Fanny, as we’ve seen, did not have the easiest of
childhoods. The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay (the American
businessman—see earlier chapters about his
story), Fanny never really knew her father, who danced out of the frame not
long after she was born on May 14, 1794. Two years later, Mary’s relationship
with William Godwin began, and, for a bit, Fanny had something like a “normal”
childhood.
But then, of course, her mother died delivering the
child who would become Mary Shelley, and now poor Fanny, only three, had no
mother—and a father who was pretty much clueless
about children. A series of women helped care for her. Then, as we’ve seen,
late in 1801 (Fanny was then 7), Godwin married again, this time to Mary Jane
Clairmont, who had, by two different fathers, two children of her own (Jane—aka
Claire—and Charles). And when Fanny was about to turn 9, Mary Jane delivered
William Godwin, Jr. And so it was, as I said, that in that Godwin household for
a time there were five children, no two of whom had the same two parents.
Rivalries crept like ivy up the psychological framework of their home.
And poor Fanny was never the favorite of anyone. Mary
Jane preferred (and fiercely so) her own children; notables arrived at the
house to meet little Mary, the daughter of Godwin and Wollstonecraft, two
luminaries of the Left. And then there was Fanny, who, as if she needed more
humbling, suffered scarring from chickenpox and
smallpox.[1]
Scholar Janet Todd—to her great credit—did something
long in need of doing in Godwin-Wollstonecraft-Shelley scholarship: investigate
and tell Fanny’s story, a story whose chapters are often dark and depressing.
When I wrote to Prof. Todd recently to congratulate her on her work, she replied
very graciously—and then told me how she’d felt at Swansea, Wales, where Fanny had
died.
But let’s wait a moment for that.
Before telling about Swansea, Todd goes after the men in Fanny’s life—Imlay,
Godwin, Bysshe Shelley. I’m not going to summarize her book (it’s not long; it’s
well worth reading), but I’ll just observe that Todd produces evidence that
Fanny, about to turn 20, might have been the first of the women in the Godwin
household to fall under the sway of Bysshe Shelley when he swooped into their
lives in 1813 and 1814.
[1] Janet
Todd, Death and the Maidens: Fanny
Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2007), 28.
No comments:
Post a Comment