The Lady and Her Monsters (16 page)

Mary Shelley. This miniature portrait was made by Reginald Easton, and according to Lady Shelley, it was based on one of Mary Shelley's death masks. At her breast she wears a blue and yellow pansy, a symbol of remembrance she began to wear following the death of her husband, Percy Shelley, in 1822.

If an affair did take place, Percy Shelley knew about it and even blessed it. He had insisted on Mary and Hogg's intimacy, perhaps because during this period—during Mary's pregnancy of 1814–15—he and Claire Clairmont began their own sexual affair. If so, it explains Mary's antipathy toward her stepsister.

In any case, Mary certainly knew that Hogg was in love with her, or at least believed himself to be, and her pregnancy allowed her to stall his advances. In a letter she wrote to him in January 1815, she said, “You love me you say—I wish I could return it with the passion you deserve—but you are very good to me and tell me that you are quite happy with the affection which from the bottom of my heart I feel for you . . . But you know Hogg that we have known each other for so short a time and I did not think about love—so that I think that
that
will come in time & then we shall be happier.”

Years later, an elderly Claire revealed to an interviewer named Edward Augustus Silsbee that Shelley actually wanted Mary to have sex with Hogg. In a memorandum book, following a conversation with Claire, Silsbee jotted down: “C's story of Mrs. S's coming into her room about when they lived was S. Pancras Arabetta—& putting her head on her pillow . . . Saying Shelley wanted her to sleep with Hogg.”

Caught up in this peculiar love scheme, the death of her daughter, a lover doctors believed was about to die, a father who did not want to see her, and constant money worries, Mary could see that the happiness she had sought with Shelley while conversing on the grounds of St. Pancras was eluding her and her life was turning into a bleak existence reminiscent of her mother's. And as she sank deeper into her melancholy, Claire also realized that she had reached a juncture in her own life. She knew she could not live at Skinner Street or in Mary's home, where the hostility had now became palpable. She had also decided it was time to find a lover of her own. And she wanted to snag someone who was more renowned than Percy Shelley, and who would eventually eclipse the poet's notoriety. Even though Mary was praised for her intellect and Fanny respected for her piety, Claire knew that in her case it was her physical beauty people admired. The mass of her dark ringlets, the olive tone of her skin, the roundness and softness of her curves, and her sociable disposition, she believed, would be enough to catch a man's attention. With that in mind, Claire set out to seduce the poet George Gordon Noel Byron, better known to the world as Lord Byron.

B
yron already had a reputation as a lascivious, shocking madman. He was the son of Captain John Byron, a man who later became known as Mad Jack, given his enjoyment of women, drink, and poker. And people agreed that family tradition had continued on, particularly in regard to women. Although many individuals felt his antics were repugnant, his beauty and charm were such that women of all ages and social status coveted him, and even men, the ones who should have loathed him most, ended up admiring him.

Thomas Moore once said about him:

Of his face, the beauty may be pronounced to have been of the highest order, as combining at once regularity of features with the most varied and interesting expression . . . His eyes, though of a light gray, were capable of all extremes of expression, from the most joyous hilarity to the deepest sadness, from the very sunshine of benevolence to the most concentrated scorn of rage. But it was in the mouth and chin that the great beauty as well as expression of his countenance lay . . . The glossy dark-brown curls, clustering over his head, gave the finish to its beauty. When this is added to his nose . . . that his teeth were white and regular, and his complexion colorless, as good an idea as perhaps it is in the power of mere words to convey may be conceived of his features.

One of Byron's most notorious lovers had been Lady Caroline, the woman who came to think of him as nothing more than “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Already married to a man who would later become part of London's Parliament, Lady Caroline was so enraptured and infatuated with Byron she had hatched a plan to run off with him. But Byron scoffed and declined the invitation.

Byron was never amused by women's antics or their girly talk, and even less by their suggestive smiles and batting eyelashes. He despised the clinginess and neediness of most of his lovers and was even less drawn to their serious desire to attach themselves to him, which he could not understand, because even he knew he could not be counted on. “You will find that I am the most selfish person in the world,” he once told an acquaintance. “I have however, the merit, if it be one, of not only being perfectly conscious of my faults, but of never denying them; and this is surely something.”

He especially enjoyed his reputation for having illicit and even scandalous affairs. This love of the forbidden even drove him toward his half sister Augusta Leigh. Five years his senior and also the daughter of Mad Jack, she too had inherited some of the old man's ability to shock people. Indecency was also one of Augusta's most remarkable traits. The daughter she eventually gave birth to, Medora, was said to have been fathered by Byron. Instead of being scandalized by this, Byron believed such a disreputable idea only added to his coat of infamy.

Many believed Byron would never marry because having a wife would thwart his unnatural desires. But thanks to Lady Melbourne, Lady Caroline's mother-in-law, he was introduced to Annabella Milbanke, who eventually became his wife. Any notion that Annabella possessed the strength to tame Byron was laughable to most. Still, they were married, even though the union was doomed from the start.

Byron possessed several traits that appeared not merely mad but downright psychotic. They were due not to mental deficits, but to his incessant drinking, coupled with his ferocious anorexia. He was a compulsive dieter, often existing on a regimen that consisted of a few cookies and copious amounts of green tea, which he usually consumed in early to midafternoon. Occasionally he added a few vegetables. He also used a massive amount of purgatives to maintain what he believed was his ideal weight. As such, he was always “extremely thin, so much that his figure [had] almost a boyish air,” further enhanced by the clothes he wore, which hung from his body.

This fear of gaining weight was tied to his desire to look thin, but also to what he believed was a mental superiority he got from his ability to control what he ate. He once told Lady Blessington that if he gave in and ate more food, “he should get fat and stupid, and that it was only by abstinence that he felt he had the power of exercising his mind.”

He felt that if he got carried away as others did, all of his “intellectual faculties would dwindle.” He said the regimen “made him feel lighter and more lively.” On one occasion he told Moore that “the devil arrives with plumpness, and I must drive him away through hunger! I DO NOT WISH TO BE A SLAVE OF MY APPETITE.” But his alcohol consumption, poor diet, and views on weight gain caused his worst traits to come out.

He was also highly self-conscious of a limp he developed in his youth due to a congenital defect. He obsessed over the limp and concealed it so successfully that few people ever noticed, though doing so often brought him great pain after long walks. He never forgot being taunted by his schoolmates because of the “lameness.” This, he mused, was “the greatest misfortune, one that [he was] never able to conquer.” He knew that a person needed a certain mental aptitude to “conquer the corroding bitterness” that arose from such a situation, and that he did not have that aptitude.

He had devised a way of walking on his toes that not only lengthened his stature (he was of average height—five feet eight inches tall), but also allowed his limp to be diminished or disappear. That he spent unusual amounts of time practicing and developing those abilities seemed repugnant to many outside of his immediate circle. His wife was one of those people who over time came to believe he was insane. But he was not medically insane; many people agreed that she lacked the sense of humor he most prized and that she needed to understand him.

Byron had also developed a habit of telling tall tales, with himself usually as the principal character in them. Those tales were meant to impress and most people realized they were embellished. Lady Byron was too late in figuring out when he was joking and when he was not: “He had wished to think [himself] partially deranged, or on the brink of it, to perplex observers and prevent them from tracing effects . . . ,” she wrote in a letter republished in
The Passages from Lady Anne Barnard's Private Family Memoirs.
“By the introduction of fictitious incidents, by change of scene or time, he has enveloped his poetical disclosures in a system impenetrable except to a very few.” Despite the discrepancies in their characters, in December 1815 Lady Byron gave birth to a baby girl. They named her Augusta Ada, after Byron's sister, though Annabella's family always referred to her as Ada. Barely a month later, Annabella left Byron. Following the separation, and for years afterward, he said he could not understand why she left him. Many felt this was an act.

Though neither spoke of the real reasons for their separation, it was speculated that Byron had told his wife about his real involvement with his half sister, and she couldn't forgive him. He wrote to her often, but those letters always went unanswered. For nearly a year after the separation, Byron admitted to her, in a letter he did not send, that he hoped for a reconciliation.

Although his marriage to Annabella had really been a sham, Byron had felt affection for his new daughter. “The little girl was born on the 10th of December last,” he wrote in a letter. “Her name is Augusta Ada (the second a very antique family name, I believe not used since the reign of John). She was, and is, very flourishing and fat, and reckoned very large for her days. Squawks and sucks incessantly . . . her mother is doing very well, and up again. I have now been married a year on the second of this month, heigh-ho!”

The loss of not seeing the baby every day now disappointed him, as he knew he would not be a part of her growing up. He despised the notion that Lady Byron would get to “feast on the smiles of her infancy and growth,” though he vowed that “the years of her maturity” would be his. Soon after the breakup of their marriage, rumors began to swirl about of Byron's violence, sodomy, and illicit affair with his half sister. He could not understand why people were so interested in the separation of a husband and wife, something that was common, he thought. It was during this time that he began receiving letters from Claire.

Initially, she wished only to meet him to discuss opportunities for her future. She had been on the lookout for ways of becoming independent and believed she could do so as a stage actress. Byron was a member of the Drury Lane Theatre, and Claire believed he could assist her: “May I beg you . . . if it is not too difficult to procure from one of your theatrical friends an account of what instructions are necessary for one who intends entering that career. What are the first steps to be taken . . . Is it absolutely necessary to go through the intolerable & disgusting drudgery of provincial theatres.”

The letters soon turned sexual, especially when he began calling her a little “fiend.” In March or April 1816, she wrote him the first letter in which she divulged her unattached state as well as some of her deeper feelings: “If a woman whose reputation had yet remained unstained, if without either guardian or husband to control she should throw herself upon your mercy, if with a beating heart she should confess the love she has borne you many years, if she should secure to you secrecy & safety, if she should return your kindness with fond affection & unbounded devotion, could you betray her, or would you be silent as the grave?”

Byron must have seen Claire as a diversion from his daily routine, though Claire must have recognized it as a good way to upstage her sister. Though he made her no long-lasting promises, he could introduce her to a large repertoire of sexual experiences, and Claire dived in with abandon, as he exerted a strong sexual allure over her. Even years later, when nearing her death, she thought of the time she had spent with him as nearing the sublime. But while Claire enjoyed her newfound sexual freedom and all of Byron's physical favors, quickly falling in love with him, Byron thought of her as nothing more than an enjoyable interlude. Soon enough, the relationship came to its inevitable denouement.

Byron had decided to leave London for the Continent, wanting to salvage what was left of his reputation and what was left of his physical and mental health. He had planned on Switzerland, traveling across Europe, down the Rhine River, until he reached the magnificent shores of Lake Geneva.

Claire heard about his plans and decided to follow him, though she had assured him she would not do so: “I assure you nothing shall tempt me to come to Geneva by myself since you disapprove of it as I cannot but feel that such conduct would be highly indelicate.” But in the same letter, she almost warned him that should she find someone willing to accompany her, she would go, as she was certain it “would not displease [Byron].” In other words, she planned on meeting him in Geneva not only because she was deeply in love with him, but because she had also just learned she was carrying his child. Believing that he not only loved her but that he would also take care of her and their child, Claire realized she needed her sister's assistance.

On January 24, 1816, Mary had given birth to a son, William, named to honor her father. Though this new birth brought joy, everyday events still dominated their lives: There was Claire, the now-constant companion in Mary and Percy's lives. And money, or the lack of it, continued to plague them. As a consequence, moneylenders were also continuously after them, and fearing that Shelley would be arrested for their debts, they decided to leave England for Italy. They believed the trip would take them away from the clutches of the loan sharks and would remove Shelley, with his fragile health, from London's dreariness. And it was supposed to give Mary a respite from her concerns. Claire, of course, wanted to go to Switzerland, not Italy, and made her opinions known. Following several conversations, they all agreed on Lake Geneva, a sojourn, they hoped, that would bring about much-needed tranquility and mark a new era in their lives.