Love & Tragedy - The Stirring Saga of Mary and Percy Shelley

The lives of Mary Shelley (the brilliant Gothic writer who wrote Frankenstein when just a teenager) and her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley (Romantic poet and stalwart of the English Literary Canon) were extraordinarily eventful and deeply tragic. Some writers seem to live all in imagination, and their personal lives are tame and quiet compared to their fiction; not so the Shelleys!

They were born at the end of the eighteenth century, just after the French Revolution that inspired and appalled the generation before them. Their upbringings may have only been separated by 30 miles or so, but they were worlds apart.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was born with all the privileges for a life he didn’t want. His family were landed aristocracy: his grandfather was a baronet, his father a member of parliament. As a baby he was given a golden rattle. Growing up, he had expensive tutors until he went to Eton, one of England’s poshest schools, and then to Oxford University. His family had a provincial, entitled life, if one in its way devoid of imagination or daring.

Meanwhile the Godwin family that Mary was born into makes a stark contrast. It’s worth first unpacking who her parents were — her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, who sadly died shortly after giving birth to Mary, was a radical who had believed in love without marriage, in the rights of and education for women; her father, William Godwin was a radical philosopher and novelist whose ideas had inspired half the country, and horrified the other half. With the increasing conservatism after the French Revolution, Godwin’s popularity slipped, and financial difficulties constantly beset the family. Mary grew up in a sprawling household of half siblings and step-siblings who all pitched in to help with the family bookshop and press Godwin had started with his second wife. As a child Mary wrote poems for their publications, and minded the shop alongside her sisters. While her brothers were sent to school, the girls were mostly educated at home, which may well have been the better deal. The Godwin household constantly hosted intelligentsia and literati of the day. Mary recounted hiding behind the sofa as a child to listen to the great poet Coleridge recite his poem The Ancient Mariner when she was supposed to be off to bed.

Percy Shelley dearly wanted to break into the world Mary was born into, and they met because he wrote to her father, inspired by his works, presenting himself as a pupil and follower. Godwin was certainly flattered, and more than happy to advise an ardent young writer, but, if we may be practical, as Godwin certainly was, he was also aware that Shelley was expecting to inherit quite a lot of money, and that a wealthy patron would make life in the artistic but impoverished Godwin household much easier.

Unfortunately for Godwin, there wasn’t a lot of money to be got out of him, as Percy was already on bad terms with his father, who wasn’t impressed with Shelley’s controversial publications, or his elopement with young Harriet Westbrook.

Which brings me to the greatest controversy of the Shelley story. When Percy and Mary met, she was sixteen years old, while he was twenty-one and married with one child and another on the way.

It seems that after three years of marriage, both Percy and Harriet were thinking they had rushed into their marriage, and that perhaps it was a mistake. While Harriet seemed to accept it was a mistake she would have to live with, Percy agreed with Godwin’s philosophy that marriage was a form of slavery that should not bind people after affection waned. They were spending more and more time apart, and as Percy became acquainted with the Godwin family, he spent more and more time in London to be near them.

Mary and Percy confessed their love to each other by her mother’s grave, and presented their news to her father and to Harriet, both of whom were horrified. Godwin banned Shelley from ever seeing Mary again, and Harriet came to visit the Godwins and pleaded with Mary to stop seeing Shelley. When Harriet took her own life a few years later, Mary was riddled with guilt, and later wrote about her sufferings as atonement for that sin.

**Mary’s stepsister, Claire, took on the role of go-between for Mary and Percy.**

I think they genuinely expected people around them to be understanding of their love and accept that it was impossible to separate two people with such strong feelings for each other. It was an idealistic vision of love that no one — except perhaps Mary’s step-sister Claire — shared. If it hadn’t been for Claire, a brilliant, Romantic, impulsive young woman who would go on to have a child by Lord Byron, the love story might have ended there. With Percy banned from the house, and Mary under close scrutiny, the pair had no opportunity to see each other. But Claire had more liberty, and she took on the role of go-between.

One night just before dawn, Mary and Claire packed their bags and crept out of the house to meet Percy, and fled to Europe.

The response from both families was instantaneous. The Shelleys cut off their wayward son, and the Godwins refused to talk to Mary. This meant the couple ran out of money very quickly and had to run back to England, where they were shut out from their family homes (a far greater loss for Mary who was only sixteen and idolised her father), and had to hide from bailiffs.

For the rest of Percy’s life, they mostly lived off money borrowed against the possibility of his future inheritance, a risky state of affairs, as when Percy died before his father, Mary found herself penniless and having to pay back his debts.

Their life together was one of magnificent highs and tragic lows, never settling in one place, always searching, and always writing their ideals, their hopes, and their regrets.