Another suicide in the Godwin-Shelley circle ...
And then, in the close Shelley-Godwin-Wollstonecraft
circle there was another suicide attempt, another one, like Harriet Westbrook
Shelley’s, that was sadly successful. Early in my research on Mary Shelley I
learned, of course, about Mary Wollstonecraft’s first child, her daughter
Fanny, named in honor of Mary’s dear friend from girlhood, Fanny Blood.
I’ve already written about the context of Fanny’s
conception—her mother’s affair with American Gilbert Imlay, who, as we
remember, eventually abandoned mother and daughter and vanished into the mists
of history. I’ve written, too, about how when Fanny, born in May 1794, was
still a little girl, she and her mother joined lives with William Godwin, who
soon married Mary when she once again became pregnant, this time with the
daughter she would never know, the daughter who would become Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley.
The early biographers of William Godwin and Percy Bysshe
Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley do not say much about Fanny.
She was, in their view, a minor player. A character actor. A young woman who,
unlike so many of the others, apparently had no literary or artistic talents. A
young woman who, it seems, was physically ordinary. Nothing special. Just, you
know, a human being. Oh, she had a kind heart. That sort of thing.
And I confess that throughout my years of research, I
also consigned Fanny to the corners of the story. Far more interesting to me
were the lives of the others—the lives of historical and literary significance.
Sure, it was sad when she left home in October 1816—she was just twenty years
old—and traveled nearly 200 miles west to Swansea, Wales, all of it by coach, where
she executed her plan to kill herself. But, I fear, I was more interested in
the reactions of the others in her
life. How Bysshe dashed off to look for her, how Godwin tried to cover it all
up (how embarrassing, a suicide in
the family!), how Mary (19) and Claire Clairmont (18) responded.
In my elaborate trip to Europe in the spring of 1999,
I made no plans to go to Swansea (which lies about 130 miles south of
Porthmadog in Wales, a place I did visit and have written about). As I look at travel
maps now, I see that there is no direct train connection between the two towns.
It would have taken about six and a half hours to make all the connections. The
bus is no better. Seven and a half hours. I suppose I could have rented a car,
but I was afraid to do that—all that driving on the left stuff; I figured I’d
hit someone head-on after a mile or so.
Still, as I sit and type today, I know for certain
that if something “significant” had happened in Swansea, I would have figured
out how to get there. I would have done it.
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