A new ‘Romantic Reimaginings’ post, written by Chloe Wilcox, revisits the Canadian science writer Grant Allen’s 19th-century novel The Woman Who Did and its adaptation of the marriage of Percy and Mary Shelley into fiction.
Content warning: suicide, eugenics
The fraught circumstances of Mary and Percy Shelley’s marriage continue to cause no shortage of controversy, frequently being the first thing people ask me about when I mention my interest in Percy Shelley. After a gradual estrangement from his first wife Harriet in Spring 1814, Percy announced his love for Mary Godwin that June.1 However, Harriet and Percy remained legally married, and Harriet was pregnant with a child who would be born in November.2 On the 10th of December 1816, Harriet’s body was found following her suicide, and Mary and Percy were married only 20 days later.3
Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895) is one text that engages with this controversy. Although not particularly popular today (perhaps for good reason), it was amongst the most popular of the fin de siècle’s New Woman novels, achieving nineteen editions within a year of publication.4 Its protagonist Herminia consistently refuses to marry her partner despite the substantial obstacles that this presents her and her daughter with throughout the novel. It ends with Herminia’s suicide, which Allen presents as a ‘martyrdom’: she awaits death ‘with hands folded on her breast, like some saint of the middle ages.’5
In The Woman Who Did, Mary and Percy Shelley’s marriage is cited in a speech by Herminia as an example of behaviour she wishes to avoid:
Brave women before me have tried for a while to act on their own responsibility, for the
good of their sex; but never of their own free will from the very beginning. They have
avoided marriage, not because they thought it a shame and a surrender, a treason to their
sex, a base yielding to the unjust pretensions of men, but because there existed at the time
some obstacle in their way in the shape of the vested interest of some other woman. When
Mary Godwin chose to mate herself with Shelley, she took her good name in her hands; but
still, there was Harriet. As soon as Harriet was dead, Mary showed she had no deep
principle of action involved, by marrying Shelley. […] Now, I have the rare chance of acting
otherwise. I can show the world from the very first that I act from principle, and from
principle only.6
The marriage is taken as evidence of Mary’s lack of integrity, in contrast to Herminia. Herminia is ‘ahead’ of society—Allen argued in response to a negative review that the reviewer was ‘just as much behind his own age as my Herminia was in front of it.’—whilst Mary’s actions are seen as a reflection of her failure to move beyond her society.7 Because Herminia’s political strategy is primarily one of personal choices, the personal lives of these authors are treated as politically significant. As Herminia argues when praising Percy Shelley’s integrity later in the novel,
Not less but more than most of us is the genius bound up with all his might to the highest
moral law, to be the prophet and interpreter of the highest moral excellence. […] that’s why
I can never admire Shelley enough, who, in an age of slavery, refused to abjure or to deny
his freedom, but acted unto death to the full height of his principles.8
Herminia’s views on the role of the author as a prophet are very similar to those of her author, as laid out in his introduction to The British Barbarians published later that same year, in which we find yet another Shelley reference:
Not to prove anything, but to suggest ideas, to arouse emotions, is, I take it, the true
function of fiction. One wishes to make one’s readers think about problems they have
never considered, feel with sentiments they have disliked or hated. The novelist as prophet
has his duty defined for him in those divine words of Shelley’s,
‘Singing songs unbidden till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.’ 9
A starkly different interpretation of the same marriage, however, is found in Allen’s 1890 essay ‘The Girl of the Future’, in which he lays out his system of eugenics. He argues that, when given the education and freedom to do so, women will naturally choose, in his eyes, a more ideal partner to have children with.
There have been in the past and there are even now among us a few educated and
emancipated women. […] And such women as these—our Mary Wollstonecrafts, our
Mary Godwins, our George Sands, our George Eliots—have one and all shown themselves
supremely contemptuous of man-made or slave-made ethics. They have gone where they
would, and followed their own divine internal promptings. They have known that a
Shelley or a Chopin was better worth loving than a fat, complacent, sleepy-headed
bourgeois. These are the people who point the way for humanity; the mass slowly follows
the finger-post of genius.10
Whilst this marriage is, to Herminia, proof that Mary Shelley was unable to move beyond her contemporary society, in ‘The Girl of the Future’ it serves as proof of the opposite: that she was so far ahead as to ‘point the way for humanity’. We thus see the malleability with which Allen treated the Shelleys as biographical figures. Their 1816 marriage serves as an easily recognisable event which he can assign varying significances to depending on his argument.
Chloe Wilcox is a second-year undergraduate studying English Language and Literature at St
Hugh’s College, University of Oxford. She has previously written for the BARS Review and created videos on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s biography and reception for the BARS TikTok page. She is also
interested in Shelley’s poetics and politics.
Footnotes
1 Richard Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (London: Harper Perennial, 2005), pp. 226, 232.
2 Holmes, Shelley, p. 273.
3 Holmes, Shelley, pp. 352, 355.
4 Lyssa Randolph, ‘“The Romance of Race”: Grant Allen’s Science as Cultural Capital’, in Grant Allen: Literature
and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. by William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers (Abingdon and New York:
Routledge, 2016), p. 66.
5 Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 139, 140.
6 Allen, The Woman Who Did, p. 45.
7 Grant Allen, ‘The Woman Who Did’ (Correspondence), The Academy, 9 March 1895, p. 215.
https://www.proquest.com/historical-periodicals/woman-who-did/docview/8379745/se-2.
8 Allen, The Woman Who Did, p. 75.
9 Grant Allen, The British Barbarians (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1895), pp. 9-10.
https://hdl.handle.net/2027/aeu.ark:/13960/t6d22jp25
10 Grant Allen, ‘The Girl of the Future’, The Universal Review, May 1890, p. 62.
https://www.proquest.com/historical-periodicals/girl-future1/docview/4214293/se-2?accountid=15181