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5.0 out of 5 stars
Victim of Genius, November 3, 2007
This review is from: Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley circle (Hardcover)
Janet Todd masterfully reconstructs the story of Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter Fanny, a girl whose shadowy and tragic life was lived at the interstices of the lives of several geniuses. In addition to her mother, there was her stepfather, the philosopher William Godwin, and her half-sister Mary Godwin. And the poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron were also involved in this story of a young woman who, ignored and unloved, and with a burdensome history, committed suicide at the age of twenty-one.
Although little is known about Fanny, Todd painstakingly reconstructs her movements and imagines what her feelings must have been in her melodramatic circumstances. These events have been recounted many times - but never before told from Fanny's viewpoint. This account of the poets and their circle of female acolytes reads like a novel. Todd presents the actions of Shelley and his circle in the context of what she calls a new, emerging cult of genius. "Genius was venerated, and seen as exempt from "the moral and social principles that governed everyday humanity...Genius was a new form of aristocracy."
Mary Wollstonecraft died shortly after her marriage to Godwin and the birth of their daughter Mary, who could not, as Todd observes, have been an easy sister for Fanny to have. This was a family of which it was said, "if you cannot write an epic poem, or a novel that by its originality knocks all other novels on its head, you are a despicable creature not worth acknowledging." At 16, the brilliant Mary eloped with Shelley, with whom her father was involved in a "parasitic tie." Godwin believed the world owed him a living, and Shelley was his disciple and his financial patron. Ironically, Godwin was horrified to see his own principles of free love coming home to roost with a vengeance when Shelley seduced his teenage daughter.
Shelley had what Todd calls "the cult-leader's ability to draw young women of middle class background not simply into his bed but into the insecurity and infamy of an itinerant sexual commune." He already had a wife, having run away with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook in 1811. Harriet was the mother of one child and expecting another, when he deserted her for Mary. According to Mrs. Godwin, not only Mary, but her younger stepsister Claire Clairmont, as well as Fanny, were infatuated with the charismatic genius. Fanny was away visiting relatives, when Shelley and Mary eloped, taking Claire with them. When Shelley, Mary and Claire returned to England, Fanny, distraught by their quarrels with Godwin, decided to take her future in her own hands. Traveling to Bath, she met with Shelley, who evidently rejected her. Poor and dependent, she felt that nothing remained for her but death. Her mother's biological legacy told on her, and she had grown up with the idea of suicide, which Godwin held was no sin. As Todd says, both Godwin and Shelley wrote of suicide, but "it was left to their womenfolk to succeed at it." And so Fanny Wollstonecraft was found dead in a coaching inn in Swansea, having taken laudanum. She left a suicide note, but mysteriously, the signature was torn off. As nobody claimed the body, she was buried in a pauper's grave. Todd conjectures that Shelley himself was responsible for destroying the signature, and suppressing Fanny's identity.
Fanny's life has long been obscure, but the detective work Janet Todd has done is intuitive and insightful in revealing her in her own right, and in the context of a brilliant impression of this circle of young people, geniuses and otherwise. The entitled behavior of the aristocratic Shelley and Byron, and the attachment of their "groupie" girls, brings to mind a modern cult. It is through these high dramatic and literary events that we can begin to glimpse the sad life of Fanny Wollstonecraft Godwin.
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