Shelley’s marriage and Mary’s subsequent widowhood consisted of the effort to find enough money not only to live on but also to support the many friends and family who figured that anyone with a family like Shelley’s must have some money to spend somewhere. There were a lot of starving writers out there back then, and sending desperate letters to slightly less poor writers was the Victorian version of crowdfunding. Shelley had already been disowned by his parents, and of course, his wife’s family (poor Harriet) wasn’t very fond of him, so the Shelleys were very much financially on their own. They were also ostracized socially. The reason the they spent so much of their relationship living in Switzerland and Italy is that no one would speak to them in England.

The story of the Shelley relationship is epic, but here’s a short list of awful things that happened during and shortly after their marriage. Again, trigger warning for the death of children, suicide, and general sadness. SERIOUSLY THIS A SAD LIST. Have the fluffiest romance you can find on hand to use as an antidote. And maybe some booze. It’s really depressing.

1. Percy’s wife, Harriet, became pregnant by someone else and committed suicide.
2. Percy, who had left his kids in England so he could elope to Switzerland with Mary, suddenly developed a huge interest in being an involved father. He fought for custody, but his reputation was so scandalous that Harriet’s parents successfully won custody of them. I personally don’t consider this to be awful at all because Percy was a shit, but Mary and Percy were very sad about this. One side effect is that Percy and Mary became legally married in order to improve Percy’s case.
3. Mary’s other sister, Fanny, who had been left at home when Mary and Claire left, committed suicide. Supposedly, Fanny had also been in love with Percy. It’s possible that people just assumed that Fanny was in love with Percy on the general grounds that everyone with a pulse was in love with Percy even though he was a self-centered immature narcissist named “Percy.”
4. Claire spent most of the Shelley marriage living with Mary and Percy. Claire and Mary did not get along on a day-to-day basis. At one point, Claire took a mysterious trip to the country and many speculate that she was pregnant with Percy’s baby at the time. Claire and Percy may or may not have been physically intimate, but they certainly had what people today would call an “on-again, off-again, emotional affair.” When she was grieving or under stress, which was often, Mary would detach, and Percy thrived on attention which Claire was always happy to provide.
5. Mary had five pregnancies and only one of her children survived to adulthood. One baby died shortly after birth (and shortly before she wrote Frankenstein), two died of different illnesses in the same year (at the age of one and three), and one pregnancy resulted in a late-term miscarriage (just a few weeks before Percy died). Weird medical fact – Mary almost bled to death during the miscarriage and after hours of watching her bleed out, Percy stopped the bleeding by dumping her into a tub full of ice water.
6. Mary’s stepsister, Claire, paused from her Percy crush (everyone was in love with Percy) to develop a hopeless crush on Percy’s friend, Lord Byron (everyone was in love with Byron). She became pregnant with Lord Byron’s baby. Lord Byron had the unmitigated gall to have sex with Claire, repeatedly, and then claim that she was too immoral to be a mother. WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, BYRON. He took the baby (named Allegra) away from Claire and denied Claire any contact with the baby, who died of illness at the age of five. During all this time, Claire lived with the Shelleys, and Percy acted as the go-between for Claire and Byron during the brief number of years that Allegra was alive.
7. Mary was a widow by the age of 27. Despite having many suitors, she never remarried. During her life, she lost not only her husband, but also her sister, her mother, her father, and all but one of her children, as well as almost all of their friends. Her post-apocalyptic book The Last Man ( A | BN | K | G | AB | Au | Scribd ) deals with survivor guilt, isolation, and grief.

Why am I unleashing this litany of despair upon you, Dear Bitches? There is no HEA in this story! It is a story of selfish, narcissistic, callous people who were awful to each other and who almost all died young. If Mary’s life story teaches us anything, it’s that romantic ideals can lead to very un-romantic drudgery, poverty, humiliation, and tragedy. But it’s also the story of two people who, whatever other havoc they wreaked on each other’s lives, were great at working together and inspiring each other. For good and for bad, the Shelley marriage left a lasting contribution on literature, politics, and poetry.

The Shelleys were artistic partners to a degree that was unusual for the time, although (surprise) the brunt of child rearing and keeping the household together was still born by Mary. For instance, Mary encouraged Percy to pursue poetry over philosophy. Percy wrote an introduction to Mary’s book Frankenstein and helped with editing. Because of his involvement and also, you know, SEXISM, many people believed that Percy must have written most or all of the book. However, biographer Charlotte Gordon states:

Shelley made comments in the margins, corrected Mary’s grammar, and, with her permission, rewrote some sentences, making her sentences more formal…Mary allowed Shelley to insert philosophical and political observations in a few key chapters.

Shelley’s active role in editing the book has since led to accusations that Mary was not the real author of Frankenstein. However, scholars who have studied the final draft that the couple worked on together estimate that Shelley contributed, at most, about four thousand original words to Mary’s 72,000-word-novel- a contribution that demonstrates the substantial role he played in shaping the book but which also illustrates that it was mostly written by Mary. Furthermore, fifteen years later, long after Shelley had died, Mary would make comprehensive revisions, producing the version read by most students today.

The couple read and commented on each other’s work extensively, even during periods of estrangement during their eight-year long marriage. After Percy’s death, Mary continued to write her own novels and essays, but she also had the gargantuan job of poring over scraps of paper to compile a collection of Percy’s poetry.

Her father-in-law threatened to take away her one surviving child if she wrote about Percy, and much of her life as a widow was devoted to compiling and editing Percy’s work and trying to get as much of it in the public eye as possible (she published a lot of it anonymously) while under constant pressure from Percy’s friends to do more and under pressure from her rich and powerful father-in-law to do less.

Of course, the Shelley marriage also had an influence on the content of their work simply because of their life experiences. Percy wrote about his love for Mary, and he wrote about the loss of their children and his estrangement from Mary after the deaths of Clara and William. Mary had a long personal association with illegitimate children who were rejected by society in mind when she wrote Frankenstein, and she was guilt-stricken over the deaths of Fanny and Harriet. She was also haunted by the story of her mother and by the death of her first baby. Meanwhile, both of their writing was steeped in the landscapes and ruins of Switzerland and Italy, where they spent as much time as possible due to the more permissive cultural atmosphere.

The Shelley marriage affected the Romantic Movement not only because of their own work together (Gordon refers to their partnership as “a literary movement like no other”) but also because of their association with, and effect on, other people. Mary Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was an almost sacred figure to Mary Shelley’s generations of Romantics because of her writing in the earlier days of the Romantic Movement. The Shelleys were friends with Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Edward Trelawney. Just one summer (1816) brought endless squabbles and drama as the Mary and Percy, Claire, Lord Byron, and John Polidori traveled together through Switzerland. That summer resulted in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, John Polidori’s The Vampyre, Lord Byron’s The Prisoner of Chillon and Percy Shelley’s Hymn to Intellectual Beauty. That’s a highly productive summer vacation.

Bias disclosure: I’m Team Mary. She never got over the guilt of having run off with Harriet Shelley’s husband, and in Mary’s defense, Mary was only sixteen at the time. Following her elopement with Percy, she seems to have been the token adult in a large group of emotionally immature, narcissistic, but very talented and good-looking people. My most substantial source for this article is Gordon’s book Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her Daughter Mary Shelley. Interestingly, Gordon is also Team Mary. There’s just something about Mary Shelley that inspires loyalty and affection in her readers. In reality, people often complained that she was not fun, that she was cranky and that she complained, and that she was either given to displaying too much emotion or not enough.

I think many of us can sympathize not only with Mary’s many terrible losses but also with the pressure and frustration of being the only one who remembers to pay the bills and ensure that there is food in the house. If Mary hadn’t been willing to be something of a buzz kill, all the other Romantics would have starved to death. After Percy’s death, she was a single mother with very little family support who still managed to keep her tiny surviving family together and who managed to support herself and her son through her writing. While some of Percy’s friends complained that she watered down Percy’s legacy by concealing his more controversial atheistic and political aspects, if not for her efforts we would have lost almost all of Percy’s work (he liked to write on scraps of paper and leave them lying around in drawers).

In many ways, the Shelley relationship is like a romance novel seen through a terrible, dark mirror. They fought a lot. They lost almost all of their children. They hurt other people. Percy died young (in a sailing accident). However, in one sense, their love did conquer all. Even when they were at their most estranged, they read each other’s work, even when that work was hurtful to them. They never suggested to each other, “Hey, how about if you stop writing and devote all your time to raising babies?” or “Hey, we’re super poor! How about if you stop writing and become an accountant?” They believed in each other’s art, and they were great at art. They just, through a combination of emotional issues and factors completely beyond their control, kind of sucked at love.