“Alas, that love should be a blight and shame
To those who seek all sympathies in one!”
—Shelley, “Laon and Cythna”

With the publication of the first volume of an expanded edition of her letters in 1980, and now this biography, Mary Shelley’s reputation is being reconsidered. This renewed attention is not due to the perennial interest in her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, or to one of those periodic reworkings of her greatest book, Frankenstein. It is due to the popularity of women’s studies as a full-fledged academic discipline. And so the unarticulated question for Emily Sunstein is, was Mary Shelley a feminist? For Sunstein, the answer is an implicit yes: Mary, she writes in her conclusion, was “indeed her mother’s daughter, heir to Wollstonecraft’s Romantic feminism and to a fuller measure of punishment for it.” But by any standards of feminism, modern or 19th-century, Mary Shelley would flunk—and she was the first to say so.

When people think of Mary Shelley, it is usually as a child; the sixteen-year-old who fled with Shelley to France, the nineteen-year-old who began Frankenstein during a stormy summer on Lake Geneva in the company of her lover and Lord Byron. But when Shelley died in 1822, drowned sailing from Leghorn to Pisa, Mary was only 24, and was to live another 29 years. The daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the social philosopher William Godwin, wife to the Romantic poet, she was to understand as no one else in her family the consequences of adhering to their radical principles.

She has been idealized for abandoning “all for love” and pilloried, often by her friends, for the greater caution and “conservatism” of her later years. What emerges from Sunstein’s biography is a Mary Shelley recognizable from her journals and letters: willful, loving if not always demonstrably affectionate, a devoted mother who was, despite the difficulties, equally devoted to Shelley and his memory; a private woman whose life was made extremely public.

In many ways Mary Shelley had a tragic life. Her birth killed her mother, and she was raised by Godwin and a stepmother she abhorred. Godwin (whom Mary revered) broke with her—though not permanently—when she ran off with Shelley, even though with that act she was proving herself to be her father’s (and mother’s) daughter: both were proponents of free love and Mary had asked Godwin for his blessing. Worst of all, Mary lost not only Shelley but three of her four children over the course of their eight-year relationship.

She was also unlucky in her friends. Her stepsister, Jane Clairmont, would be a none-too-grateful dependent of Mary’s on and off for years. Jane Williams, commonlaw wife and then widow of the Edward Williams who drowned with Shelley, also was supported by Mary, who doted on her. Jane repaid her by telling everyone who would listen that Mary had been cold and cruel to Shelley in his last year; that she, not Mary, was the love of Shelley’s life—and even that Shelley would have married her had he not died at sea.

The men in Mary’s life were no better. After the cremation Leigh Hunt quarreled with the new widow over who should have Shelley’s heart; despite this and other great unkindnesses to Mary she was to continue to aid the irresponsible Hunt with money and support all her life. Aubrey Beauclerk, with whom Mary was in love later in her life, jilted her twice. Shelley himself betrayed Mary with her stepsister perhaps as early as 1814, certainly by 1822; nor was Jane the only one. After his death Mary, as his editor, had the painful task of reading through poems lamenting his unhappiness with her, and other poems (notably, “Epipsychidion”) dedicated to other women.

Finally, there was Godwin. He was bitterly furious with Mary for running off with Shelley, but saw no reason that the loans Shelley was extending him should not continue. The rumors that Godwin had “sold” Mary to Shelley arose directly from this business. Over the years Godwin continued to write letters that were at once insulting and demanding, such as the following, written when Mary was in a depression following the death of her son William:

I cannot but consider it as . . . putting you quite among the commonality and mob of your sex, when I had thought I saw in you symptoms entitling you to be ranked among those noble spirits that do honour to our nature. Oh, what a falling off is here! . . . You have the husband of your choice, to whom you seem to be unalterably attached, a man of high intellectual endowments whatever I and some other persons may think of his morality. . . . You have all the goods of fortune, all the means of being useful to others. . . . But . . . all is nothing, because a child of three years old is dead.

Such was her father’s love. In return Mary showed him a great deal of patience and devotion, paying his debts, giving him money, taking out loans to aid him. Living off of two hundred pounds a year plus her writing (and trying to educate her young son Percy at Harrow), she still managed to supplement her father’s income to insure him of the three hundred per year he needed. Any defense of Mary Shelley’s character could, I think, end here.

But was she a feminist? True enough, she flouted conventions and disobeyed her own father to follow the man she loved. When her husband died she never remarried, earning a significant amount for herself and her many dependents by her own writing, and throughout her life she took special care to befriend and help people whose private lives were by normal standards scandalous.

Yet none of these actions are particularly feminist. Sunstein has taken the line that if she became more conventional as she grew older, it was because society forced her into it. Certainly the pressures were great. Sir Timothy Shelley’s hatred for her was such that she was at terrific pains not to offend him in order to secure some kind of future for his grandchild. Much of Mary’s “conservatism” was the reaction of a mother intent on protecting her son as much as possible from scandal and his grandfather’s further anger.

But there is more than this. Mary Shelley has written herself that she came to regret some of her actions (and Shelley’s). If she did not live to regret her marriage, she did regret the circumstances, especially the responsibility she felt she and Shelley had for the suicide of Harriet Shelley, the wife Shelley had abandoned when he ran off with Mary.

And while she never turned into an outright conservative, it is clear that after years of difficulties she had had enough of her liberal friends. As she wrote to her friend Edward Trelawny in 1837, angry that he’d accused her of being afraid to publish something of her father’s:

What has my life been what is it Since I lost Shelley—I have been alone—& worse—I had my father’s fate for many a year a burthen pressing me to the earth—& I had Percy’s education & welfare to guard over—& in all this I had no one friendly hand stretched out to support me. . . . —If I have ever found kindness it has not been from liberals—to disengage myself from them was the first act of my freedom—the consequence was that I gained peace and civil usage . . . You are a Man at a feast . . . you naturally scoff at me & my dry crust in a comer . . . but it is useless to tell a pampered Man this.

The most thorough and public rejection of her parents’ theories may be Frankenstein—Mary Shelley’s one great book. Though the prose is unremarkable and the book’s structure very weak, the conception of Frankenstein is a brilliant stab at the twin roots of liberalism: scientism and progress. Precisely as a cautionary tale, Frankenstein can be read as a critique of William Godwin. What was Godwin’s religion if not a belief in the goodness of progress that scientific reasoning will bring us? It was Godwin (quoting Ben Franklin) who wrote in Political Justice that “mind will one day become omnipotent over matter,” and who suggested that men will learn not only to abolish sleep but perhaps to overcome the “accidents” of disease and death.

Unfortunately, science’s new Adam, Frankenstein‘s victory over death, is a monster that destroys its creator and his family. Whether Mary was aware of it or not, what stronger refutation of Godwin’s theories can there be than the vision of the monster grieving over his dead father, then fleeing to his own death across the ice?

Sunstein’s Mary Shelley is a readable biography, and a largely accurate portrayal. It has, however, some faults. Sunstein clearly takes Shelley’s side against his first wife, Harriet, who I think had much excuse; and she has a disconcerting way of glossing over the most inexcusable behavior on the part of Mary’s father with a passing phrase. When Godwin published in 1798 his dead wife’s private letters to her lover Imlay, he exposed her reputation (and that of her still-living daughter, Fanny) to an outraged public. While quoting an angry Southey in criticism, Sunstein herself excuses Godwin for “the implacable innocence of a philosopher of truth.”

Such charity for male irresponsibility is strange in a feminist, but stranger still is Sunstein’s apparently genuine belief in Mary Shelley’s ability to foretell the future. A more basic problem is Sunstein’s method. This being yet another book to fall into that middle ground between scholarly and popular biography, there are footnotes, but never where I want them. Sunstein’s dismissal of Fanny Kemble Butler’s famous anecdote (that when she advised Mary Shelley to teach her son to think for himself, Mary replied, “Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!”) is not completely persuasive. I am pedant enough to wish Sunstein had given fuller explanations as to why she is certain, say, Mary did not have an affair with Thomas Jefferson Hogg. I also miss a proper bibliography; there is only a bibliographical chapter, which is by no means complete.

As far as Sunstein goes with it, her reading of Mary Shelley’s character stands up. She simply does not take it far enough. I believe in the Mary she describes at 25, but by 40 Mary’s opinions had changed more than Sunstein is willing to consider. Probably because of Sunstein’s prejudices, there is no thorough discussion of some of Mary Shelley’s later letters and journal entries. It is true enough, as Sunstein argues, that Mary has been unjustly maligned; true enough that she was admirable in many ways; even true enough that she was heir to her mother’s feminism. That was a legacy she did not regret, but with which she came to disagree—while continuing to revere both her parents and Shelley. In her journal in 1838 Mary made a complete explanation of her position, the. most interesting parts of which Sunstein does not quote. I will give some of it here:

In the first place, with regard to “the good cause”—the cause of the advancement of freedom and knowledge, of the rights of women, &c.—I am not a person of opinions. I have said elsewhere that human beings differ greatly in this. Some have a passion for reforming the world; others do not cling to particular opinions. That my parents and Shelley were of the former class, makes me respect it. I respect such when joined to real disinterestedness, toleration, and a clear understanding. . . . For myself, I earnestly desire the good and enlightenment of my fellow-creatures, and see all, in the present course, tending to the same, and rejoice; but I am not for violent extremes, which only bring on an injurious reaction. . . . Besides, I feel the counter-arguments too strongly. I do not feel that I could say aught to support the cause efficiently; besides that, on some topics (especially with regard to my own sex), I am far from making up my mind. . . . If I have never written to vindicate the rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed. At every risk I have befriended and supported victims to the social system; but I make no boast, for in truth it is simple justice I perform.

Carol Gilligan has observed that there is a difference between male and female morality. In discussing Gandhi she makes the point that a male liberal often means someone who professes to love men in the abstract, but who has a tendency to mistreat them in the particular. William Godwin and Shelley are perfect examples of this kind of humanitarian. Mary Shelley, to her credit, is not. 

[Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality, by Emily Sunstein (Boston: Little, Brown and Company) 478 pp., $24.95]