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Death & The Maidens

Author: Janet Todd

'His whole existence was visionary, and there breathed in his actions in his looks and in his manners that high and superhuman tone which we can only conceive to belong to a superior being," gushed his sister-in-law Claire Clairmont about Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.

But perhaps closer to earth and reality was the comment of Everina Wollstonecraft, a more distant relative to the poet by marriage. "Shelley was certainly a man of Genius and great feeling – but the effects of both were perverted by some unhappy flightings of mind that led him to cause much unhappiness to his connections," she sighed.

Much unhappiness, indeed. Shelley's story leaves in its wake a trail of women whose lives were destroyed or at least disturbed by the dreamy visionary (not to mention his several children, most of whom did not survive their precarious childhoods.)

Among the young lives unsettled by Shelley, one of the most quickly forgotten was that of Fanny Wollstonecraft, illegitimate daughter of feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, and half-sister to Wollstonecraft's second daughter, Mary, author of "Frankenstein" and wife of Shelley. In her closely researched and intelligently crafted book, Death and the Maidens, Scottish academic Janet Todd carefully pieces together what is known about Fanny, who appears to have been a sensitive young woman, caught in the cross tides of too much genius.

Fanny stepped into the glare of celebrity while still an infant when her mother, Mary, featured her in her popular memoir "Letters from Sweden," a book which ultimately became a favorite of Shelley's. Shortly before her death, Mary married Enlightenment philosopher William Godwin, a thinker who decried family ties as "selfish." Godwin was fond of his bright, affectionate stepdaughter but ultimately became too wrapped up in his own concerns to note her struggles.

Finally Fanny was tugged into the vortex surrounding Shelley when he ran off with Fanny's two teenage stepsisters, leaving Fanny to cope with a scandal, an aggrieved family, and few prospects of her own.

But "Death and the Maidens" reaches beyond the sad tale of a young life turned tragic to paint a vivid picture of life – and particularly, the lives of women – amidst the rich but messy intellectual turmoil of the early 19th century.

Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and Shelley all aimed for the stars. Fanny's life is the heartbreaking reminder of how often they failed to see what was right under their noses.

– M.K.

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