6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
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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4.0 out of 5 stars
Fanny Wollstonecraft's suicide is not predestined. Read all about it., February 22, 2012
This review is from: Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley circle (Hardcover)
"Shelley was certainly a man of Genius and great feeling--but the effects of both were perverted by some unhappy flightings of mind that led him to cause much unhappiness to his connections." (p. xi)
~~Everina Wollstonecraft
In Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle feminist author Janet Todd spends more time focusing on the finances and sexual attitude of Percy Bysshe Shelley then making Fanny Wollstonecraft a character who can be empathized with (until the ending.) The author uses narration and exposition to provide a full-length picture of Fanny's life, beginning with the time in her mother's life in which Fanny is conceived. Amateur psychological analysis explores Fanny Wollstonecraft's motivation for committing suicide and leaving a note that becomes defaced, presumably by Shelley to keep scandal down for Mary, Godwin, and himself. So from the beginning the book is set up like a novel with a mystery hook. The main argument is that, despite common assumption, Fanny Wollstonecraft does not suffer from lifelong depression which gives her a suicidal disposition. That subject is written about passionately. The best documentation in the entire book involves the detailing of her suicide and how nobody came forward to claim her body.
Fanny's great love of poetry and understanding of Shelley as a poet is stressed. However, Fanny is still basically an ordinary person in the shadow of famous literary talents. Fanny Wollstonecraft is the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a feminist author who dies from complications involving the birth of Mary Godwin (later Shelley). Fanny's stepfather is William Godwin, an author of books about philosophical anarchism. Mary--author of Frankenstein--becomes the mistress and then wife of radical thinker and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Even Claire Clairmont--Fanny's stepsister with no literary talent except as a scribe of manuscripts--becomes the mother of acclaimed poet Lord Byron's child and is quite probably mistress to Percy Bysshe Shelley. It is in this context that Fanny is used as a go-between for communication between the Shelley and Godwin households. She is taken for granted and mistreated by both sides.
The greatest strength of this book is the author's writing skill. It is well-written grammatically. It has great clarity and is concise in word choice and structure. It is amazingly coherent and has great fluidity considering that it is a group narrative. Each chapter is focused on a specific person. All but the first two chapters are named after a single person so it makes it easy to use the table of context to know where to go back to in order to find information.
The fullness of development to the point of obvious embellishment makes it closer to a novel than an ordinary biography. This would be fine if it had been what the book is marketed as. In the Preface the author uses the disclaimer "I have marshaled all the facts I can, but some links must be speculative." For that she cites the discrepancy of the records. At times it is made clear that speculation has been made. Many more times there is lack of documentation. There is often a lack of a footnote to even say where words in quotations came from. Furthermore, on page xiv Janet Todd notes that she has employed what is considered "bad form in biographies" by drawing from poetry, fiction, novels, and philosophical works of the people in Fanny Wollstonecraft's family circle.
Even with that shortcoming the book satisfies the argument set out by the author. Fanny Wollstonecraft did commit suicide because of life situations, not a life-long disposition to melancholy. What verifiable evidence has been provided is sufficient to the author's cause.
Death and the Maidens is so well-written that it could even be utilized as a read for pure entertainment. It is strongly recommended for those interested in learning about "one of the first families of Romanticism", and even more enthusiastically recommended for feminists.
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