Portrait of a lady

Or should that be Regency wild child instead of lady?

It's a long time since I did any portraits. I was reading about the Shelley entourage again recently and this was the result - inspired by some cuttings I happened upon in my bits and pieces box and by Claire Clairmont, teen runaway who threw in her lot with Shelley and her half sister Mary when they decamped for France.

Then threw herself at Byron and ended up pregnant and deserted.

 

Here she is, older, wiser and still poor, as a governess in Russia where she did her best to distance herself, geographically and metaphorically, from her scandalous past, though judging by her letters and recently discovered memoir (in which she rages against Byron and Shelley's conduct)she retained her splendidly fierce independence of spirit, in contrast to Mary Shelley whose somewhat prim and proper life-after-Shelley always seems a bit of a disappointing anti-climax.

Had she been born a hundred years later I think she would have made a wonderful suffragette.

Mary Shelley - in the Gulf of Melancholy

Mary in the Gulf of Melancholy

This little image had been kicking around in the back of my head for ages - it's a kind of follow-on from doing the sea storm in the picture of Shelley's Surrey birthplace last year. So I took a break between the houses of Dickens to do this imaginary portrait of Mary Shelley using magazine scraps, cuts from a photpcopy of pages from an old book about Byron and Claire Clairmont with nicely yellowed pages and an inked monoprint I pulled and then cut out

A widow aged just 26, she had experienced more life, joy and tragedy by that age than most of us in a lifetime. The rebellious daughter of a rebellious mother (feminist Mary Wolstonecraft), she had eloped with a married genius, buried three of their children and suffered several miscarriages. On the plus side, as you might say, she had written the definitive Gothic novel and an enduring masterpiece. Frankenstein has never been out of print since its publication.

Already plunged in a deep depression following a miscarriage, the death of Shelley in a sailing accident when his boat was engulfed by a storm, left her bereft and (more practically) rather less than penniless in a foreign land in what she described in her journal as "a gulph of melancholy".

So here she is in her gulph (I must say I prefer her spelling for some reason) and I can now turn my refreshed attention to Dickens's Doughty Street home.

Fiddly stuff which as you see requires lots of soothing cups of tea to aid the old concentration ...
Mary, meanwhile, is now in my online shop at www.etsy.com/shop/AmandaAWhite
(sorry the link defeats me!)

A victim of Romanticism

Here is another miniature portrait, of a woman whose life was fatally shaped by the Romantic movement:

To Fanny nothing now remained except death

Fanny Wollstonecraft was a tragic figure, overlooked in life and death. The daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, half-sister to Mary Shelley, adopted daughter of William Godwin, she was herself not touched by genius, though she wished to be worthy of those geniuses who surrouded her. Conventional and unbookish, her role in the chaotic, debt-ridden Godwin household was confined to two things: running the place and peacemaking. She was most likely in love with Shelley who regarded her at best with indifference and at worst as a useful go-between and was left behind when he, Mary and their stepsister Claire ran off to France.

Unappreciated, unloved and taken for granted, poor Fanny eventually decided to end her life. Even in this she took care to cause no trouble. She took the coach to Swansea, booked herself into an inn and took an overdose of laudanum. No family member came forward to claim her body and she was buried in a communal grave. She was just 22.

No character of Jane Austen ever had to write anything as dire as a suicide note but you can't help feeling that if any had they could have done no better than Fanny's elegant and understated farewell:

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 endeavouring to promote her welfare. Perhaps to hear of my death will give you pain, but you will soon have the blessing of forgetting that such a creature ever existed as Francis Wollstonecraft."

Poor Fanny.

Deary me, really,  the more I read about Percy Bysshe Shelley the less I find to like about him...