by Frances Thomas
The members of Shelley’s circle are a vivid and confident lot: Mary Wollstonecraft, her daughter Mary, Shelley, Byron, even Claire Clairmont, they burst out of the pages at us as we read about them, gifted, opinionated, very much alive. But as you read, you’re conscious of another figure flitting in and out of their stories like a ghost. This is Fanny Imlay, illegitimate daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, half-sister to Mary Shelley. She lives among them all, but seems to make little impression, until suddenly, shockingly, at the age of nineteen, we read of her suicide.
Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie, circa 1797, NPG London
She was born in 1794, daughter to Mary and Gilbert Imlay, an American adventurer, merchant and philosopher, with a strong belief in freedom, especially freedom for himself. They conducted their affair in Paris, in the heady and dangerous days of the Revolution, and when Mary became pregnant, she had happy thoughts of settling down, in a newly free world, to a family life with Imlay and their child. Of course, things didn’t work out like that. When Fanny was born, Imlay kept finding excuses for being away from them; and gradually Mary began to realise that this was how things were going to be. In the hope of regaining his affections, she even went on a long and difficult journey through Scandinavia to sort out a business arrangement for him. Baby Fanny was taken along too, with her French nursemaid Marguerite. She spent seven weeks alone with Marguerite, in a remote Swedish hotel, while Mary continued her journey to Denmark. The business plan didn’t work out, and Imlay soon made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with Mary or his daughter. Sunk into deepest gloom, Mary made two suicide attempts. Even though she was too young to lay down memories of these difficult times, Fanny must have imbibed a sense of uncertainty.
Then suddenly things improved. Mary met and fell in love with William Godwin, the famous (and infamous) author of Political Justice. Fanny liked him too; she called him ‘Man’ and would eagerly ask her mother ‘Does Man come today, Mama?’ When he went on a journey to his friend Tom Wedgwood, Godwin discussed the little mug marked with her initial that he would bring back for her. Although neither believed in marriage, when Mary became pregnant, they married. Fanny took the name Fanny Godwin, and ‘Man’ became ‘Papa’.
They were living in the new development of the Polygon, near where Euston Station is now. In those early days it was a pleasant place, houses with gardens, surrounded by fields and farms. Fanny, just three, was at that magical age when a happy child creates a secure little world around herself. It seemed the start of a new life for Fanny, at the centre of a loving relationship. And they must have spoken of the new little playmate she would soon have; a brother, so they thought, called William, to carry on the radical and intellectual traditions of his parents.
The Polygon, Somers Town
Then suddenly, all in a single day, everything was over. On the 30th August 1797, Mary went into labour. Fanny’s birth had not been difficult, and Mary wasn’t too anxious about this one. She thought that the baby would have arrived by tea-time, and she would be up and about the following day. Fanny and her nursemaid were probably sent away during the hours of labour, and the baby was born late that evening. Not a William – it was a little girl, another Mary. But then something went wrong. The contractions of childbirth, which should have expelled the placenta, failed. As the night wore on and the midwife became increasingly worried, Godwin rushed into the night to find a doctor.
When the doctor arrived, he stripped off his coat, and thrust his arm into Mary’s vagina. The placenta had to be removed in pieces; Mary said it was the worst pain she’d ever known. Either because a piece of placenta had been left behind, or because of the doctor’s dirty hands, a violent fever soon set in, and on September 10th, Mary died.
What did Fanny make of all this? She would have been bewildered by strangers rushing up and down stairs, banging doors, shouting, while the thin insistent wail of a new-born baby, who somehow wasn’t the little playmate she’d been promised, rang through the house. Mama was inaccessible, unfamiliar, and then suddenly no longer there.
Over the next few weeks and months, various friends came in to look after the children. Fanny seemed to bond with none of them, and her behaviour was said to be difficult. But gradually, a new sort of order established itself. Godwin became genuinely fond of his little girls, and when he was away, wrote them loving letters. He complained that Fanny was always wanting to climb on his lap when he was working, and hear stories. Her little sister grew up to be played with, and there were children in the neighbouring houses, and a garden in which to pick fruit. Godwin taught the girls, probably eccentrically and sporadically, but they learned their lessons; little Mary turning out to be especially bright, Fanny less so, though perhaps Godwin was prejudiced in favour of his natural daughter. Those early years seemed happy, though Coleridge, visiting, complained of the ‘cadaverous silence’ of the house (probably in contrast to his own noisy brood) . Strangely, we don’t get much sense, now or later, in spite of this early bond, of Mary and Fanny being especially close.
When she was eight, her world fell apart again. A woman called Mrs Clairmont, a widow with two children, had moved into the neighbouring house. Her manner was loud, brash, self-centred. Actually, she was neither a widow nor a Mrs Clairmont. There had never been a husband, and her children had different fathers. But Godwin was lonely and overworked- Mrs Clairmont was available and a good manager. Once again, he married, and the new Mrs Godwin moved in with her two children, Charles and Jane. (Some years later Jane would give herself the more romantic name of Claire, and so I shall call her that.)
So, suddenly, Fanny was no longer the elder of a little family of two girls, she was simply the eldest of a brood of five – Mrs Godwin soon gave birth to a son, William. But being the eldest didn’t make her the most important; Mrs Godwin favoured her own children, and Godwin, under growing financial pressure, was becoming increasing gloomy and inaccessible to Fanny and Mary. Fanny was described as good and quiet. Maybe she felt that ‘being good’ was the only way of avoiding more disasters in her life. It was as though she’d been handed a script – she was to be the better behaved and less clever one – and was living up to it.
Godwin expected to be supported financially by his friends and admirers, but this wasn’t happening, so he and his wife decided to start a business publishing and selling books.
The Godwin family bookshop
For a few years it prospered, but by the time Fanny was thirteen, the family was forced to move to a dark corner house in an insalubrious part of Holborn. Gone was the garden, the fields, the farms, the fresh air of the Polygon. We don’t quite know how Fanny spent her days, but I suspect that, being older and less lively than Claire and Mary, she was became a dogsbody, working in the shop and packing up books. Mrs Godwin was noisy and quarrelsome, and the atmosphere in the house wasn’t always pleasant, but there was a stream of clever visitors, Coleridge among them. Mary listened attentively, Claire tried to get herself noticed, and as for Fanny, we hear little about her, though she apparently took an interest in education and visited experimental schools in London. When Godwin compares his two daughters, he is quick to emphasise Mary’s brilliance; ‘her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes, almost invincible.’ Fanny, on the other hand, was ‘of a quiet modest unshowy disposition.’ Plainer than her sister, and scarred from an early attack of smallpox, the best he can conclude of Fanny is that she was ‘in general prepossessing.’
One of the visitors who admired Godwin (and whom Godwin tried to dun for money) was a tall, beautiful eccentric poet, a dishevelled angel. Percy Bysshe Shelley came to visit with Harriet, his pretty young wife, and it’s possible that the impressionable young Fanny fell in love with him. When he first came Mary was absent in Scotland, where she was sent for extended periods to stay with friends, but then, when she and Shelley finally met, there was a strong and immediate attraction between them. Harriet Shelley wasn’t stupid, but she couldn’t converse like Mary and the bond grew. Later, chaperoned by Claire, they would walk to Mary Wollestonecraft’s grave in old St Pancras churchyard, where they may have made love for the first time. Shelley, like Godwin, was a strong believer in free love.
St Pancras Old Church
But when Mary and Shelley eloped in 1814, strangely taking Claire with them, Fanny, now eighteen, was left behind. Shelley’s free-loving and unconventional little coterie didn’t include her. Mrs Godwin cruelly told her how much Mary and Claire despised her and made fun of her behind her back. The prison walls closed in. Fanny had nowhere to go.
The atmosphere at home became more poisonous than ever, so much so that Charles, Fanny’s stepbrother, left to work in Europe. Being male, of course, he had that choice. Fanny did not. Almost the only professions open to a well-bred woman were governessing and school-teaching, and it’s probable that Fanny’s radical connections would have made it hard for her to find a position. In fact, Mary Wollestonecraft’s two sisters, Fanny’s aunts, had a plan to open a school in Ireland, and there was talk of her joining them, but in the end, she was not wanted, perhaps precisely because of those radical antecedents. A door had briefly opened, and then slammed shut. Fanny’s only role at that time seemed to be that of go-between, trying to persuade Mary and Claire to come back to respectability, and nagging Shelley for the money that Godwin still felt he was owed.
Meanwhile, trapped in the dark house, she could imagine the life her sisters were leading; Mary, thoroughly loved-up and Claire, who’d managed to seduce Byron, the most glamorous celebrity in Europe. In the summer of 1816 they were staying in a villa by Lake Geneva, writing, talking and making love. The contrast with Fanny’s grim life could not have been greater.
Then, that October, Fanny suddenly embarked on a mysterious coach journey to Bath, leaving a ‘don’t try to find me’ letter for her family. We know exactly what she was wearing: a blue striped skirt and brown fur-trimmed pelisse. She’d brought a ‘brown berry necklace’ and a gold watch with her. We don’t quite know what she did in Bath, but she may have visited Shelley, who had returned to England and was staying there with Mary and Claire. She might have asked if she could be allowed to join their family, and Shelley might have refused. At any rate, a poem he wrote at this time is often associated with that meeting:
Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken…
Fanny left Bath, took the coach to Bristol, and then on to Swansea. There she checked into the Mackworth Arms inn, drank a cup of tea, told the chambermaid she could manage, and went upstairs to her room.
The Mackworth Arms
In the morning, her body was discovered, a bottle of laudanum by her side. There was also a note:
I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate and whose life has only been a series of pain…
From the coroner, we learn how she was dressed and the few possessions she had with her, but nothing more. And her stepfather seems to have reacted to her death callously, allowing her to be buried in a pauper’s grave. Her family were shocked, but not devastated, by her death. And even her suicide was overshadowed by that of poor little Harriet Shelley, a few weeks later, which has attracted far more attention from biographers. A life that had never really started for her had ended in misery.
Acknowledgements
Fiona Sampson, In Search of Mary Shelley
Janet Todd, Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollestonecraft and the Shelley Circle
Edna Nixon, Mary Wollstonecraft; Her Life and Times.
Frances Thomas was born in Wales during the war, lived most of her life in London, and now lives in mid-Wales. She went to London University and is married to Richard Rathbone, a professor of African history. She’s written many books for young people, as well as a couple of adult novels, a biography of Christina Rossetti, and recently poetry. She has won the Welsh Books Council Tir na nOg prize and Scottish Arts Council award for her children’s books.
