Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley circle (Hardcover)

by Janet Todd (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. It is little surprise that there has been no major biography of Fanny Wollstonecraft—first daughter, by an American lover, of brilliant feminist theorist Mary Wollstonecraft and elder half-sister of Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Fanny produced no books, lived in the shadow of others and found her feelings for Percy Bysshe Shelley ignored, as the poet favored, then married, Mary. Fanny spent a great deal of time as a go-between, helping smooth over the endless sexual and social intrigues of the Shelley and Byron circle. Realizing none of her own dreams, she committed suicide in 1816 at the age of 22. There are moments of terrific insight, such as Mary's odd, confused reaction to Fanny's death and her transforming Fanny into the ill-fated servant girl Justine in Frankenstein, who is unjustly accused of killing a child. Todd has rescued Fanny from ill-deserved obscurity, yet the biography is more of a meditation on the role of all of the women in Byron and Shelley's circle, and its power lies in Todd's soundly and generously feminist reimagining of these women's lives. Not only a splendid work of feminist history, this is an important addition to late 18th- and early 19-century literary criticism. (Oct.)
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Product Description
From the Romantic period's star circle, the story of its saddest casualty--Fanny Wollstonecraft, daughter of an original feminist, sister of a literary star, and hopeful object of a poet's affection, dead of suicide at the age of nineteen.

Little contemporary information was written about Fanny Wollstonecraft, whose mother Mary Wollstonecraft's scandalous life scarred Fanny's possibilities before she was even born. Deserted by her father, yet reared by Mary's husband William Godwin, Fanny barely had a chance to adjust when her mother died from giving birth to the legitimate and lovely Mary. Fanny was always considered the ungainly one, the plain one, the less intelligent one. Finally her imagination was sparked by the arrival of Percy Bysshe Shelley to the Godwin household. Her infatuation was quickly shattered when Shelley, like so many before him, chose the company of her sister instead, and though Fanny bore this rejection bravely, she was never quite the same after Mary and Shelley eloped along with her step-sister Claire--who would later track down and seduce Lord Byron.

Awash in a sea of sexual radicals, Fanny acted as personal assistant and go-between to this den of hedonists, shuttling information from one faction to the other, covering her sister's lies and creating fabrications of her own. She ultimately ended her life alone in a Welsh seaside hotel, an empty bottle of laudanum and an unsigned note by her side.

Janet Todd's meticulously researched and brilliantly told rendering of this life give fresh and fascinating insight to the Shelley-Byron world even as it draws Fanny out of the shadows of her mother's and sister's stunning careers.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint (October 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582433399
• ISBN-13: 978-1582433394
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #762,952 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Victim of Genius, November 3, 2007

By	Diana Birchall (Santa Monica, California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.