Shelley and the Maiden: The Death of Fanny Wollstonecraft [Hardcover]

Fanny Wollstonecraft was a 22 year old girl who committed suicide in a small hotel in Wales in 1816. Her sad story is one of the sidelights of literary history because her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, a famous feminist, and her half-sister was Mary Godwin, who married the poet Shelley, and wrote Frankenstein. Fanny's life was lonely and unregarded. She was illegitimate and her father abandoned mother and daughter shortly after Fanny's birth. Her mother died giving birth to Mary when Fanny was only three, and she then lived in the household of her stepfather, William Godwin, with his second wife and several step-siblings. Fanny was the odd one out, not pretty, not clever, put-upon. When Shelley eloped with Mary Godwin, leaving Fanny behind, she was devastated. Her loneliness increased as she was torn between her stepfather and her siblings. Janet Todd's book is a fascinating look inside this circle of geniuses. Written with sympathy for Fanny's short, unhappy life, it is essential reading for anyone interested in the Romantic poets.

In this fascinating study, Janet Todd reconstructs the story of a girl whose shadowy and tragic life was lived at the interstices of the lives of several geniuses. There were her mother, firebrand feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; her stepfather, 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. Todd writes, "What is distinctive in the lives of these extraordinary young people is their literariness, their refusal to separate life and literature." Indeed, this account of the poets and their circle of female acolytes reads like a novel. These events have been recounted many times - but never before told from the viewpoint of Fanny.

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." Shelley had egalitarian principles, but his dazzling combination of high social standing and genius enabled him to carry out moral experiments that William Godwin, the "bourgeois radical" thinker who inspired him, did not attempt himself. And Godwin's daughter Mary could not, as Todd observes, have been an easy sister for Fanny in 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 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 teenage wife, who was the mother of one child and expecting another, when he deserted her for Mary. Mary and her younger stepsister Claire Clairmont left the Godwin home and journeyed with Shelley to the Continent, but the older, plainer Fanny was left behind, though evidently all three girls were infatuated with the charismatic genius. After the travelers returned, the poor and dependent Fanny, rejected by Shelley, felt that nothing remained for her but death. On 12 October 1816 she was found dead in a coaching inn, 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 masterly 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 glimpse the sad life of Fanny Wollstonecraft Godwin.

I cannot think how many people I have brought this wonderful book to - and recommended it to far more. Fanny was the first daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who died giving birth to her half sister Mary. The two sisters were raised together, by Mary's father Godwin and, when Mary and her step-sister Claire absconded with Shelley, she was left behind. Fanny killed herself at the age of only 22, but despite the story of debt, misery and very bad decisions by almost every one involved, Janet Todd makes this a riveting read. I think I dig this book out at least once a year. It's an amazing story and very well told.