The Forgotten Tragedy of the Frankenstein Story

Of the many 200^th Anniversary Celebrations for the creation of Frankenstein, it is unlikely these events of October of 1816 are on anyone’s party list.

Entries in Mary Godwin’s Diary

Wednesday, October 9.—Read Curtius; finish the Memoirs; draw. In the evening a very alarming letter comes from Fanny. Shelley goes immediately to Bristol; we sit up for him till 2 in the morning, when he returns, but brings no particular news.

Thursday, October 10.—Shelley goes again to Bristol, and obtains more certain trace. Work and read. He returns at 11 o’clock.

Friday, October 11.—He sets off to Swansea. Work and read.

Saturday, October 12.—He returns with the worst account. A miserable day. Two letters from Papa. Buy mourning, and work in the evening.

These were the only entries in Mary’s daily diary of the news of the suicide of her twenty-two year old elder half-sister, Fanny Imlay Godwin. The entries are characteristic of Mary’s decidedly terse and brief references to the most wrenching of events in her life recorded in her daily accounts. This was during the time in which she and her younger step-sister Claire Clairmont Godwin were living in Bath, writing Frankenstein and her tour journals she called her memoirs. This was October of 1816. They had returned from their second trip to Europe and that famous fateful legendary summer with the impromptu contest on Lake Geneva. Claire was fully pregnant with Byron’s child, (to be born Alba and later changed to Allegra) and Mary was still rejected by her father for her “illicit” unwed liaison with Percy Shelley. They had taken up residence in Bath to hide Claire’s pregnancy from prying scandal eyes in London and Mary was working on the beginnings of a draft of the story she had envisioned in Geneva.

Mary’s father, William Godwin’s finances were a shambles and he was approaching bankruptcy. He had been counting on money from Shelley, but Shelley was still at odds with his own father over his inheritance and had already lent large sums. Even though the Godwins were estranged from their daughter, Mary’s step-mother Mrs. Clairmont Godwin was attempting to raise loans on the publishing business, based on the promise of Percy Shelley’s prospects. The family was feeling that Fanny was a burden at home and hoped she could be sent again to her relatives in Ireland, but her relations there had refused. Fanny’s letters gave little clue to the state of her mind, except for a general bleakness.

She left home and made her way to Swansea. It is unclear why she chose Wales. Perhaps it was familiarity from her younger days, when there are accounts that she had relatives, but her intention was clear in letters posted from Bristol. Fanny had written to both the Shelleys and the Godwins to account for her sudden disappearance from Skinner Street with the added note:

“I depart immediately to the spot from which I hope never to remove.”

Percy Shelley set out to follow her track. He arrived too late. The morning after that letter had been posted from Bristol she was found in a room at the Mackworth Arms, lying dead on the floor. Next to her was a bottle of Laudanum, and a note of profound despair:

“I have long determined that the best thing I could do was to put an end to the existence of a being whose birth was unfortunate, and whose life has only been a series of pain to those persons who have hurt their health in endeavoring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death may give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as…”

The note ends abruptly, the grammar is odd at the end so perhaps she was succumbing to the effects of the laudanum as she wrote it.

The local Swansea paper The Cambrian reported that Friday October 11, 1816:

 “A melancholy discovery was made in Swansea yesterday: a most respectable-looking female arrived at the Mackworth Arms on Wednesday night by the Cambrian coach from Bristol: she took tea and retired to rest, telling the chambermaid she was exceedingly fatigued and would take care of the candle herself. Much agitation was created in the house by her non-appearance yesterday morning, and on forcing her chamber door, she was found a corpse with the remains of a bottle of laudanum on the table and a note.”

Percy Shelley is not mentioned in any of the reporting, but the name on the note was said to have been torn off and burned. Did Shelley arrive and prevail to keep her identity secret? She was described as wearing stockings marked with a “G” (Godwin)and her stays had the letters “MW” (Mary Wollstonecraft), hand me down remnants of her mother. She was described as wearing a blue striped skirt, a white bodice, a brown fur-lined pelisse coat and matching hat. She had in her possession a small French gold watch, a brown-berry necklace, and a small leather purse containing five shillings and a six-penny piece. An inquest held a week later when she was still identified only as a “young lady” stated a verdict merely that she was ‘found dead’.

The suicide of Fanny Imlay Wollstonecraft Godwin is perhaps one of the saddest of episodes in the story of the Shelleys. Of her family, Mary was probably the most fond of her, but she had always seemed an innocent side player. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, had written of breast-feeding her as an infant in her travels in Norway, which seemed to cause her some embarrassment. And when William Godwin published his biography of Wollstonecraft which revealed the questionable legitimacy of her birth and Mary Wollstonecraft’s relation to her father, Gilbert Imlay (they had been declared as married in France, but not officially recorded in England), she held herself in part to blame for the resulting scandal-driven critical rejection of her writer mother as a libertine. This was likely the reference to her “unfortunate birth”. She had written in an earlier letter:

“I have determined never to live to be a disgrace to such a mother I have found that if I will endeavour to overcome my faults I shall find being’s to love and esteem me.”

But she found little esteem in her own household. She noted in the same letter in May of 1816 that her step-mother had told her that she was the subject of ridicule by Mary and Shelley:

“What ever faults I may have I am not sordid or vulgar. I love you for your selves alone. I endeavour to be as frank to you as possible that you may understand my real character. I understand from Mamma that I am your laughing stock – and the constant beacon of your satire.’

Fanny had been the first of the Godwin sisters to encounter Percy Shelley. She was most probably in love with him and had high hopes, though when he fell for Mary, she accepted and stepped aside in support of Mary’s happiness. Shelley was fond of Fanny, but more likely in friendship than more. William Godwin had leaned heavily on Fanny in dealing with his creditors as she seemed to have a skill at correspondence, but with his increasing financial difficulties, this constant task must have weighed on her, and Godwin may have turned to blame in his situation. It may have been his health she was referring to in her suicide note, and one can only offer conjecture that perhaps he or her step-mother had laid some blame on her in a moment of argument. Her relationship with her step-mother had always been difficult as well. Mary blamed Mary Jane Claremont Godwin for many things, one of them her treatment of Fanny. It was Mrs. Godwin who apparently was often sending Fanny away to other relatives. She had sent an inquiry to the Ireland clan to take her again, but when that request was rejected, it may have added to Fanny’s despair of being rejected and unwanted by all around her.

There seems no record of another particular incident or circumstance which caused Fanny Imlay to feel so rejected and unloved that she would travel from London to an inn in South Wales with a bottle of laudanum intent to destroy herself. Perhaps this was the last straw for her, accepting in self-blaming reasoning that she needed to be sent away, that no-one wanted her.  She could not go to the Shelleys, to see Mary and Percy together, when she was in love with Shelley but would not think of interfering in Mary’s happiness, and they, having their own difficulties with scandal. Claire was pregnant from her liaison with Byron, and Fanny was at this point feeling her own prospects for romance increasingly bleak.

How Shelley found Fanny at the Mackworth Arms is unreported, though he probably took the Cambrian Coach from Bristol, just as she had the day before, and arrived at the inn to discover the news which had already been reported. What is less clear is whether they already knew her potential destination in Wales? Was she seeking out a familiar haunt from her youth, or was she thinking of a boat to Ireland? According to a fellow traveler to Swansea she said she had left London by the Post Coach to Bath on Tuesday. Had she seen Mary or Shelley in Bath or had traveled onward on Wednesday? It was still a ferry ride across the Severn River from Bristol to Wales so he could not have followed her that day. Had she waited one more evening, he might have been in time. Shelley felt his own pain at her loss and his own blame. When they had last spoken is not recorded, but was it that Wednesday and she did not find a solace in Bath? Shelley acknowledges that he was perhaps unaware of her real feelings for him when he wrote a requiem poem, though not identifying the subject until Mary published her collection of his works in 1817 as “On F.G.”:

“Her voice did quiver as we parted,
Yet knew I not that heart was broken
From which it came,—and I departed,
Heeding not the words then spoken—
Misery, ah! misery!
This world is all too wide for thee.”

Godwin was deeply affected by Fanny’s loss and it sent him into a despondent gloom, but his chief concern at the moment of the news was the potential for more public scandal which was the cause of his separation from his other daughters.

He wrote to Mary:

“Do not expose us to those idle questions which to a mind in anguish, is one of the severest of all trials. We are at this moment in doubt whether, during the first shock, we shall not say that she is gone to Ireland to her aunt, a thing that had been in contemplation. Do not take from us the power to exercise our own discretion. You shall hear again to-morrow. What I have most of all in horror is the public papers, and I thank you for your caution, as it may act on this.”

In fact, the death and circumstance was kept private for some time. She was not identified by the family and was buried nameless in a pauper’s grave. Mary’s half-brother, Charles Godwin, was apparently unaware of it for a year when he referenced Fanny in a letter. Mrs. Godwin for her part spent a great deal of her energy blaming Shelley. When ultimately revealed, rumors that Fanny’s suicide had been the result of a tryst with Shelley and her jealousy at his relationship with Mary had been circulating. It became clear that it was Mary Jane Godwin who had been complicit in the rumor mongering when she wrote to a Mrs. Gisborne four years later that the three Godwin daughters, Mary, Claire and Fanny had all been simultaneously in love with Shelley. The Shelleys held Mrs. Godwin responsible for many of the more salacious slanders which would affect them for years.

Fanny’s tragic death would shortly be followed by another suicide, when Shelley’s wife, Harriet, was found floating in the Serpentine stream which flows through Hyde Park. Another unhappy figure in the story, but with his first wife’s death, Shelley was able to finally marry Mary in December of 1816, which also ended their separation from Godwin, and a move from Bath to Marlow for another chapter.

The original Mackworth Arms Inn, located on Wind Street in Swansea had once been described in 1798 as the best hotel in town, and had hosted Admiral Lord Nelson under its roof, but fell to progress and was demolished in 1890 to make way for a post office. And the residence in Bath rented by Mary and Shelley across from the Abbey was also torn down to make an addition to the Bath’s Pump House. Even Bath officials were apparently unaware of its place in the Shelley story for a century. It is not certain how much Fanny’s death played in the writing of Frankenstein. Mary wrote nothing more about it in her diaries beyond the terse one sentence of reportage, but as she was formulating the architecture of story at the time, it is tantalizing to consider could the tragic turn of reprisal by the creature against his wife and child in her novel be informed by the feelings of her own part in the story of her sister?

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