Other Women (16 page)

The trio hadn’t been in Calais for a day before they’d been tracked down by a furious Mrs Godwin in pursuit of her errant daughter Jane. Mary had made her own bed and could stay in it at far as Jane’s mother was concerned; the two had never got along. But Jane was not going to be allowed to sink off the social pages through her sister’s indiscretions. Jane at first agreed to go home with her mother, and perhaps she should have, it might well have prevented a life of heartache to come. Before they left for Dover Jane had changed her mind more than once. In the end she stayed with Mary and Shelley (which rather gives the lie to her later claim that she had been duped into the trip) while Mrs Godwin returned home a very angry and bitter woman.

Claire Clairmont

When the elopement was discovered in England Harriet was absolutely distraught. Shelley answered her pleading letters with self-righteous ones full of indignation and blame. He claimed Harriet was being clingy and selfish, denying him the happiness of being with his one true love. She should, knowing his views on marriage and free love, be pleased for him. Harriet soon gave up on getting him back and moved home to her father with her two children, a boy and a girl.

Paris was the first stop on the agenda for the threesome’s tour of Europe. There Shelley managed to get the sum of £60 from English bankers. It was not a lot for three people to go on holiday with, even by the standards of those times. To save money they decided to walk throughout Europe, yet none of them was fit for the enterprise. The girls were only used to strolling in the city and Shelley, suffering from his self-imposed strict vegetarian diet, was not the strongest or most fit young man to be making the trip.

Not only were they physically disadvantaged for such a journey but Europe in 1814 was not a safe place for tourists. Only four months before, much of it had been impossible for genteel travellers and had been so since the French Revolution some twenty years earlier. What the three witnessed affected them. They saw poverty and depression, starvation and hardship as none of them had ever known. The living conditions in which they found themselves also left a lot to be desired. One night Jane refused to sleep in her own bed because the place was overrun by rats; of course this may have been a ploy to get into bed with her sister and Shelley, or to at least break up their cosiness.

They hadn’t been travelling very long when Shelley took a tumble and sprained his ankle. Thus walking was out of the question and for a while they travelled by hired carriage, a luxury they could not afford. It took them as far as the Swiss border and then left them to make their own way into Switzerland. About this time Mary and Shelley embarked on a joint diary. Jane, in her typical jealous fashion, feeling deliberately left out, demanded paper from them so she could make her own journal. Mary and Shelley were finding the third in their company a burden, or at least Mary did. Shelley’s relationship with Jane has never been fully fathomed. There has always been speculation that they had an on-off sexual relationship throughout Shelley’s life. Years later Shelley acknowledged paternity of a little girl, Elena Adelaide. It was almost certainly not Mary’s child, but there were rumours it may have been Jane’s (or Claire’s as she was called by then). It may be that the child was not related to any of them but was adopted and brought in to help ease Mary’s sense of loss at her own daughter Clara and her son William.

In Switzerland, whatever Shelley thought, Mary was heartily sick of her sister and got Shelley to have words with her about her behaviour. Jane would not have taken this kindly and continued to go out of her way to make life miserable for Mary. Shelley, on the other hand, seemed to be enjoying the jaunt very much. He would act impulsively and erratically. One time he tried to buy a child he saw on the road and was most put out when the father told him to clear off.

Shelley certainly lived for his own pleasure, without over concern for anyone else’s. By this time the £60 was all gone and they were destitute again. Shelley wrote to Harriet asking for money. He suggested she might like to bring them the money and join them in their travels. It is amazing to think that after his cavalier treatment of his pregnant wife Shelley really thought she would buy into that one. Why would a conventional young woman, dumped by her philandering husband when she was expecting their second child, want to travel through war-torn Europe in order to help out that same husband, his mistress and her sister? Did Shelley believe his attractions were that strong? Or was he naive and really believed that Harriet would fit in with the other two women?

The upshot was, of course, that Harriet refused his request. Shelley and his companions were forced to return to England. Jane didn’t understand why they had to leave after they had only just got to Switzerland. She refused to believe it was for financial reasons and preferred to suggest it was her sister’s fussiness over a stove in their rented dwelling that sparked off a fit of pique.

The return journey was begun one month after the elopement. On one of the barges they travelled on they managed to horrify their fellow travellers by talking revolution and how they wanted to cut off the king’s head. It was a way of passing an uncomfortable time, but unfortunately smacks of juvenile delinquency and boredom.

Shelley, Mary and Jane wandered into London in early September. The captain of the boat in which they took passage was suspicious of the three and sent one of his crew to follow them home to make sure they paid for their trip. In view of their financial crisis Shelley made straight for Harriet’s father’s house. The two girls stayed hidden in a coach while Shelley went inside to plead with his wife for funds. Somehow he managed to persuade the injured woman to cover all his outstanding debts from money he had previously given her. Perhaps he used those very laws he didn’t believe in – their marriage – as means to pressure her to do so. As Shelley’s lawful wife, everything Harriet owned actually belonged, by law, to him. The boatman was paid and Shelley departed to find suitable shelter for the girls.

The Godwins refused to have them enter their house and also prohibited Charles and Fanny from visiting the trio. Shelley was furious, using Godwin’s own words on freedom and love to show what a hypocrite the older man was. Godwin had sold out on his own philosophy when he married Mary Wollstonecraft, claimed Shelley, and that he himself, by living in sin with his daughters, was rectifying the imbalance caused by it. Shelley writes as if he was convinced by his own arguments, but it is difficult for the outsider to see it as anything other than pure selfishness.

By now Mary knew that she too was in the family way. Only a handful of their former friends bothered to visit Shelley and his ladies. Thomas Hogg was one; Thomas Love Peacock was another. Charles Clairmont and Fanny Imlay, Mary’s and Jane’s brother and sister, paid furtive visits when they thought their parents wouldn’t notice. Charles would give them small amounts of money for their everyday living expenses but he didn’t have the funds to bail them out of the deep debt that Shelley was in. The bailiffs assailed them from time to time, causing Shelley to run off until things had settled. On Sundays he could return home because the bailiffs were not allowed to ply their trade on the Lord’s Day.

Mary was not well throughout the pregnancy. Shelley advocated a strict vegetarian diet, and not a sound one at that. There are thoughts about this contributing to the unwellness of both Shelley and Mary. Mary would retire to bed early leaving Jane and Shelley to spend a lot of time together in the evenings. Mary was not happy about this, she didn’t trust her sister and may not have trusted her lover either; she had, after all, witnessed what he did to his pregnant wife. Mary’s solution to the problem was to suggest that Jane move out. The problem was that there was nowhere for her to go. She was not allowed to return home to Skinner Street, she had no other relatives willing to take her in, and Shelley had no money to find her separate lodgings; Mary was stuck with her.

Then, at the beginning of 1815, Jane did one of her extraordinary things that confounded everybody: she changed her name from Jane to Clara and then to Claire. With the change of name came a change of character. Instead of whingeing and blaming Shelley and her sister for their misery, Claire became animated and interested in things intellectual. She and Shelley began to go out and about, talking and walking, with she hanging on his every word. The strategy had the desired effect, and while Shelley began to enjoy Claire’s company, Mary’s jealousy became even more noticeable.

The little group were isolated socially and economically. It was frustrating but it also offered the opportunity Shelley had been looking for to put some of his free-love theories into practice. Here was a ready-made community of like-minded people who could participate in the experiment of their own will. While no one would be forced to sleep with or take up with another of the party if they didn’t want to, there was no one to object to it if they did. With this in mind, Shelley encouraged Hogg, a frequent visitor, to declare his admiration of Mary. Shelley even went as far as inviting Hogg to visit Mary while he and Claire were deliberately out walking. Mary was not that impressed by Hogg’s letter declaring undying love, although she suggested in a return letter that it was not something she would rule out altogether. They were not, she explained, well enough acquainted for them to become lovers (although she didn’t put it as baldly as that), but she thought with time they might well be. Mary was bored. She was bored with being pregnant and left at home all the time while her lover and her sister enjoyed gadding about town. It was Shelley she wanted, not Hogg. When her boredom and sense of abandonment became too much Mary wrote to Hogg again suggesting that she was getting a bit more interested. However, it was Hogg who began to get cold feet over the affair. Meanwhile, Shelley was enjoying overseeing Claire’s education. She was to study languages, philosophy and poetry but she was to give up music. Claire obediently did as she was asked to do.

Towards the end of February 1815, Mary Godwin gave birth to a baby girl. The infant was sickly and was not expected to live beyond a day. She was never given a name and she died about ten days later. Mary was devastated; all that time waiting and fearing her lover would leave her and then her baby was gone. She went into a depression. It was faithful Fanny who came and nursed Mary, trying to console her. Hogg withdrew his attentions altogether, it was neither the time nor the place. Claire was still being blamed by Mary for trying to steal Shelley and Mary kept insisting that they find a new home for her.

Shelley approached Harriet again for more money but did not receive any. He asked Hogg for money and received a small amount. Finally Shelley went to his father and managed to get enough to cover all immediate debts and to provide for the near future. He was to get an annual allowance of £1,000, of which he would send one-fifth to Harriet in the form of maintenance. This windfall meant that Claire could be sent away. Mary had Shelley send her as far as Lynmouth, a small and relatively isolated place. They had spent a happy time there but it held nothing of interest for Claire nor any other prospects, such as marriage.

With Claire taken care of, Mary and Shelley were able to settle down together in Windsor. Mary was soon pregnant again. Seeing such domestic bliss and how conducive it was to Shelley’s writing, Thomas Love Peacock conceded that Mary was a far more suitable partner for his friend than Harriet had been. He still did not condone the shabby treatment of Harriet by Shelley but he was happy to see some kind of settling down and contentment.

Claire, however, left on her own in a hostile place, was not going to let herself be tossed aside. She soon managed to make her way back to Shelley and Mary’s house. Mary now had a baby boy, William, and Claire convinced her she could help to look after him. Perhaps she did and perhaps she didn’t: the outcome was that Mary was as adamant not to live with Claire as she had been before. Thus Claire was set up in her own lodgings in town.

In 1816 Claire wrote a passionate letter to the poet Byron, offering herself to him. What possessed her, no one knows. Maybe she wanted a poet of her own, one even more famous than her sister’s. Byron lived to regret inviting the young lady into his home, but he did so and they began an affair. To Claire it was a grand passion to rival Mary’s with Shelley; to Byron it was a fling with a female slightly more elevated than a prostitute. Byron was already a married man, although he was certainly not a faithful one. When he tired of Claire he dumped her. However, Claire was not going to be discarded so thoughtlessly and she pursued him.

When she heard Byron was set to travel to Switzerland Claire put it to Shelley and Mary that they all three go there too, to recapture their first time away together. Shelley was enthusiastic; he wanted to meet Byron in person, the poet he admired so much and whose stature was already great. Mary was not going to let Shelley out of her sight, of course, so they took themselves off to Switzerland, a little older and wiser the second time around.