Reviewed by Harriet
‘That woman is a hyena in petticoats’
I wonder how many people would have guessed from the title and the cover clip from a portrait who the hyena was. She was of course the famous 18th-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft – described by the misogynistic Horace Walpole as ‘a hyena in petticoats’ – and the woman in the portrait clip is her daughter Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. However, the daughter who is central to this novel is not Mary Shelley. Although Mary is what you might call a supporting character, the lead here is Françoise – Fanny – Imlay, Wollstonecraft’s older daughter, born out of wedlock in France where her mother was in a most unhappy relationship with her father, the American so-called diplomat Gilbert Imlay. It is through Fanny that we learn over the course of the novel of her upbringing: brought back to England by her periodically suicidal mother, who took her on an extraordinary journey around Sweden in the vain hope of regaining Imlay’s love; provided with a stepfather when her mother married the writer and philosopher William Godwin; deprived of a mother but gaining a half-sister when Wollstonecraft died after giving birth to the child who would become Mary Shelley; and acquiring a stepsister, Claire Clairmont, when Godwin married his next door neighbour.
Told this way it all sounds pretty straightforward, but the book is structured in such a way that it comes to the reader in short bursts. All but two chapters are between one and one and a half pages, and the longer ones only four. Most are told in the first person by Fanny herself, though sometimes the narrator steps in and describes her from the outside. Mary has a few chapters to herself and towards the later part of the novel so does Claire, who actually, aged 80, has the last word. Someone else I haven’t mentioned is of course Shelley. He rarely appears in person, but he is talked about endlessly and indeed the whole of the complex plot revolves around him.
At only 200 pages, this is properly described as a novella, but Jupiter Jones has conveyed a whole, ultimately tragic life so concisely and so beautifully expressed that no-one should wish it to be any longer. Her research is impressive – this is a period and a family that I know well myself and have actually written about, and I can’t fault her facts. And its around these facts that Fanny is imaginatively, and wholly convincingly, brought to life. What the reader is witnessing is the gradual deterioration of a life which, despite the unusual circumstances of its beginning, was initially a happy and contented one. In the second chapter Fanny remembers her carefree childhood, walking arm in arm with her two sisters through the busy streets of London:
Goosey goosey gander we sing as we wander. We take turns with the basket, and Mrs Godwin’s shopping list, and the sing-a-song- of sixpence purse. We three are inseparable, invincible, irrepressible….We lose the shopping list, and blind as mice to the consequences, we buy ribbons the colours of lavender’s blue dilly dilly, lavender’s green and a bag of one-a-pennytwo-a-penny-hot-cross-buns, and we run home, sticky and laughing.
But by the end of the chapter, some sadness intervenes. As the girls get older, they are often separated, with one of them often sent away because they are ‘getting on Mama’s nerves’, and ‘One sent away feels alone. Two left at home feel incomplete’.
Then Shelley enters the picture. He has written letters to Godwin and all three girls are already ‘a little in love with him’. He’s married to Harriet, and Fanny thinks they will love Harriet too, while Mary thinks that ‘marriage – according to my father’s philosophy – is an evil and odious monopoly’. When Shelley finally visits, it is to Fanny that he reads parts of his new poem and explains it. When she expresses with great joy her admiration for the poetry and the ideas expressed in it ‘Shelley says “Oh, shut up, Fanny” and kisses her on the mouth’. Claire spots them and is jealous. Mrs Godwin is worried by Shelley’s attentions to Fanny and thinks she will be ‘ruined’. So Fanny is sent to Wales to stay with a couple of Welsh speaking aunts who, when Fanny asks if they had kept any letters from her mother, tells her they used them to light the fire. With Fanny away, Shelley turns his attention to Mary, but reprimands her if she speaks unkindly of Fanny. Soon, though, they start planning an elopement to France and Claire will go with them because she speaks French.
From here on, things go from bad to worse. The two girls and Shelley run out of money, and come back to England. Godwin is furious and will not have them in the house, so Fanny is brought back from Wales and made to be a go-between, visiting the curious menage in the various cheap lodgings they move between. Mary’s baby dies. She is miserable and jealous of the close relationship developing between Shelley and Claire. Fanny, left behind, is increasingly lonely and unhappy. In the end, she takes the only option she feels is open to her.
Claire’s last word, in an interview in her old age, is that Fanny was exceptionally clear-headed, and, unblinded by romanticism, ‘saw Shelley for exactly what he was, as a poet and as a man’. When asked about Mary, she says ‘Oh, that sister’, closes her eyes and feigns sleep.
This is a superb book and one of the best I’ve read for a while.
Harriet is a co-founder and one of the editors of Shiny.
Jupiter Jones, The Hyena’s Daughter (Weatherglass, 2026). 978-1068176609, 200pp., paperback original.
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