Mary and Claire would read these charming letters with a condescending pity. Poor Fanny! How Skinner Street! Always thinking that Godwin’s novels, Godwin’s debts, and Mrs. Godwin’s bad tempers were the most important things in the world! Fanny’s slavery gave the two others a more vivid appreciation of their own freedom. Her loneliness enhanced for them the value of their lovers’ society, and, in their compassion for her, Mary got Shelley to buy her a watch before leaving Geneva. When the Shelleys and Claire came back to England, to settle down at Bath, they saw Fanny as they passed through London. She was depressed, and spoke of nothing but her loneliness and her uselessness; no one wanted her. In saying good-bye to Shelley, her voice quivered. Yet she wrote to him at Bath with the same affectionate frankness as before, although her letters now had that indefinable note of reproach which those who lead a death-in-life feel towards those whose life is filled with living. Godwin, his literary work broken into by fresh money troubles, became more and more grumpy; an aunt, Everina Wollstonecraft, who had promised to take Fanny as governess in her school, wrote to say that a sister of Mary and Claire would certainly be too terrifying a teacher for the narrow-minded middle-class parents. One morning the Shelleys received from Bristol a curious letter, in which Fanny bade them farewell in mysterious sentences: “I am going to a place whence I hope never to return.” Mary implored Shelley to go to Bristol at once. He came home during the night without any news. Next morning he went again, and this time brought Mary lamentable tidings. Fanny had left Bristol for Swansea by the Cambrian Coach, and had put up at the Mackworth Arms Inn. She had gone at once to her room telling the chamber-maid that she was tired. When she did not come down next morning, her door was forced, and she was found lying dead, her long brown hair spread about her. By her was the little Genevan watch given her by Mary and Shelley. On the table was a bottle of laudanum and the beginning of a letter: “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 . . .” Godwin had taught in _Political Justice_ that suicide is not a crime; the only difficulty being to decide in each individual case whether the social advantage of thirty supplementary years of life forbids recourse to a voluntary death. After the tragedy he wrote to Mary for the first time since her flight. It was to implore the three outcasts to avoid anything leading to publicity, “which to a mind in anguish is one of the severest of all trials.”