A natural survivor in this tale of doomed youth, Claire withstood all subsequent regroupings and outlived them all. While the second Mary’s half-sister Fanny took an overdose of laudanum in a Swansea pub, her stepsister Claire Clairmont tagged along when she eloped with Shelley. Infatuated first with young women, they transferred their affections to philandering men who abandoned or exploited them. Had they lived to compare experiences, mother and daughter would have had plenty to discuss: first the troubled childhoods, then the moody adolescence, followed by the frustrations of thwarted sexuality. The effect is not just to trigger comparisons, but to overturn chronologies, and to make us follow two disastrous histories simultaneously. The facts of their lives are well known, but what makes this biography so riveting is its doubling of the two Marys in alternate chapters, deepening the reader’s immersion in the fabric of each woman’s struggle before plunging back into the parallel story.
In dwelling on her love affairs, he made her into a notorious “fallen woman” and discredited her value as an Enlightenment philosopher. Wollstonecraft’s devoted husband, the philosopher William Godwin, in dashing off a frank memoir, inadvertently ensured that his wife’s contribution to feminism would be ignored for another century. Even after death, their reputations took a further battering. Men used and rejected them, their close relations killed themselves, their children died, and their books were panned by the critics of the day.
The “sobering” element comes from the frustrations of their “outlaw” status in a disapproving society. Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), died a mere 10 days after giving birth to Mary Godwin, author of Frankenstein (1818), but the first Mary’s impact on her daughter’s life choices was immeasurable. “It is a sobering tale, the rise and fall of both Marys,” says Charlotte Gordon towards the end of this gripping dual biography of the mother and daughter whose lives so briefly crossed.
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