Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle
Janet Todd
Profile £17.99, pp304
Being Shelley: The Poet's Search for Himself
Ann Wroe Cape
£25, pp464
Excoriated in his lifetime for blasphemy and vice, Shelley was idealised for a century and more after his death as purity incarnate: 'an angel among his fellow mortals', wrote his grieving widow, who set the tone for the Victorian version of the poet, 'a celestial spirit given and taken away: for we were none of us worthy of him'. Shelley himself put it more bluntly: 'You might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthly from me.'
His two latest biographers perpetuate the Jekyll-and-Hyde tradition, one exploring his spiritual journey, the other totting up the emotional and moral cost of his unearthliness and inhumanity. In Death and the Maidens, Janet Todd confronts more frankly than anyone has done before the fact that Shelley spent virtually his entire adult life trying to lure young girls away from the protection of their families. All of them were vulnerable, inexperienced and underage. Two killed themselves on his account. Most of the babies they bore him died while in his care. The character who emerges from this book was as manipulative as he was mesmeric, self-absorbed and ruthlessly self-righteous.
'It is no reproach to me that you have never filled my heart with an all-sufficing passion,' he wrote to Harriet Westbrook, who had run away from school to marry him only to find herself dumped after three years for 16-year-old Mary Godwin. Shelley insisted there was 'little to regret' when Harriet was fished out of the Thames two years later, pregnant at 21 with her third child (which, as Todd argues persuasively, may well have been his). 'Everyone does me full justice - bears testimony to the uprightness & liberality of my conduct to her,' Shelley wrote, and married Mary a fortnight after the discovery of the body.
But it is Mary's older half sister, Fanny Wollstonecraft, who provides Todd with her main focus. Unlike her bolder, prettier, more assertive sibling, Fanny left no portrait of herself, no journals and few letters. She has hovered until now at the edge of books about Shelley and his followers, mild and plaintive, overshadowed not only by the brilliant Mary but by their obstreperous stepsister, Claire Clairmont (who eloped simultaneously with Shelley to Mary's great and growing consternation). Todd maps Fanny's path from the enchanting, ebullient, confident small child described by her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, to the meek, sad, uncomplaining drudge who lived out her short life, after her mother's death, in the household of her stepfather, William Godwin.
Intelligent and thoughtful, isolated from her contemporaries, abandoned by her sisters and largely ignored by Shelley, Fanny stayed behind at home, bullied by her resentful stepmother and exploited by Godwin, who made her his go-between in a career of shameless sponging. Fanny revered him as she did Shelley, asking only to be allowed to serve as the handmaid of literary genius, treated by both men in return with indifference verging on callousness. 'It is not my fault,' Shelley wrote of her suicide, only too well aware that his final rejection had clinched Fanny's despair: 'this is not to be attributed to me.'
She swallowed poison with characteristically unobtrusive efficiency, unknown and alone in a Welsh coaching inn, blaming no one and causing so little commotion that Godwin managed to keep her death secret for months, even from close relatives. Shelley let her go to a pauper's grave in spite of a last letter, written the night before she died, asking him to bury her. This book is touching, scholarly and fair as far as it goes, although its exclusive emphasis on Shelley as a man - 'the dragging shadow with which the soul had to live' in Ann Wroe's phrase - leaves a sour sense of an immature, greedy and demanding ego with little or no concept of other people as anything but vehicles for his own desires and their instant gratification.
Wroe rights the balance by concentrating on the poet's words rather than the trail of wrecked lives and premature deaths he left behind him. She shares Shelley's view of the innocence of childhood (which didn't prevent him being, as she says, cruelly inattentive to his own children). It was the child in himself that interested Shelley, the alternative persona he kept 'tucked away like the dried plums in his pocket and the surreptitious paper boats', cultivating all his life the look as well as the behaviour of an adolescent boy, 'fresh-faced and eager... more open to wonders than the man he was required to be'.
He aimed to combine that childlike wonderment with cutting-edge technology: paper ships, messages in bottles, fleets of kites designed to harness sheet lightning, a motorboat powered by 'self-impelling steam-wheels of the mind'. Some of his prophetic visions - whole seas drained dry for planting crops, the depths of the earth scientifically plundered and torn open - make grim reading almost two centuries later. Wroe traces the nervous articulation of his work through the finished poetry, and through the notebooks in which he made it. She tracks the lines themselves emerging - dim, quivering, still not fully formed - from doodled webs of leaves, trees, stones, clouds and mountain peaks.
His thoughts form and re-form, elusive and magnificently ambivalent (what looks like a flight of steps to Todd becomes, in Wroe's book, a freshly raked grave). Shelley's fierce slashing pencil strokes, his crossings-out and overwriting yield 'ghosts of what he might say, or might have said'. His darkest fears and needs take shape, personified as tiny creatures, devils, phantoms, figments, 'furtive miserable things' invading a page margin or skittering, 'bat-winged... with legs and beaks trailing, on the backs of shopping lists'.
Wroe ends her book with a macabre image of the drowned poet under water, his skin puckering, limbs swelling and thighbones protruding as marauding fishes nuzzle at his flesh 'like reviewers massing for the kill'. Reviewers of one sort or another have picked his bones ever since but, if posterity still can't decide whether Shelley was primarily predator or prey, his victims seem to have been in no doubt. Both Harriet and Fanny loved him to the end, while Mary, who suffered longer and perhaps more deeply than either from his depredations and betrayals, came to see him posthumously as angelic. Being Shelley suggests why. It traces the movement of his mind - soaring, scudding, dipping, floating, racing like flames or wind or waves - with exhilarating assurance, precision and panache.
· To order Death and the Maidens for £16.99 or Being Shelley for £23, both with free UK p&p, go to observer.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0885