He came again, ten days later, into the schoolroom, and this time Fanny wasn’t there. He didn’t ask for Fanny, though. He had brought her a present, he said, a notebook for her Virgil translation. That was May 16. She marked the day in her journal, not that she had to. All these years later she could still call back those days in May, when Shelley began to replace Virgil as the sun in her sky.
The next time, he brought his friend Hogg to the house, and led him up the stairs into Godwin’s library, on the pretext of introducing him to the famous man. But when they were informed that Godwin wasn’t home, Shelley still lingered, pacing the floor.
She was in the schoolroom, on the other side of the wall, holding her breath—she knew his steps by then. She wasn’t sure then if she should, wasn’t even sure if she would, until she stepped, trembling, out into the hall.
As Hogg would tell it later, “A thrilling voice cried ‘Shelley!’ A thrilling voice answered ‘Mary!’ A very young female, fair and fair-haired, pale indeed, and with a piercing look, wearing a frock of tartan, unusual dress in London at that time, had called him.” He went to her like “an arrow from the bow of the far-shooting king.”
Yes, that tartan dress. From Scotland—Hogg was right, no one else in London had one then. It fit her like a glove, she was sixteen, with clear gray eyes and gold-red hair, even more beautiful, people told her, than her mother’s. “Titian hair,” the Baxters called it. It danced around her head, Coleridge had written, “in a cloud of light.”
And as for the arrow from the far-shooting king, it must have struck her that day as she rose from her books, and that was that. They started meeting secretly, first in the sunny garden of Charterhouse School, down the street. To evade Mrs. Godwin’s suspicion, she took her stepsister with her—fatally, fatally—to walk down to the schoolyard, where Shelley would be waiting. In those first days, he would invite her to sit on a bench with him to discuss “philosophy,” and suggest to Claire that she walk to the corner. Then beyond the corner, farther each day. Never far enough.
Shelley brought to those meetings his own copies of her mother’s stirring books. “Prudence,” they read aloud to each other, was “the resort of weak people”; “Passions are spurs to action and open the mind.”
Hardly idle writing—her mother had lived by her words. Her first lover was the Romantic painter Fuseli, who had loved her for her red hair and then left her for a younger woman, with redder hair.
She’d then fled to Paris to forget him in the Revolution. She’d gone as a journalist and a partisan, one of the women marching through the streets behind the Tricolore, though she found herself in tears as she glimpsed Louis XVI, by then just a man, rolling past in his cart, on his way to the guillotine. And then came the Terror, with blood running through the streets around the Place de la Revolution—carrying away with it the hopes of a whole generation. But she’d stayed on, even after England and France went to war, since she’d met and fallen in love there with Gilbert Imlay, Fanny’s father, the same sort of cad as Fuseli, it turned out.
To his credit, Imlay, an American, saved her life by claiming her as his wife on his passport, which got her out of France. But he refused to live with her in London, refused to take any responsibility for Fanny, and Mary Wollstonecraft, the strong, brilliant author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, threw herself into the river for him.
But once saved, she found the courage to live on and “be happy,” even Fanny had been happy, and then she, Mary, was born a year later, and Mary Wollstonecraft, age thirty-eight, was gone.
But as Shelley read her mother’s words aloud on the bench in the Charterhouse School garden, it seemed to her that she and her mother had come together at last, now that she was sixteen and in no danger of “resorting to prudence.” Willing, every day more, to “open her mind” to the passions her mother wrote of, her whole life then “wrapt in excitement.” Moving ever further from her father’s problematic world; living wholly, radiantly, in the world of her mother.
Before long, she and Shelley graduated from the school garden to the tangled privacy of the St. Pancras churchyard. The place was overgrown, poorly kept, barely frequented, perfect for them. They sat among the weeds beside her mother’s grave and continued to read her books to each other.
“The man who can be contented to live with a pretty companion who has no mind . . . has never felt the satisfaction . . . of being loved by someone who could understand him.” At this, Shelley’s eyes filled with tears. He had married Harriet Westbrook impulsively, he explained, when she was sixteen and he nineteen, in a romantic escapade to rescue her from the school she hated. She was pretty, pink and white, and he thought he could educate her into a soul mate. They had trekked to Ireland and handed out leaflets favoring emancipation; to Wales, where they tried to instigate an uprising of the poor. He wasn’t sure in those days if he was a political activist or a poet, but then he wrote Queen Mab, and saw that he could be both.
Though no longer with Harriet. Soon after Wales, they had a child, and Harriet’s older sister showed up and reeled her back in, away from Shelley. Stopped her from nursing the baby, which Shelley ardently desired, and opposed their return to Wales to continue their political activism there. A diametric opposition took hold, with the sister prevailing and the husband leaving home.
Though not before “getting,” as they said, another baby, still to be born, in 1814, when she and Shelley met. This was a knot that she, Mary, couldn’t untie.
But there was her mother again, urging her “very early in life to form your grand principle of action, to save you from vain regret, of having, through irresolution, let the springtime of existence pass away unenjoyed. Gain experience—ah! gain it—while experience is worth having, and acquire sufficient fortitude to pursue your own happiness . . .”
“The springtime of existence”—where was she but there? In the heart of it, with her own mother’s words that she’d never heard so directly, so clearly, urging her not to let this moment “pass away unenjoyed.” And what were those words to a sixteen-year-old girl sitting breathless on her mother’s grave, face-to-face with a twenty-one-year-old boy, a poet and beautiful, if married—but a resounding yes?
On Sunday, the twenty-sixth of June, the Godwins went to tea, and she slipped out alone. Shelley was waiting in the graveyard. They pledged their love. He blessed her “beloved name.” For the first time, she felt the truth of what she’d been told: that she’d been born under a lucky star. A comet had blazed at her birth. It was auspicious after all.
Later Shelley would write how it was that day, how she looked to him as she stepped from the shadow of the old church, into the light.
How beautiful and calm and free thou wert
In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain
Of custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,
And walked as free as light the clouds among . . .
And he was right, she was both ecstatic and calm. Proud, too, that she had, like her mother, “burst custom” and “walked free.” Shelley called it his “real birthday.” His plan now was to ask Godwin for her hand, not in matrimony, given his entangled status, but ceremonially, nonetheless. As he foresaw it:
We will have rites our faith to bind,
But our church shall be the starry night,
Our altar the grassy earth outspread,
And our priest the muttering wind.
And she, too, had expected it to be like that. Expected her father to bless their love, their union, and Harriet to agree to a legal separation or, if she preferred, to come to live with them “as a sister.” She’d actually envisioned it this way—that was when? Eight years ago, in those light sunny days of that summer of 1814. Looking back now, she wondered if she was already pregnant.