Yes, I do “understand the happiness flowing from confidence and entire sympathy, independent of worldly circumstances.” I know the latter compared to the former are nothing.
A delicate nursling of European luxury and aristocracy, I thought and felt for myself, and for martyrised humankind, and have preferred all hazards, all privations in the forests of the New World to the dear-bought comforts of miscalled civilisation. I have made the hard earth my bed, the saddle of my horse my pillow, and have staked my life and fortune on an experiment having in view moral liberty and human improvement. Many of course think me mad, and if to be mad mean to be one of a minority, I am so, and very mad indeed, for our minority is very small. Should that few succeed in mastering the first difficulties, weaker spirits, though often not less amiable, may carry forward the good work. But the fewer we are who now think alike, the more we are of value to each other. To know you, therefore, is a strong desire of my heart, and all things consistent with my engagements (which I may call duties, since they are connected with the work I have in hand) will I do to facilitate our meeting.
Soon after this Mary made Frances Wright’s acquaintance, and heard from herself all the story of her stirring life. She was not of American, but of Scottish birth (Dundee), and had been very early left an orphan. Her father had been a man of great ability and culture, of advanced liberal opinions, and independent fortune. Fanny had been educated in England by a maternal aunt, and in 1818, when twenty-three years of age, had gone with her younger sister to the United States. Since that time her life had been as adventurous as it was independent. Enthusiastic, original, and handsome, she found friends and adherents wherever she went. Two years she spent in the States, where she found sympathy and stimulus for her speculative energies, and free scope for her untried powers. She had written a tragedy, forcible and effective, which was published at Philadelphia and acted at New York. After that she had been three years in Paris, where she enjoyed the friendship and sympathy of Lafayette and other liberal leaders. In 1824 she was once more in America, fired with the idea of solving the slavery question. She purchased a tract of land on the Nashoba river (Tennessee), and settled negroes there, assuming, in her impetuosity, that to convert slaves into freemen it was only necessary to remove their fetters, and that they would soon work out their liberty. She found out her error. In Shelley’s words, slightly varied, “How should slaves produce anything but idleness, even as the seed produces the plant?” The slaves, freed from the lash, remained slaves as before, only they did very little work. Fanny Wright was disappointed; but, as her letters plainly show, her schemes went much farther than negro emancipation; she aimed at nothing short of a complete social reconstruction, to be illustrated on a small scale at the Nashoba settlement.
Overwork, exposure to the sun, and continuous excitement, told, at last, on her constitution. As she informed Mrs. Shelley in her first letter, she had broken down with brain fever, and, when convalescent, had been ordered to Europe.
In Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter she found a friend, hardly an adherent. Fundamentally, their principles were alike, but their natures were differently attuned. Neither mentally nor physically had Mary Shelley the temperament of a revolutionary innovator. She had plenty of moral courage, but she was too scrupulous, too reflective, and too tender. The cause of liberty was sacred to her, so long as it bore the fruit of justice, self-sacrifice, fidelity to duty. Fanny Wright worshipped liberty for its own sake, confident that every other good would follow it, with the generous, unpractical certainty of conviction that proceeds as much from a sanguine disposition as from a set of opinions. Experience and disappointment have little power over these temperaments, and so they never grow old—or prudent. It may well be that all the ideas, all the great changes, in which is summed up the history of progress, have originated with natures like these. They are the salt of the earth; but man cannot live by salt alone, and their ideas are carried out for them in detail, and the actual everyday work of the world is unconsciously accomplished, by those who, having put their hand to the plough, do not look back, nor yet far forward.
Still, it was a remarkable meeting, that of these two women. Fanny Wright was a person who, once seen, was not easily forgotten. “She was like Minerva;” such is the recollection of Mrs. Shelley’s son. Mrs. Trollope has described her personal appearance when, three years later, she was creating a great sensation by lecturing in the chief American cities—
She came on the stage surrounded by a bodyguard of Quaker ladies in the full costume of their sect.... Her tall and majestic figure, the deep and almost solemn expression of her eyes, the simple contour of her finely-formed head, her garment of plain white muslin, which hung around her in folds that recalled the drapery of a Grecian statue,—all contributed to produce an effect unlike anything that I had ever seen before, or ever expect to see again.
On the other hand the following is Robert Dale Owen’s sketch of Mary Shelley.
... In person she was of middle height and graceful figure. Her face, though not regularly beautiful, was comely and spiritual, of winning expression, and with a look of inborn refinement as well as culture. It had a touch of sadness when at rest. She impressed me as a person of warm social feelings, dependent for happiness on living encouragement, needing a guiding and sustaining hand.
It is certain that Mary felt a warm interest in her new friend. She made her acquainted with Godwin, and lost no opportunity of seeing and communing with her during her stay in England; nor did they part till Fanny Wright was actually on board ship.