Sacred Monuments: Mary Shelley's Lives of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft

Michael Rossington, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

The notoriety of Godwin's Memoirs of Wollstonecraft must have reinforced upon his daughter a sense in which her mother's life was public, published and shaped by her father. It is striking that the only sustained public writing about her mother appears within biographical accounts of her father including the "Memoirs of William Godwin" published in the Bentley's Standard Novels edition of Caleb Williams (1831). Here her language echoes Godwin's Memoirs:

The writings of this celebrated woman are monuments of her moral and intellectual superiority. Her lofty spirit, her eager assertion of the claims of her sex, animate the ‘Vindication of the Rights of Woman;' while the sweetness and taste displayed in her ‘Letters from Norway' depict the softer qualities of her admirable character. Even now, those who have survived her so many years, never speak of her but with uncontrollable enthusiasm. Her unwearied exertions for the benefit of others, her rectitude, her independence, joined to a warm affectionate heart, and the most refined softness of manners, made her the idol of all who knew her.[9]

"Open as day to melting charity"—with a heart brimful to bursting with generous affection—& yearning for sympathy—she had fallen on evil days and her life had been one course of hardship, poverty—lonely struggle & bitter disappointment . . . Difficulties—worldly difficulties indeed she set at nought compared with her despair of good, her confidence betrayed—and when once she could conquer the misery that clung to her heart, she struggled cheerfully to meet the poverty that was her inheritance & to do her duty by her darling child.[10]

After another visit to St Pancras churchyard in October 1814, Mary and Percy read Godwin's edition of her Posthumous Works containing the letters to Imlay. These may be seen as instructive for the couple not on account of their cruel poignancy (the recipient's rank unworthiness) but in terms of the model of self-analysis they offer. Wollstonecraft articulates a morality of love in which commerce and the "systematic tyranny"[12] of men are critiqued even as the beneficent vitality of the independent imagination is promoted:

Ah! my friend, you know not the ineffable delight, the exquisite pleasure, which arises from a unison of affection and desire, when the whole soul and senses are abandoned to a lively imagination, that renders every emotion delicate and rapturous.[13]

Later, aspects of Wollstonecraft are embodied in the largely respectful account of Madame Roland in Lives who is described as looking forward "to a life of activity and usefulness on a grand scale,"[16] and in one of her most compelling fictional heroines, Fanny Derham in Lodore (1835). In the following passage from the novel Derham speaks, as Lisa Vargo points out, as "a follower of the ideas of Godwin and Wollstonecraft"[17]:

Words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world's great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on; I never hesitated to use them, when I fought any battle for the miserable and the oppressed. People are so afraid to speak, it would seem as if half our fellow-creatures were born with deficient organs; like parrots, they can repeat a lesson, but their voice fails them, when that alone is wanting to make the tyrant quail.

In after times . . . the life of Fanny Derham [may] be presented as a useful lesson, at once to teach what goodness and genius can achieve in palliating the woes of life, and to encourage those, who would in any way imitate her, by an example of calumny refuted by patience, errors, rectified by charity, and the passions of our nature purified and ennobled by an undeviating observance of those moral laws on which all human excellence is founded – a love of truth in ourselves, and a sincere sympathy with our fellow-creatures.[19]

Mary Shelley's view of the aims of biography, as expressed in the following passage from her life of Metastasio, shows her debt to her father's respect for the genre and to dominant eighteenth-century models:

It is from passages such as these, interspersed in his letters, that we can collect the peculiar character of the man – his difference from others – and the mechanisms of being that rendered him the individual that he was. Such, Dr Johnson remarks, is the true end of biography, and he recommends the bringing forward of minute, yet characteristic details, as essential to this style of history; to follow which precept has been the aim and desire of the writer of these pages.[20]

He had not that zeal and ardour of feeling resulting from a conviction that, however perilous the passage from slavery to liberty, it must be attempted and persevered in, with all its attendant evils, if men are to be brought back from that cowardice, indolence, and selfishness which mark the slave, to the heroism, patience, and intellectual activity which characterise the freeman.[21]

Yet there is also a sense that Shelley is conscious of the role of both writer and reader in creating, not simply recording, the subjects of life-writing. Recognizing the success of Rousseau's enterprise to project a singular version of his life, she comments, "Every word we read stamps the 'Confessions' with truth, and animates them with a living image."[23] Rousseau's Confessions supplies a model of the writer carefully laying before the reader materials which will allow judgments to be made, a model she apparently seeks to follow in her life of Machiavelli:

The question of whether he sat down in cold blood, and as approving them, or whether he wrote in irony, the detestable maxims he boldly and explicitly urges, has been disputed by many...It is a curious question, to be determined only by the author himself. We must seek in the actions of his life, and in his letters, for a solution of the mystery. Ample materials are afforded, and if we are unable to throw a clear light on the subject, at least we shall adduce all the evidence, and, after summing it up impartially, leave the jury of readers to decide.[24]