Grammar American & British

Friday, July 26, 2024

158-] English Literature

158-] English Literature

Mary Shelley

Her Literary Career

The most eloquent summary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's position in English letters is still Leigh Hunt's much-quoted couplet from "The Blue-Stocking Revels": "And Shelley, fourfam'd,—for her parents, her lord, / And the poor lone impossible monster abhorr'd." Though recent studies have shown some appreciation of Mary Shelley by her own lights, the four "fames" Hunt mentioned have tended to outshine them. When not known as the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, she is recognized as the daughter of the celebrated radical writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the equally well-known novelist and political philosopher William Godwin. Even the sole recognition won by her own efforts, the "monster abhorr'd" of her great novel Frankenstein (1818), is tainted by popular associations with stage and cinema versions of the monster which have little to do with her "Modern Prometheus." Yet this "four-famed" woman was also a skilled editor and critic, an influential travel writer, a literary historian, a devoted mother, and a dabbler in verse as well as in the new genre of the short story.

There is some warrant for seeing Mary Shelley as a reflection of her parents, for both mother and father were extraordinary. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, published the classic manifesto of sexual equality, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Her father, William Godwin, established his preeminence in radical British political thought with his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and won a permanent place in literary history with his novel Caleb Williams (1794), often considered the first English detective novel. The toast of radical social circles, the two were bound to meet. When they did, in the summer of 1796, an immediate mutual attraction began, and they were married on 29 March 1797. On 30 August of that year Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born. Complications from her birth resulted in her mother's death 10 September.

In 1801, when little Mary was four, Godwin remarried. The only memories of her stepmother that Mary recorded are bad ones. Godwin's second wife, Mary Jane Clairmont, brought her own children, Charles and Jane, into the family, and young Mary felt displaced. A son, William, born in 1803, furthered the girl's sense of alienation, and she felt driven to compete, not only with the other children but also with the second Mrs. Godwin, for her father's affection.

Godwin's second wife was not of Mary Wollstonecraft's intellectual stature. Still, entering a literary household, she developed a literary pursuit of her own. In 1805 she persuaded Godwin to found a publishing house in her name, M. J. Godwin, to publish children's books under the imprint of the Juvenile Library. In 1808, at the age of eleven, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin published a booklet in the series, a rhymed children's tale called Mounseer Nongtongpaw; or, the Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris.

Threatened by her stepdaughter's attention to Godwin, especially when adolescence transformed the child into a beautiful image of the first wife, Mary Jane Godwin sent the teenaged Mary to Scotland on 7 June 1812, ostensibly for the girl's health. In addition to further isolating her from the father she loved, the two years in Scotland nurtured Mary's literary imagination, as she records in her 1831 preface to the single-volume, Standard Novels edition of Frankenstein:

They were my eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.

In this period, during a brief visit home on 11 November 1812, Mary first met Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was in the company of his first wife, Harriet Westbrook.

By March of 1814, however, when Mary returned to England to stay, Shelley's marriage was troubled, and Mary had become a lovely young woman, almost seventeen. On 5 May Shelley saw her for the first time in two years; a swift summer courtship led to elopement on 28 July (though without a divorce Shelley was not free to marry), a quick tour of the Continent, and the raw material for Mary Shelley's first adult publication, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817).

From the start, Percy Shelley encouraged Mary to write. When they eloped, they carried with them a box of her early writings, which were lost in Paris during the trip. Mary responded to the loss by beginning immediately a novel called "Hate," and, when back in England, she started an historical novel, "The Life of Louvet." Neither novel was ever finished, as pregnancy and illness stole her energy. On 22 February 1815 her first daughter was born prematurely, and died 6 March.

In August the Shelleys moved to Bishopsgate, where, on 24 January 1816, Mary gave birth to a son, named William after Grandfather Godwin. On 3 May the Shelleys, including the boy William, and Mary's stepsister, Jane Clairmont (who had come to be known as Claire) left for Geneva to meet George Gordon, Lord Byron. There, with the promise of a lengtheir stay on the Continent, and in the company of the most celebrated literary figure in Europe, Mary began to write her masterpiece, Frankenstein.

The story of the composition of Frankenstein is often told, though it is hardly ever told the same way twice. Though critics have called some of its details into question, the best account of the novel's genesis is Mary's own, in her preface to the 1831 edition. Sometime in mid June, the literary discussion of the Shelley-Byron party turned toward German ghost stories. Byron suggested each member of the group (Shelley, Byron, Claire Clairmont, Mary, and Dr. John William Polidori) write a ghost story in the same vein. In the next few weeks Mary produced a short story which, when expanded, became Frankenstein

 

The Geneva idyll ended 29 August 1816, when the Shelleys returned to England. Then came a series of shocks: Mary's half sister, Fanny Imlay (daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft and Gilbert Imlay), committed suicide on 9 October; a month later Shelley's wife, Harriet, drowned herself. Harriet's death left Shelley free to marry; on 20 December he and Mary were wed at St. Mildred's Church on Bread Street, London.

By May of 1817 Mary had finished writing Frankenstein. Knowing that the public had a romantic interest in their elopement and that it would take some time to see her novel through the press, Mary prepared an account of her romantic summer of 1814, padded with Shelley's Mont Blanc, written at that time, and a few of the poet's letters. History of a Six Weeks' Tour appeared in November of 1817, almost two months after the birth of Clara Everina Shelley on 2 September.

Though the year 1818 opened with the publication of Frankenstein on New Year's Day, and the Shelleys began a much longer stay on the Continent, this period saw another series of emotional shocks to Mary Shelley: in September her daughter, barely a year old, died in Venice, and the following June her son died in Rome. By the end of the summer she was able to return to writing, producing the novella Mathilda. The birth of her fourth and last child, Percy Florence Shelley, in November made it difficult for her to see to its publication; it did not appear in print until 1959. Moreover, she had all but abandoned her shorter work in order to begin historical research for a much longer novel, Valperga (1823).

In the spring of 1820, Mary Shelley also made an attempt at writing drama, producing two short blank-verse adaptations from Ovid, Proserpine and Midas. The first appeared in an annual during her lifetime; the second was not published until 1922. Both blank-verse dramas include brief lyrical pieces by Percy Shelley.

In 1821 the Shelleys settled in Pisa, and by the end of the year Byron had joined them. Once again, as in Geneva five years earlier, the Shelleys enjoyed stimulating literary fellowship. But again Mary's joy was cut short. On 16 June 1822 she suffered a miscarriage, and on 8 July Percy Shelley drowned while sailing in the Gulf of Spezia.

Grief so debilitated her, as her letters and journals attest, that the first year after her husband's death should have been Mary Shelley's least productive period, but her novel Valperga had been completed for more than a year and was ready for press, and bereavement drove her to express her grief in verse, a medium she normally avoided. "I can never write verses," she wrote to Maria Gisborne on 11 June 1835, "except under the influence of a strong sentiment & seldom even then." Furthermore, the need to support her surviving child and limits on her support from her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, made writing a practical need rather than a personal indulgence.

Thus, in February of 1823, Valperga appeared in three volumes, and the first of Mary's periodical essays—a review of the Florentine Chronicles of Giovanni Villani—appeared in Byron and Leigh Hunt's magazine The Liberal. Knowing of the strong marketability of her late husband's works, she immediately returned to England and began editing his remaining manuscripts. Sir Timothy, however, cut off that avenue of income: his angry reaction to the appearance of Posthumous Poems in 1824 forced Mary to agree not to publish any more of her late husband's writings in Sir Timothy lifetime. Sir Timothy had also threatened to withdraw all support for his grandchild, Percy Florence Shelley, unless Mary surrendered the boy to his care, but when Mary categorically refused Sir Timothy relented, sending an allowance of £ 100 per year beginning in 1823, increased to 200 the following year, 250 in 1827, 300 in 1829, and 400 in 1841.

Thrown back on her own literary resources, Mary began writing The Last Man, published in February of 1826. The public was anxious for works from her pen; the immense popularity of Frankenstein had been increased even more by several stage productions: Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein, which Shelley herself saw, was one of six different versions in 1823 alone. As she wrote to Leigh Hunt on 9 September, after seeing the drama: "lo and behold! I found myself famous." The title pages of all of her later novels carry the phrase "by the author of 'Frankenstein.'"

In September of 1826 Charles Bysshe Shelley, son of the poet by his first wife and heir to Sir Timothy Shelley's title, died. Thus Mary's son, Percy, the only surviving male named Shelley, became heir to the baronetcy just before his seventh birthday.

Once again Mary Shelley had the financial means to travel to the Continent: she visited Paris in April of 1828, meeting General Lafayette and the rising young novelist Prosper Merimée. The meeting with Merimée, though brief, must have been stimulating: their literary conversation continued in letters after Mary's return to England. The trip was not all pleasant, however: contracting smallpox, she returned to England six weeks after she left.

Though faithful to the letter of her agreement with Sir Timothy not to publish any of her husband's works, Mary Shelley did continue to assist in the editorial work of others. Most of the latter half of 1829 was devoted to helping Cyrus Redding with the Paris edition of Shelley's collected poems, as well as completing the writing and research for Perkin Warbeck, which appeared in May of 1830. That March she had the peculiar experience of reviewing her father's novel Cloudesley in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. As one might expect, the review was overwhelmingly favorable, describing Godwin's work in superlatives and explicating his theory of the novel. In November of 1831 Frankenstein appeared in a best-selling single-volume edition, for which Mary Shelley wrote a new preface. She also published her drama Proserpine in a Christmas annual, The Winter's Wreath for 1832.

Percy Florence Shelley, almost thirteen, began public school at Harrow in September of 1832. His mother's letters reveal a touch of wistfulness at letting him go, but the separation did create more writing time for her. Sometime in 1834 the Reverend Dionysius Lardner commissioned Mary Shelley to write biographical sketches for his popular Cabinet Cyclopedia. Doubtless, he had read her essays on Italian literature in the Westminster Review, and requested similar work for his series. The connection with Lardner proved fruitful for Mary: after the appearance of the first volume of Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal in February of 1835, another in October, and the third two years later, Mary went on to produce a similar work covering French authors, appearing in two volumes in 1838 and 1839. This period also saw the publication of Mary Shelley's last novel, Falkner, and Percy Florence Shelley's matriculation to Cambridge, both in 1837.

As Mary concluded the Cyclopedia series, Sir Timothy Shelley rescinded his prohibition against publishing his son's works. Although 1839 began a period of declining health for Mary Shelley, she began a complete edition of her late husband's poems in four volumes, the last of which appeared in May. In November she produced a single-volume edition of the same work, and her edition of Percy B. Shelley's Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments was reviewed in December.

Recovering somewhat from her illness, and in hopes of gaining even more strength from a milder climate, Mary Shelley began a tour of the Continent with her son and his college friends; a second trip with the same company lasted more than a year, June 1842 to August 1843. Keeping a journal and copies of all her letters from both journeys, she turned them to profit as a travel book, much as she had with her elopement tour some thirty years earlier. Rambles in Germany and Italy, published in two volumes in July of 1844, was to be her last book.

Mary Shelley's primary concern of her widowed life—the care of her son—was relieved at this time, but other worries soon followed. On 24 April 1844 Sir Timothy Shelley died, leaving his estate and title to Percy Florence Shelley; but in the following year two blackmail schemes against her came close to crushing her spirit. Near the end of her Continental excursion in 1843, Mary Shelley had befriended in Paris a down-and-out Italian political exile named Ferdinando Gatteschi. It was for him that she wrote her Rambles, and she sent him the proceeds, as well as a continual flow of caring, supportive letters. The language of these heartfelt letters, however, was so sentimental that Gatteschi, realizing that the tone could be misconstrued as seductive, demanded further payment from Mary Shelley to keep them from the press. She was saved by another acquaintance from her travels, who had the Parisian police seize all Gatteschi's papers and retrieved the letters. Another attempt at blackmail by a literary forger known as George Byron, who claimed to be the poet's son, was also thwarted.

The last six years of Mary Shelley's life were spent in relative peace and retirement. She lived to see her son married on 22 June 1848, now secure as Sir Percy Shelley. On 1 February 1851 Mary Shelley died in London at the age of fifty-three.

Though Frankenstein assures Mary Shelley a permanent place in literary history and though some of her other novels are praised by critics, her nonfiction prose, particularly in the forms of biography and travel essay, ranks with some of the best writing in those genres. Indeed, when Rambles and her Cyclopedia biographies are considered next to her fiction of the period after 1830, it must be admitted that the nonfiction is superior writing. Mary Shelley herself thought so: near the end of her literary career, she told her husband's publisher, Edward Moxon, "I should prefer quieter work ... such as my lives for the Cyclopedia ... which I think I do much better than romancing ..." (20 September 1843).

Mary Shelley's first adult work, History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), introduced her into the peculiar genre of travel writing almost by accident. Though Mary Shelley knew that much of the interest in the work would be based on hopes of catching glimpses of her husband's life, the book's main strength is the vivid description that had become a hallmark of Romanticism. Moreover, the description is of that essentially Romantic type which describes the observer as much as the scene, and senses a supernatural presence in nature. In her preface she tells the reader:

Those whose youth has been past as theirs (with what success it imports not) in pursuing, like the swallow, the inconstant summer of delight and beauty which invests this visible world, will perhaps find some entertainment in following the author, with her husband and friend, on foot, through part of France and Switzerland, and in sailing with her down the castled Rhine, through scenes beautiful in themselves, but which, since she visited them, a great poet has clothed with the freshness of a diviner nature.

That "great poet," of course, is her husband, and the reference is to his blank-verse masterpiece Mont Blanc, which was first published in this book. In her preface she is acknowledging that travel writing is not poetry, but that it is more than just clinical and objective description: it is an attempt to bring the reader imaginatively into scenes described. Mary Shelley's English audience, starved for real experience of the Continent (Napoleon's wars made travel there dangerous until the peace of 1814), was eager for new accounts of travel there.

Mary Shelley's literary career began and ended with travel books. Of all of her writings, her last, Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844), suffers most from the constraint of writing for money. Pushed into writing by a need for money for Gatteschi, Mary Shelley's heart was not always in what she wrote. Nevertheless, there are passages in which her heart was too much with her: again and again a scene would remind her of how she first saw it with her husband. Yet she does not allow the reminiscence to obscure the description for the reader. This work too has affinities to descriptive-meditative verse. It maintains the sense of a supernatural presence behind nature:

It has seemed to me—and on such an evening, I have felt it,—that this world, endowed as it is outwardly with endless shapes and influences of beauty and enjoyment, is peopled also in its spiritual life by myriads of loving spirits; from whom, unawares, we catch impressions, which mould our thoughts to good, and thus they guide beneficially the course of events, and minister to the destiny of man. Whether the beloved dead make a portion of this holy company, I dare not guess; but that such exists, I feel.

There is also a political element to the book, consisting mostly of laments over the increasing oppression of Italy under Austria, but this part owes most to Gatteschi, and is not Mary Shelley's best writing.

When she breaks away from Italian politics and writes of Italian literature, Mary Shelley is at her best, and some sections dealing with Italian culture are as good as her periodical essays on Italy or her Cyclopedia entries on Italian writers. Letter XVI, in the second volume of Rambles in Germany and Italy, is a complete history of Italian literature: she is particularly eloquent in her discussion of the Italian Romantics, using military language to describe the struggle between classic and romantic.

It began in 1818, when Berchet, a poet of merit, descended suddenly into the arena, throwing, by way of challenge, a translation of the Leonora of Burgher, accompanied by an essay, discarding the old models and planting a new banner....

There is a fair portion of art criticism in the book as well, but it is not as good as her literary history.

Mary Shelley's periodical essays of the 1820s establish her as a leading ambassador of Italian culture in England. Her very first published essay was a review of the Italian historian Giovanni Villani's Chroniche Fiorentine. Her focus is telling: after a vigorous defense of modern writers (as opposed to classical; that is, since Dante), she praises Villani for his illumination of the places and people mentioned in Dante's Divine Comedy. She presents Villani as the very type of narrator she has been in her travel writing,

the writer who makes the persons of Dante's Spirits familiar to us; who guides us through the unfinished streets and growing edifices of Firenze la bella, and who in short transports us back to the superstitions, party spirit, companionship, and wars of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Mary Shelley's poetics in the opening paragraphs are squarely Romantic: citing Madame Germaine de Staël's distinction of classic and romantic without commenting on its validity, she laments the folly of systematizing genius.

More than any other topic, Mary Shelley's articles through the 1820s dealt with presenting Italy and its culture to English readers. "Recollections of Italy" in the London Magazine for January 1824 combined her Italophilia with travel writing. Her "Defense of Velluti" in the Examiner for 11 June 1826 was signed "Anglo-Italicus," another indication of the extent to which Italy became a part of her literary identity.

A review article in the October 1826 Westminster Review examining three English travel books about Italy shows how well Mary Shelley understood the genre, and the confidence with which she judged the expertise of other "authorities" on Italy. A similar essay in the same magazine three years later (July 1829) reviewed two books for English travelers in Italy. What is striking about these essays, as criticism, is one judgment which is out of line with those of her day and ours. It is the identification of a genre she terms "Anglo-Italian literature," inaugurated, she says in the first article, by Byron's "Beppo" and represented by the five books she reviews in both essays. The fact that Mary Shelley discerned a "school" of English expatriate authors writing in and about Italy suggests one reason for her preoccupation with Italy in her nonfiction: she saw Anglo-Italian literature as a category as distinct as biography or travel writing. These two essays, "The English in Italy" and "Modern Italy," form an important link between her travel writing and her writings about Italy, having elements of both.

Mary Shelley's book reviews of non-Italian topics are not nearly as engaging, but they are of some biographical interest when the reader speculates how peculiarly fitting each is to her personality, and how each in some way illuminates her other work. Her essay "On Ghosts" (London Magazine, March 1824) strikes those who know Mary Shelley only through Frankenstein as very much a part of her Gothic sensibility, and captures the mood that must have presided over that ghost-story session with Byron at Lake Geneva in 1816. Yet its tone is analytical, and it presents the Gothic as a yearning for a lost innocence of superstition. She suggests a central tenet of Romanticism and Gothicism: the Enlightenment did not totally exorcise the supernatural from human consciousness, and that is a good thing. "But do none of us believe in ghosts?" she continually asks.

Each of the remaining essays bears some connection with an aspect of Mary Shelley's life. Her review of two works by Merimée in the October 1929 Westminster Review recalls her visit to the young poet the previous year. Her review, in the same issue, of The Loves of the Poets, by Anna Brownell Jameson, is poignant with the unstated realization that she too would be the subject of just such literary biography: the definition of love she cites is from her husband's essay "On Love." The definition of a poet is her own, and is worthy of being placed beside those of the other Romantics, especially as hers is not well known:

What is a poet? Is he not that which wakens melody in the silent chords of the human heart? A light which arrays in splendor things and thoughts which else were dim in the shadow of their own significance . His soul is like one of the pools in the Ilex woods of the Maremma, it reflects the surrounding universe, but it beautifies, groups, and mellows their tints, making a little world within itself, the copy of the outer one; but more entire, more faultless. But above all, a poet's soul is Love; the desire of sympathy is the breath that inspires his lay, while he lavishes on the sentiment and its object, his whole treasure-house of resplendent imagery, burning emotion, and ardent enthusiasm. He is the mirror of nature, reflecting her back ten thousand times more lovely; what then must not his power be, when he adds beauty to the most perfect thing in nature—even Love.

Mary Shelley's review of Thomas Moore's Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831) in the January 1832 Westminster Review is interesting as a gauge of her demands on biography, the genre which would absorb most of her literary energies for the next decade. Her review of her father's novel Cloudesley in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for May 1830 holds a twofold interest: as her only public critical comment on a work of fiction not her own and as a sign of her affection for her father, a glimpse at the critical biography that she planned but never finished (though portions of it appear in Kegan Paul's biography of Godwin).

The review also illuminates Mary Shelley's own thoughts on novel writing. It begins with a summary of the theory of the novel presented in Godwin's preface to Cloudesley, supported by lengthy quotations. Shelley then contrasts Godwin's theory with Edward Bulwer-Lytton's, as expressed in his preface to Pelham (1828). The comparison serves to assert Godwin's supremacy in the art of the novel. "Mr. Bulwer," Shelley states, "gives us ... himself, his experience, his opinions, his emotions. The high-wrought and noble tone of his mind spreads a sacred and even mysterious grandeur over his pages."

On the other hand Godwin, his daughter tells us, brings himself into his novels only by entering into his characters:

By dint of the mastery of thought, he transfuses himself into the very souls of his personages; he dives into their secret hearts, and lays bare, even to their anatomy, their workings; not a pulsation escapes him,—while yet all is blended into one whole, which forms the pervading impulse of the individual he brings before us.

Cloudesley is then presented as "a fresh example of what we have been saying."

Shelley's contrast of the two styles reveals some of her own view of the novelist's craft. Her image of Bulwer-Lytton's is very like the Victorian age caricature of Romanticism: overrich, grandiose, overstuffed with the author's ego. Her concept of her father's practice represents what the Romantics themselves thought they were doing: balancing reason and emotion, subject and object, classical form and "Gothic" ornament. "The mere copying from our own hearts," she concludes, "will no more form a first-rate work of art, than will the most exquisite representation of mountains, water, wood, and glorious clouds, form a good painting, if none of the rules of grouping and colouring are followed."

Mary Shelley's biographical sketches in Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia may be, as she thought they were , her very best writing; ironically, they are the least read. There is little to lament in this irony: the type of work these sketches form may be best termed "serviceable." They are lively and readable, but they are intended to be reference works. Mary Shelley's studies of the great men of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and France display a Romantic tendency to explore the inner workings of the subject's mind, insofar as they can be discerned. This imaginative quality in her biographies makes them more compelling than others before her time; yet there is no lack of hard fact or logical analysis in these accounts.

The last genre attempted by Mary Shelley is in many ways a continuation of her work in biography and literary history, for her notes and prefaces to Shelley's poems are mostly biographical rather than critical. There is varying critical opinion today concerning how careful Mary Shelley was as an editor, but most of the cavils—silent emendation, or even suppression of some material—are the result of demanding twentieth-century editorial values of a nineteenth-century editor. Her last paragraph in the preface to Posthumous Poems may be a key to the lack of any evaluative tone in her notes:

I do not know whether the critics will reprehend the insertion of some of the most imperfect among them; but I frankly own that I have been more actuated by the fear lest any monument of his genius should escape me than the wish of presenting nothing but what was complete to the fastidious reader.

Since the Oxford and other standard editions of Percy Shelley's works have incorporated all "Mrs. Shelley's" notes and prefaces, it may be that, after Frankenstein, the most-read works from her pen are her editorial works, which provide the most thorough and reliable biographical back-ground to Shelley's poems of any single source.

Mary Shelley's letters and journals must be evaluated by different criteria, as they were not written for publication. This is not a universal rule: many of her literary contemporaries wrote each slightest note with an eye toward the public, and it was not unusual to prepare one's own letters and journals for publication. To some extent, Mary Shelley did this with her travel journals and related letters. But with those excepted, most of her letters and journals are personal, showing the verbal shorthand one uses with close friends.

The journals are not typical of Shelley's prose style: they are more memoranda than diaries; telegraphic and abbreviated for the most part. Two exceptions are notable: travel entries, especially her descriptions of Geneva in 1816; and the melancholy entries following the three-month gap in her journal after Percy Shelley's death in 1822. Here she confides to herself the minutest feelings that had been previously found only in letters, and rarely there. Perhaps it was her husband's death that unleashed this eloquent self-communion, since her ideas and feelings before had always been tested against his. She says in the first entry (2 October) after the poet's death on 8 July:

For eight years I communicated, with unlimited freedom, with one whose genius, far transcending mine, awakened and guided my thoughts. I conversed with him; rectified my errors of judgment; obtained new lights from him; and my mind was satisfied. Now I am alone—oh, how alone! The stars may behold my tears, and the winds drink my sights; but my thoughts are a sealed treasure, which I can confide to none. But can I express all I feel? Can I give words to thoughts and feelings that, as a tempest, hurry me along? Is this the sand that the ever-flowing sea of thought would impress indelibly? Alas! I am alone.

Yet it is out of this solitude that Mary Shelley forged some of her greatest writing.

The extent to which Mary Shelley's mind was connected with her husband's before his death can also be seen in their letters. Many of her letters in the eight years of her marriage were postscripts to her husband's. Virtually every variety of style may be read in her letters. There is a breathless, precipitous jumble of emotions and half-uttered sentiments in her billets-doux to Shelley, such as this letter of 25 October 1814, when he was running to escape imprisonment for debt:

For what a minute did I see you yesterday—is this the way my beloved that we are to live till the sixth in the morning I look for you and when I awake I turn to look on you—dearest Shelley you are solitary and uncomfortable why cannot I be with you to cheer you and to press you to my heart oh my love you have no friends why then should you be torn from the only one who has affection for you ...?

In contrast is the florid "Continental" ornament of her formal epistles to French and Italian correspondents, such as this 11 November 1830 letter to Lafayette:

Pardon a woman, my dear and most respected General, for intruding these observations. I was the wife of a man who—held dear the opinions you espouse, to which you were the martyr and are the ornament; and to sympathize with successes which would have been the matter of such delight to him, appears to me a sacred duty—and while I deeply feel my incapacity to understand or treat such high subjects, I rejoice that the Cause to which Shelley's life was devoted, is crowned with triumph.

Yet another style is the respectful, almost deferential balance of dignity and humility in her formal letters to those she thought to be above her station, either in society or in letters. Consider this 25 May 1829 request to Sir Walter Scott for help on her research for Perkin Warbeck:

I hope you will forgive my troubling you—it is almost impertinent to say how foolish it appears to me that I should intrude on your ground, or to compliment one all the world so highly appretiates—but as every traveller when they visit the Alps, endeavours however imperfectly, to express their admiration in the Inn's Album, so it is impossible to address the Author of Waverly [sic] without thanking him for the delight and instruction derived from the inexhaustible source of his genius....

Mary Shelley's business correspondence is pointed, succinct, and direct, as we see in this 6 August 1835 query to Charles Ollier about royalties:

What of Lodore—Do you remember that when 700 are sold I am to have £ 50—? Will 700 never be sold—I am very unlucky; praised & noticed as it has been. You promised me to look after my interests in this particular and I trust you, because I think you will feel more sympathy with a poor Author than a rich Publisher.

 Virtually all of the Shelley circle were Mary Shelley's correspondents (Lord Byron, Maria Gisborne, Claire Clairmont, Edward John Trelawny), as well as other important Romantic writers (Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, Henry Crabb Robinson), editors, and publishers (Thomas Campbell, Edward Moxon, John Murray, Charles Ollier). Mary Shelley's letters are of interest not only as sources for biography, but also as further indications of her literary skill. For whichever of her "four fames" draws us to her—her mother, her father, her husband, or her monster—everything from Mary Shelley's pen claims for her prodigious territory in English Romantic prose.

Reputation

In her own lifetime Mary Shelley was taken seriously as a writer, though reviewers often missed her writings' political edge. After her death, however, she was chiefly remembered as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as the author of Frankenstein. In fact, in the introduction to her letters published in 1945, editor Frederick Jones wrote, "a collection of the present size could not be justified by the general quality of the letters or by Mary Shelley's importance as a writer. It is as the wife of [Percy Bysshe Shelley] that she excites our interest." This attitude had not disappeared by 1980 when Betty T. Bennett published the first volume of Mary Shelley's complete letters. As she explains, "the fact is that until recent years scholars have generally regarded Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as a result: William Godwin's and Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter who became Shelley's Pygmalion." It was not until Emily Sunstein's Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality in 1989 that a full-length scholarly biography was published.

The attempts of Mary Shelley's son and daughter-in-law to "Victorianise" her memory by censoring biographical documents contributed to a perception of Mary Shelley as a more conventional, less reformist figure than her works suggest. Her own timid omissions from Percy Shelley's works and her quiet avoidance of public controversy in her later years added to this impression. Commentary by Hogg, Trelawny, and other admirers of Percy Shelley also tended to downplay Mary Shelley's radicalism. Trelawny's Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1878) praised Percy Shelley at the expense of Mary, questioning her intelligence and even her authorship of Frankenstein.[275] Lady Shelley, Percy Florence's wife, responded in part by presenting a severely edited collection of letters she had inherited, published privately as Shelley and Mary in 1882.

From Frankenstein's first theatrical adaptation in 1823 to the cinematic adaptations of the 20th century, including the first cinematic version in 1910 and now-famous versions such as James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, Mel Brooks' satirical 1974 Young Frankenstein, and Kenneth Branagh's 1994 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, many audiences first encounter the work of Mary Shelley through adaptation. Over the course of the 19th century, Mary Shelley came to be seen as a one-novel author at best, rather than as the professional writer she was; most of her works have remained out of print until the last thirty years, obstructing a larger view of her achievement. In recent decades, the republication of almost all her writing has stimulated a new recognition of its value. Her habit of intensive reading and study, revealed in her journals and letters and reflected in her works, is now better appreciated. Shelley's conception of herself as an author has also been recognised; after Percy's death, she wrote of her authorial ambitions: "I think that I can maintain myself, and there is something inspiriting in the idea." Scholars now consider Mary Shelley to be a major Romantic figure, significant for her literary achievement and her political voice as a woman and a liberal.

Selected works

Main article: Mary Shelley bibliography

History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817)

Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)

Mathilda (1819)

Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823)

Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824)

The Last Man (1826)

The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830)

Lodore (1835)

Falkner (1837)

The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839)

Contributions to Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men (1835–39), part of Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia

Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844)

Collections of Mary Shelley's papers are housed in Lord Abinger's Shelley Collection on deposit at the Bodleian Library, the New York Public Library (particularly The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle), the Huntington Library, the British Library, and in the John Murray Collection.



157- ] English Literature

157- ] English Literature

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 
 
 

Literary themes and styles

Mary Shelley lived a literary life. Her father encouraged her to learn to write by composing letters, and her favourite occupation as a child was writing stories. Unfortunately, all of Mary's juvenilia were lost when she ran off with Percy in 1814, and none of her surviving manuscripts can be definitively dated before that year. Her first published work is often thought to have been Mounseer Nongtongpaw, comic verses written for Godwin's Juvenile Library when she was ten and a half; however, the poem is attributed to another writer in the most recent authoritative collection of her works. Percy Shelley enthusiastically encouraged Mary Shelley's writing: "My husband was, from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was forever inciting me to obtain literary reputation."

Novels

Autobiographical elements

Certain sections of Mary Shelley's novels are often interpreted as masked rewritings of her life. Critics have pointed to the recurrence of the father–daughter motif in particular as evidence of this autobiographical style. For example, commentators frequently read Mathilda (1820) autobiographically, identifying the three central characters as versions of Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and Percy Shelley. Mary Shelley herself confided that she modelled the central characters of The Last Man on her Italian circle. Lord Raymond, who leaves England to fight for the Greeks and dies in Constantinople, is based on Lord Byron; and the utopian Adrian, Earl of Windsor, who leads his followers in search of a natural paradise and dies when his boat sinks in a storm, is a fictional portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley. However, as she wrote in her review of Godwin's novel Cloudesley (1830), she did not believe that authors "were merely copying from our own hearts". William Godwin regarded his daughter's characters as types rather than portraits from real life. Some modern critics, such as Patricia Clemit and Jane Blumberg, have taken the same view, resisting autobiographical readings of Mary Shelley's works.

Novelistic genres

Mary Shelley employed the techniques of many different novelistic genres, most vividly the Godwinian novel, Walter Scott's new historical novel, and the Gothic novel. The Godwinian novel, made popular during the 1790s with works such as Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), "employed a Rousseauvian confessional form to explore the contradictory relations between the self and society", and Frankenstein exhibits many of the same themes and literary devices as Godwin's novel. However, Shelley critiques those Enlightenment ideals that Godwin promotes in his works. In The Last Man, she uses the philosophical form of the Godwinian novel to demonstrate the ultimate meaninglessness of the world. While earlier Godwinian novels had shown how rational individuals could slowly improve society, The Last Man and Frankenstein demonstrate the individual's lack of control over history.

Shelley uses the historical novel to comment on gender relations; for example, Valperga is a feminist version of Scott's masculinist genre. Introducing women into the story who are not part of the historical record, Shelley uses their narratives to question established theological and political institutions. Shelley sets the male protagonist's compulsive greed for conquest in opposition to a female alternative: reason and sensibility. In Perkin Warbeck, Shelley's other historical novel, Lady Gordon stands for the values of friendship, domesticity, and equality. Through her, Shelley offers a feminine alternative to the masculine power politics that destroy the male characters. The novel provides a more inclusive historical narrative to challenge the one which usually relates only masculine events.

Gender

With the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s, Mary Shelley's works, particularly Frankenstein, began to attract much more attention from scholars. Feminist and psychoanalytic critics were largely responsible for the recovery from neglect of Shelley as a writer. Ellen Moers was one of the first to claim that Shelley's loss of a baby was a crucial influence on the writing of Frankenstein. She argues that the novel is a "birth myth" in which Shelley comes to terms with her guilt for causing her mother's death as well as for failing as a parent. Shelley scholar Anne K. Mellor suggests that, from a feminist viewpoint, it is a story "about what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman ... [Frankenstein] is profoundly concerned with natural as opposed to unnatural modes of production and reproduction". Victor Frankenstein's failure as a "parent" in the novel has been read as an expression of the anxieties which accompany pregnancy, giving birth, and particularly maternity.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in their seminal book The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) that in Frankenstein in particular, Shelley responded to the masculine literary tradition represented by John Milton's Paradise Lost. In their interpretation, Shelley reaffirms this masculine tradition, including the misogyny inherent in it, but at the same time "conceal [s] fantasies of equality that occasionally erupt in monstrous images of rage". Mary Poovey reads the first edition of Frankenstein as part of a larger pattern in Shelley's writing, which begins with literary self-assertion and ends with conventional femininity. Poovey suggests that Frankenstein's multiple narratives enable Shelley to split her artistic persona: she can "express and efface herself at the same time". Shelley's fear of self-assertion is reflected in the fate of Frankenstein, who is punished for his egotism by losing all his domestic ties.

Feminist critics often focus on how authorship itself, particularly female authorship, is represented in and through Shelley's novels. As Mellor explains, Shelley uses the Gothic style not only to explore repressed female sexual desire but also as way to "censor her own speech in Frankenstein". According to Poovey and Mellor, Shelley did not want to promote her own authorial persona and felt deeply inadequate as a writer, and "this shame contributed to the generation of her fictional images of abnormality, perversion, and destruction".

Shelley's writings focus on the role of the family in society and women's role within that family. She celebrates the "feminine affections and compassion" associated with the family and suggests that civil society will fail without them. Shelley was "profoundly committed to an ethic of cooperation, mutual dependence, and self-sacrifice". In Lodore, for example, the central story follows the fortunes of the wife and daughter of the title character, Lord Lodore, who is killed in a duel at the end of the first volume, leaving a trail of legal, financial, and familial obstacles for the two "heroines" to negotiate. The novel is engaged with political and ideological issues, particularly the education and social role of women. It dissects a patriarchal culture that separated the sexes and pressured women into dependence on men. In the view of Shelley scholar Betty T. Bennett, "the novel proposes egalitarian educational paradigms for women and men, which would bring social justice as well as the spiritual and intellectual means by which to meet the challenges life invariably brings". However, Falkner is the only one of Mary Shelley's novels in which the heroine's agenda triumphs. The novel's resolution proposes that when female values triumph over violent and destructive masculinity, men will be freed to express the "compassion, sympathy, and generosity" of their better natures.

Enlightenment and Romanticism

Frankenstein, like much Gothic fiction of the period, mixes a visceral and alienating subject matter with speculative and thought-provoking themes. Rather than focusing on the twists and turns of the plot, however, the novel foregrounds the mental and moral struggles of the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, and Shelley imbues the text with her own brand of politicised Romanticism, one that criticised the individualism and egotism of traditional Romanticism. Victor Frankenstein is like Satan in Paradise Lost, and Prometheus: he rebels against tradition; he creates life; and he shapes his own destiny. These traits are not portrayed positively; as Blumberg writes, "his relentless ambition is a self-delusion, clothed as quest for truth". He must abandon his family to fulfill his ambition.

Mary Shelley believed in the Enlightenment idea that people could improve society through the responsible exercise of political power, but she feared that the irresponsible exercise of power would lead to chaos. In practice, her works largely criticise the way 18th-century thinkers such as her parents believed such change could be brought about. The creature in Frankenstein, for example, reads books associated with radical ideals but the education he gains from them is ultimately useless. Shelley's works reveal her as less optimistic than Godwin and Wollstonecraft; she lacks faith in Godwin's theory that humanity could eventually be perfected.

As literary scholar Kari Lokke writes, The Last Man, more so than Frankenstein, "in its refusal to place humanity at the centre of the universe, its questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature ... constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism." Specifically, Mary Shelley's allusions to what radicals believed was a failed revolution in France and the Godwinian, Wollstonecraftian, and Burkean responses to it, challenge "Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress through collective efforts". As in Frankenstein, Shelley "offers a profoundly disenchanted commentary on the age of revolution, which ends in a total rejection of the progressive ideals of her own generation". Not only does she reject these Enlightenment political ideals, but she also rejects the Romantic notion that the poetic or literary imagination can offer an alternative.

Politics

There is a new scholarly emphasis on Shelley as a lifelong reformer, deeply engaged in the liberal and feminist concerns of her day. In 1820, she was thrilled by the Liberal uprising in Spain which forced the king to grant a constitution. In 1823, she wrote articles for Leigh Hunt's periodical The Liberal and played an active role in the formulation of its outlook. She was delighted when the Whigs came back to power in 1830 and at the prospect of the 1832 Reform Act. Critics have until recently cited Lodore and Falkner as evidence of increasing conservatism in Mary Shelley's later works. In 1984, Mary Poovey influentially identified the retreat of Mary Shelley's reformist politics into the "separate sphere" of the domestic. Poovey suggested that Mary Shelley wrote Falkner to resolve her conflicted response to her father's combination of libertarian radicalism and stern insistence on social decorum. Mellor largely agreed, arguing that "Mary Shelley grounded her alternative political ideology on the metaphor of the peaceful, loving, bourgeois family. She thereby implicitly endorsed a conservative vision of gradual evolutionary reform." This vision allowed women to participate in the public sphere but it inherited the inequalities inherent in the bourgeois family.

However, in the last decade or so this view has been challenged. For example, Bennett claims that Mary Shelley's works reveal a consistent commitment to Romantic idealism and political reform and Jane Blumberg's study of Shelley's early novels argues that her career cannot be easily divided into radical and conservative halves. She contends that "Shelley was never a passionate radical like her husband and her later lifestyle was not abruptly assumed nor was it a betrayal. She was in fact challenging the political and literary influences of her circle in her first work." In this reading, Shelley's early works are interpreted as a challenge to Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley's radicalism. Victor Frankenstein's "thoughtless rejection of family", for example, is seen as evidence of Shelley's constant concern for the domestic.

Short stories

In the 1820s and 1830s, Mary Shelley frequently wrote short stories for gift books or annuals, including sixteen for The Keepsake, which was aimed at middle-class women and bound in silk, with gilt-edged pages. Mary Shelley's work in this genre has been described as that of a "hack writer" and "wordy and pedestrian". However, critic Charlotte Sussman points out that other leading writers of the day, such as the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also took advantage of this profitable market. She explains that "the annuals were a major mode of literary production in the 1820s and 1830s", with The Keepsake the most successful.

Many of Shelley's stories are set in places or times far removed from early 19th-century Britain, such as Greece and the reign of Henry IV of France. Shelley was particularly interested in "the fragility of individual identity" and often depicted "the way a person's role in the world can be cataclysmically altered either by an internal emotional upheaval, or by some supernatural occurrence that mirrors an internal schism". In her stories, female identity is tied to a woman's short-lived value in the marriage market while male identity can be sustained and transformed through the use of money. Although Mary Shelley wrote twenty-one short stories for the annuals between 1823 and 1839, she always saw herself, above all, as a novelist. She wrote to Leigh Hunt, "I write bad articles which help to make me miserable—but I am going to plunge into a novel and hope that its clear water will wash off the mud of the magazines."

Travelogues

When they ran off to France in the summer of 1814, Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley began a joint journal, which they published in 1817 under the title History of a Six Weeks' Tour, adding four letters, two by each of them, based on their visit to Geneva in 1816, along with Percy Shelley's poem "Mont Blanc". The work celebrates youthful love and political idealism and consciously follows the example of Mary Wollstonecraft and others who had combined travelling with writing. The perspective of the History is philosophical and reformist rather than that of a conventional travelogue; in particular, it addresses the effects of politics and war on France. The letters the couple wrote on the second journey confront the "great and extraordinary events" of the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo after his "Hundred Days" return in 1815. They also explore the sublimity of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc as well as the revolutionary legacy of the philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Mary Shelley's last full-length book, written in the form of letters and published in 1844, was Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843, which recorded her travels with her son Percy Florence and his university friends. In Rambles, Shelley follows the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and her own A History of a Six Weeks' Tour in mapping her personal and political landscape through the discourse of sensibility and sympathy. For Shelley, building sympathetic connections between people is the way to build civil society and to increase knowledge: "knowledge, to enlighten and free the mind from clinging deadening prejudices—a wider circle of sympathy with our fellow-creatures;—these are the uses of travel". Between observations on scenery, culture, and "the people, especially in a political point of view", she uses the travelogue form to explore her roles as a widow and mother and to reflect on revolutionary nationalism in Italy. She also records her "pilgrimage" to scenes associated with Percy Shelley. According to critic Clarissa Orr, Mary Shelley's adoption of a persona of philosophical motherhood gives Rambles the unity of a prose poem, with "death and memory as central themes". At the same time, Shelley makes an egalitarian case against monarchy, class distinctions, slavery, and war.

Biographies

Between 1832 and 1839, Mary Shelley wrote many biographies of notable Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French men and a few women for Dionysius Lardner's Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men. These formed part of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, one of the best of many such series produced in the 1820s and 1830s in response to growing middle-class demand for self-education. Until the republication of these essays in 2002, their significance within her body of work was not appreciated. In the view of literary scholar Greg Kucich, they reveal Mary Shelley's "prodigious research across several centuries and in multiple languages", her gift for biographical narrative, and her interest in the "emerging forms of feminist historiography". Shelley wrote in a biographical style popularised by the 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779–1781), combining secondary sources, memoir and anecdote, and authorial evaluation. She records details of each writer's life and character, quotes their writing in the original as well as in translation, and ends with a critical assessment of their achievement.

For Shelley, biographical writing was supposed to, in her words, "form as it were a school in which to study the philosophy of history", and to teach "lessons". Most frequently and importantly, these lessons consisted of criticisms of male-dominated institutions such as primogeniture. Shelley emphasises domesticity, romance, family, sympathy, and compassion in the lives of her subjects. Her conviction that such forces could improve society connects her biographical approach with that of other early feminist historians such as Mary Hays and Anna Jameson. Unlike her novels, most of which had an original print run of several hundred copies, the Lives had a print run of about 4,000 for each volume: thus, according to Kucich, Mary Shelley's "use of biography to forward the social agenda of women's historiography became one of her most influential political interventions".

Editorial work

Soon after Percy Shelley's death, Mary Shelley determined to write his biography. In a letter of 17 November 1822, she announced: "I shall write his life—& thus occupy myself in the only manner from which I can derive consolation." However, her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, effectively banned her from doing so. Mary began her fostering of Percy's poetic reputation in 1824 with the publication of his Posthumous Poems. In 1839, while she was working on the Lives, she prepared a new edition of his poetry, which became, in the words of literary scholar Susan J. Wolfson, "the canonizing event" in the history of her husband's reputation. The following year, Mary Shelley edited a volume of her husband's essays, letters, translations, and fragments, and throughout the 1830s, she introduced his poetry to a wider audience by publishing assorted works in the annual The Keepsake.

Evading Sir Timothy's ban on a biography, Mary Shelley often included in these editions her own annotations and reflections on her husband's life and work. "I am to justify his ways," she had declared in 1824; "I am to make him beloved to all posterity." It was this goal, argues Blumberg, that led her to present Percy's work to the public in the "most popular form possible". To tailor his works for a Victorian audience, she cast Percy Shelley as a lyrical rather than a political poet. As Mary Favret writes, "the disembodied Percy identifies the spirit of poetry itself". Mary glossed Percy's political radicalism as a form of sentimentalism, arguing that his republicanism arose from sympathy for those who were suffering. She inserted romantic anecdotes of his benevolence, domesticity, and love of the natural world. Portraying herself as Percy's "practical muse", she also noted how she had suggested revisions as he wrote.

Despite the emotions stirred by this task, Mary Shelley arguably proved herself in many respects a professional and scholarly editor. Working from Percy's messy, sometimes indecipherable, notebooks, she attempted to form a chronology for his writings, and she included poems, such as Epipsychidion, addressed to Emilia Viviani, which she would rather have left out. She was forced, however, into several compromises, and, as Blumberg notes, "modern critics have found fault with the edition and claim variously that she miscopied, misinterpreted, purposely obscured, and attempted to turn the poet into something he was not". According to Wolfson, Donald Reiman, a modern editor of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works, still refers to Mary Shelley's editions, while acknowledging that her editing style belongs "to an age of editing when the aim was not to establish accurate texts and scholarly apparatus but to present a full record of a writer's career for the general reader". In principle, Mary Shelley believed in publishing every last word of her husband's work; but she found herself obliged to omit certain passages, either by pressure from her publisher, Edward Moxon, or in deference to public propriety. For example, she removed the atheistic passages from Queen Mab for the first edition. After she restored them in the second edition, Moxon was prosecuted and convicted of blasphemous libel, though the prosecution was brought out of principle by the Chartist publisher Henry Hetherington, and no punishment was sought. Mary Shelley's omissions provoked criticism, often stinging, from members of Percy Shelley's former circle, and reviewers accused her of, among other things, indiscriminate inclusions. Her notes have nevertheless remained an essential source for the study of Percy Shelley's work. As Bennett explains, "biographers and critics agree that Mary Shelley's commitment to bring Shelley the notice she believed his works merited was the single, major force that established Shelley's reputation during a period when he almost certainly would have faded from public view".


156-] English Literature

156- ] English Literature

Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (UK: /ˈwʊlstənkrɑːft/; née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction.[2] She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary's mother died 11 days after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father, who provided her with a rich if informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Mary came to have a troubled relationship.

In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married . Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.

 In 1816, the couple and Mary's stepsister famously spent a summer with Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to the upbringing of her son and a career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at the age of 53.

Until the 1970s, Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Shelley's achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846), support the growing view that Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.

Life and career

Early life

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the first child of the philosopher, novelist, and journalist William Godwin. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. Godwin was left to bring up Mary, along with her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's child by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay. A year after Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), which he intended as a sincere and compassionate tribute. However, because the Memoirs revealed Wollstonecraft's affairs and her illegitimate child, they were seen as shocking. Mary Godwin read these memoirs and her mother's books, and was brought up to cherish her mother's memory.

Mary's earliest years were happy, judging from the letters of William Godwin's housekeeper and nurse, Louisa Jones. But Godwin was often deeply in debt; feeling that he could not raise the children by himself, he cast about for a second wife. In December 1801, he married Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated woman with two young children of her own – Charles and Claire. Most of Godwin's friends disliked his new wife, describing her as quick-tempered and quarrelsome; but Godwin was devoted to her, and the marriage was a success. Mary Godwin, in contrast, came to detest her stepmother. William Godwin's 19th-century biographer Charles Kegan Paul later suggested that Mrs Godwin had favoured her own children over those of Mary Wollstonecraft.

Together, the Godwins started a publishing firm called M. J. Godwin, which sold children's books as well as stationery, maps, and games. However, the business did not turn a profit, and Godwin was forced to borrow substantial sums to keep it going. He continued to borrow to pay off earlier loans, compounding his difficulties. By 1809, Godwin's business was close to failure, and he was "near to despair". Godwin was saved from debtor's prison by philosophical devotees such as Francis Place, who lent him further money.

Though Mary Godwin received little formal education, her father tutored her in a broad range of subjects. He often took the children on educational outings, and they had access to his library and to the many intellectuals who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States Aaron Burr. Godwin admitted he was not educating the children according to Mary Wollstonecraft's philosophy as outlined in works such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but Mary Godwin nonetheless received an unusual and advanced education for a girl of the time. She had a governess and a daily tutor and read many of her father's children's books on Roman and Greek history in manuscript. For six months in 1811, she also attended a boarding school in Ramsgate. Her father described her at age 15 as "singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible."

In June 1812, Mary's father sent her to stay with the dissenting family of the radical William Baxter, near Dundee, Scotland. To Baxter, he wrote, "I am anxious that she should be brought up ... like a philosopher, even like a cynic." Scholars have speculated that she was sent away for her health, to remove her from the seamy side of the business, or to introduce her to radical politics. Mary Godwin revelled in the spacious surroundings of Baxter's house and in the companionship of his four daughters, and she returned north in the summer of 1813 for a further stay of 10 months. In the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, she recalled: "I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered."

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mary Godwin may have first met the radical poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley in the interval between her two stays in Scotland. By the time she returned home for a second time on 30 March 1814, Percy Shelley had become estranged from his wife and was regularly visiting William Godwin, whom he had agreed to bail out of debt. Percy Shelley's radicalism, particularly his economic views, which he had imbibed from William Godwin's Political Justice (1793), had alienated him from his wealthy aristocratic family: they wanted him to follow traditional models of the landed aristocracy, and he wanted to donate large amounts of the family's money to schemes intended to help the disadvantaged. Percy Shelley, therefore, had difficulty gaining access to money until he inherited his estate because his family did not want him wasting it on projects of "political justice". After several months of promises, Shelley announced that he either could not or would not pay off all of Godwin's debts. Godwin was angry and felt betrayed.

Mary and Percy began meeting each other secretly at her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, and they fell in love—she was 16, and he was 21. On 26 June 1814, Shelley and Godwin declared their love for one another as Shelley announced he could not hide his "ardent passion", leading her in a "sublime and rapturous moment" to say she felt the same way; on either that day or the next, Godwin lost her virginity to Shelley, which tradition claims happened in the churchyard.[28] Godwin described herself as attracted to Shelley's "wild, intellectual, unearthly looks". To Mary's dismay, her father disapproved, and tried to thwart the relationship and salvage the "spotless fame" of his daughter. At about the same time, Mary's father learned of Shelley's inability to pay off the father's debts. Mary, who later wrote of "my excessive and romantic attachment to my father", was confused. She saw Percy Shelley as an embodiment of her parents' liberal and reformist ideas of the 1790s, particularly Godwin's view that marriage was a repressive monopoly, which he had argued in his 1793 edition of Political Justice but later retracted. On 28 July 1814, the couple eloped and secretly left for France, taking Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with them.

After convincing Mary Jane Godwin, who had pursued them to Calais, that they did not wish to return, the trio travelled to Paris, and then, by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot, through a France recently ravaged by war, to Switzerland. "It was acting in a novel, being an incarnate romance," Mary Shelley recalled in 1826. Godwin wrote about France in 1814: "The distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war...". As they travelled, Mary and Percy read works by Mary Wollstonecraft and others, kept a joint journal, and continued their own writing. At Lucerne, lack of money forced the three to turn back. They travelled down the Rhine and by land to the Dutch port of Maassluis, arriving at Gravesend, Kent, on 13 September 1814.

The situation awaiting Mary Godwin in England was fraught with complications, some of which she had not foreseen. Either before or during the journey, she had become pregnant. She and Percy now found themselves penniless, and, to Mary's genuine surprise, her father refused to have anything to do with her. The couple moved with Claire into lodgings at Somers Town, and later, Nelson Square. They maintained their intense programme of reading and writing, and entertained Percy Shelley's friends, such as Thomas Jefferson Hogg and the writer Thomas Love Peacock. Percy Shelley sometimes left home for short periods to dodge creditors. The couple's distraught letters reveal their pain at these separations.

Pregnant and often ill, Mary Godwin had to cope with Percy's joy at the birth of his son by Harriet Shelley in late 1814 and his constant outings with Claire Clairmont. Shelley and Clairmont were almost certainly lovers, which caused much jealousy on Godwin's part. Shelley greatly offended Godwin at one point when, during a walk in the French countryside, he suggested that they both take the plunge into a stream naked; this offended her principles. She was partly consoled by the visits of Hogg, whom she disliked at first but soon considered a close friend. Percy Shelley seems to have wanted Mary Godwin and Hogg to become lovers; Mary did not dismiss the idea, since in principle she believed in free love. In practice, however, she loved only Percy Shelley and seems to have ventured no further than flirting with Hogg. On 22 February 1815, she gave birth to a two-month premature baby girl, who was not expected to survive. On 6 March, she wrote to Hogg:

My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can. I wish to see you— It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now.

The loss of her child induced acute depression in Mary Godwin, who was haunted by visions of the baby; but she conceived again and had recovered by the summer. With a revival in Percy Shelley's finances after the death of his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, the couple holidayed in Torquay and then rented a two-storey cottage at Bishopsgate, on the edge of Windsor Great Park. Little is known about this period in Mary Godwin's life, for her journal from May 1815 to July 1816 is lost. At Bishopsgate, Percy wrote his poem Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude; and on 24 January 1816, Mary gave birth to a second child, William, named after her father, and soon nicknamed "Willmouse". In her novel 'The Last Man, she later imagined Windsor as a Garden of Eden.

Lake Geneva and Frankenstein

In May 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and their son travelled to Geneva with Claire Clairmont. They planned to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire had left her pregnant. In History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), she describes the particularly desolate landscape in crossing from France into Switzerland.

The party arrived in Geneva on 14 May 1816, where Mary called herself "Mrs Shelley". Byron joined them on 25 May, with his young physician, John William Polidori, and rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny; Percy Shelley rented a smaller building called Maison Chapuis on the waterfront nearby. They spent their time writing, boating on the lake, and talking late into the night.

"It proved a wet, ungenial summer", Mary Shelley remembered in 1831, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house". Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves with German ghost stories, which prompted Byron to propose that they "each write a ghost story". Unable to think of a story, young Mary Godwin became anxious: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative." During one mid-June evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted; "galvanism had given token of such things". It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her "waking dream", her ghost story:

 I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.

She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published in 1818. She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life". The story of the writing of Frankenstein has been fictionalised several times and has formed the basis for a number of films.

In September 2011, the astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year, and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her waking dream took place "between 2am and 3am" on 16 June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story.

Authorship of Frankenstein

While her husband Percy encouraged her writing, the extent of Percy's contribution to the novel is unknown and has been argued over by readers and critics. Mary Shelley wrote, "I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world." She wrote that the preface to the first edition was Percy's work "as far as I can recollect". There are differences in the 1818, 1823 and 1831 editions, which have been attributed to Percy's editing. James Rieger concluded Percy's "assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator", while Anne K. Mellor later argued Percy only "made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text." Charles E. Robinson, editor of a facsimile edition of the Frankenstein manuscripts, concluded that Percy's contributions to the book "were no more than what most publishers' editors have provided new (or old) authors or, in fact, what colleagues have provided to each other after reading each other's works in progress."

Writing on the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein, literary scholar and poet Fiona Sampson asked, "Why hasn't Mary Shelley gotten the respect she deserves?" She noted that "In recent years Percy's corrections, visible in the Frankenstein notebooks held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, have been seized on as evidence that he must have at least co-authored the novel. In fact, when I examined the notebooks myself, I realized that Percy did rather less than any line editor working in publishing today." Sampson published her findings in In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), one of many biographies written about Shelley.

Bath and Marlow

On their return to England in September 1816, Mary and Percy moved—with Claire Clairmont, who took lodgings nearby—to Bath, where they hoped to keep Claire's pregnancy secret. At Cologny, Mary Godwin had received two letters from her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, who alluded to her "unhappy life"; on 9 October, Fanny wrote an "alarming letter" from Bristol that sent Percy Shelley racing off to search for her, without success. On the morning of 10 October, Fanny Imlay was found dead in a room at a Swansea inn, along with a suicide note and a laudanum bottle. On 10 December, Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet, was discovered drowned in the Serpentine, a lake in Hyde Park, London. Both suicides were hushed up. Harriet's family obstructed Percy Shelley's efforts—fully supported by Mary Godwin—to assume custody of his two children by Harriet. His lawyers advised him to improve his case by marrying; so he and Mary, who was pregnant again, married on 30 December 1816 at St Mildred's Church, Bread Street, London. Mr and Mrs Godwin were present and the marriage ended the family rift.

Claire Clairmont gave birth to a baby girl on 13 January, at first called Alba, later Allegra. In March of that year, the Chancery Court ruled Percy Shelley morally unfit to assume custody of his children and later placed them with a clergyman's family. Also in March, the Shelleys moved with Claire and Alba to Albion House at Marlow, Buckinghamshire, a large, damp building on the river Thames. There Mary Shelley gave birth to her third child, Clara, on 2 September. At Marlow, they entertained their new friends Marianne and Leigh Hunt, worked hard at their writing, and often discussed politics.

Early in the summer of 1817, Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein, which was published anonymously in January 1818. Reviewers and readers assumed that Percy Shelley was the author, since the book was published with his preface and dedicated to his political hero William Godwin. At Marlow, Mary edited the joint journal of the group's 1814 Continental journey, adding material written in Switzerland in 1816, along with Percy's poem "Mont Blanc". The result was the History of a Six Weeks' Tour, published in November 1817. That autumn, Percy Shelley often lived away from home in London to evade creditors. The threat of a debtor's prison, combined with their ill health and fears of losing custody of their children, contributed to the couple's decision to leave England for Italy on 12 March 1818, taking Claire Clairmont and Alba with them. They had no intention of returning.

Italy

One of the party's first tasks on arriving in Italy was to hand Alba over to Byron, who was living in Venice. He had agreed to raise her so long as Claire had nothing more to do with her. The Shelleys then embarked on a roving existence, never settling in any one place for long. Along the way, they accumulated a circle of friends and acquaintances who often moved with them. The couple devoted their time to writing, reading, learning, sightseeing, and socialising. The Italian adventure was, however, blighted for Mary Shelley by the deaths of both her children—Clara, in September 1818 in Venice, and William, in June 1819 in Rome. These losses left her in a deep depression that isolated her from Percy Shelley, who wrote in his notebook:

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,

And left me in this dreary world alone?

Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—

But thou art fled, gone down a dreary road

That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode.

For thine own sake I cannot follow thee

Do thou return for mine .

For a time, Mary Shelley found comfort only in her writing. The birth of her fourth child, Percy Florence, on 12 November 1819, finally lifted her spirits, though she nursed the memory of her lost children till the end of her life.

Italy provided the Shelleys, Byron, and other exiles with political freedom unattainable at home. Despite its associations with personal loss, Italy became for Mary Shelley "a country which memory painted as paradise". Their Italian years were a time of intense intellectual and creative activity for both Shelleys. While Percy composed a series of major poems, Mary wrote the novel Matilda, the historical novel Valperga, and the plays Proserpine and Midas. Mary wrote Valperga to help alleviate her father's financial difficulties, as Percy refused to assist him further. She was often physically ill, however, and prone to depressions. She also had to cope with Percy's interest in other women, such as Sophia Stacey, Emilia Viviani, and Jane Williams. Since Mary Shelley shared his belief in the non-exclusivity of marriage, she formed emotional ties of her own among the men and women of their circle. She became particularly fond of the Greek revolutionary Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos and of Jane and Edward Williams.

In December 1818, the Shelleys travelled south with Claire Clairmont and their servants to Naples, where they stayed for three months, receiving only one visitor, a physician. In 1820, they found themselves plagued by accusations and threats from Paolo and Elise Foggi, former servants whom Percy Shelley had dismissed in Naples shortly after the Foggis had married. The pair revealed that on 27 February 1819 in Naples, Percy Shelley had registered as his child by Mary Shelley a two-month-old baby girl named Elena Adelaide Shelley. The Foggis also claimed that Claire Clairmont was the baby's mother. Biographers have offered various interpretations of these events: that Percy Shelley decided to adopt a local child; that the baby was his by Elise, Claire, or an unknown woman; or that she was Elise's by Byron. Mary Shelley insisted she would have known if Claire had been pregnant, but it is unclear how much she really knew. The events in Naples, a city Mary Shelley later called a paradise inhabited by devils, remain shrouded in mystery. The only certainty is that she herself was not the child's mother. Elena Adelaide Shelley died in Naples on 9 June 1820.

After leaving Naples, the Shelleys settled in Rome, the city where her husband wrote "the meanest streets were strewed with truncated columns, broken capitals...and sparkling fragments of granite or porphyry...The voice of dead time, in still vibrations, is breathed from these dumb things, animated and glorified as they were by man". Rome inspired her to begin writing the unfinished novel Valerius, the Reanimated Roman, where the eponymous hero resists the decay of Rome and the machinations of "superstitious" Catholicism. The writing of her novel was broken off when her son William died of malaria. Shelley bitterly commented that she had come to Italy to improve her husband's health, and instead the Italian climate had just killed her two children, leading her to write: "May you my dear Marianne never know what it is to lose two only and lovely children in one year—to watch their dying moments—and then at last to be left childless and forever miserable". To deal with her grief, Shelley wrote the novella The Fields of Fancy, which became Matilda, dealing with a young woman whose beauty inspired incestuous love in her father, who ultimately commits suicide to stop himself from acting on his passion for his daughter, while she spends the rest of her life full of despair about "the unnatural love I had inspired". The novella offered a feminist critique of a patriarchal society as Matilda is punished in the afterlife, though she did nothing to encourage her father's feelings.

In the summer of 1822, a pregnant Mary moved with Percy, Claire, and Edward and Jane Williams to the isolated Villa Magni, at the sea's edge near the hamlet of San Terenzo in the Bay of Lerici. Once they were settled in, Percy broke the "evil news" to Claire that her daughter Allegra had died of typhus in a convent at Bagnacavallo. Mary Shelley was distracted and unhappy in the cramped and remote Villa Magni, which she came to regard as a dungeon. On 16 June, she miscarried, losing so much blood that she nearly died. Rather than wait for a doctor, Percy sat her in a bath of ice to stanch the bleeding, an act the doctor later told him saved her life. All was not well between the couple that summer, however, and Percy spent more time with Jane Williams than with his depressed and debilitated wife. Much of the short poetry Shelley wrote at San Terenzo involved Jane rather than Mary.

The coast offered Percy Shelley and Edward Williams the chance to enjoy their "perfect plaything for the summer", a new sailing boat. The boat had been designed by Daniel Roberts and an admirer of Byron, Edward Trelawny, who had joined the party in January 1822. On 1 July 1822, Percy Shelley, Edward Ellerker Williams, and Captain Daniel Roberts sailed south down the coast to Livorno. There Percy Shelley discussed with Byron and Leigh Hunt the launch of a radical magazine called The Liberal. On 8 July, he and Edward Williams set out on the return journey to Lerici with their eighteen-year-old boat boy, Charles Vivian. They never reached their destination. A letter arrived at Villa Magni from Hunt to Percy Shelley, dated 8 July, saying, "pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed Monday & we are anxious". "The paper fell from me," Mary told a friend later. "I trembled all over." She and Jane Williams rushed desperately to Livorno and then to Pisa in the fading hope that their husbands were still alive . Ten days after the storm, three bodies washed up on the coast near Viareggio, midway between Livorno and Lerici. Trelawny, Byron, and Hunt cremated Percy Shelley's corpse on the beach at Viareggio.

Return to England and writing career

After her husband's death, Mary Shelley lived for a year with Leigh Hunt and his family in Genoa, where she often saw Byron and transcribed his poems. She resolved to live by her pen and for her son, but her financial situation was precarious. On 23 July 1823, she left Genoa for England and stayed with her father and stepmother in the Strand until a small advance from her father-in-law enabled her to lodge nearby. Sir Timothy Shelley had at first agreed to support his grandson, Percy Florence, only if he were handed over to an appointed guardian. Mary Shelley rejected this idea instantly. She managed instead to wring out of Sir Timothy a limited annual allowance (which she had to repay when Percy Florence inherited the estate), but to the end of his days, he refused to meet her in person and dealt with her only through lawyers. Mary Shelley busied herself with editing her husband's poems, among other literary endeavours, but concern for her son restricted her options. Sir Timothy threatened to stop the allowance if any biography of the poet were published. In 1826, Percy Florence became the legal heir of the Shelley estate after the death of his half-brother Charles Shelley, his father's son by Harriet Shelley. Sir Timothy raised Mary's allowance from £100 a year to £250 but remained as difficult as ever. Mary Shelley enjoyed the stimulating society of William Godwin's circle, but poverty prevented her from socialising as she wished. She also felt ostracised by those who, like Sir Timothy, still disapproved of her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In the summer of 1824, Mary Shelley moved to Kentish Town in north London to be near Jane Williams. She may have been, in the words of her biographer Muriel Spark, "a little in love" with Jane. Jane later disillusioned her by gossiping that Percy had preferred her to Mary, owing to Mary's inadequacy as a wife. At around this time, Mary Shelley was working on her novel, The Last Man (1826); and she assisted a series of friends who were writing memoirs of Byron and Percy Shelley—the beginnings of her attempts to immortalise her husband. She also met the American actor John Howard Payne and the American writer Washington Irving, who intrigued her. Payne fell in love with her and in 1826 asked her to marry him. She refused, saying that after being married to one genius, she could only marry another. Payne accepted the rejection, and tried – without success – to talk his friend Irving into proposing himself. Mary Shelley was aware of Payne's plan, but how seriously she took it is unclear.

In 1827, Mary Shelley was party to a scheme that enabled her friend Isabel Robinson and Isabel's lover, Mary Diana Dods, who wrote under the name David Lyndsay, to embark on a life together in France as husband and wife. With the help of Payne, whom she kept in the dark about the details, Mary Shelley obtained false passports for the couple. In 1828, she fell ill with smallpox while visiting them in Paris; weeks later she recovered, unscarred but without her youthful beauty.

During the period 1827–40, Mary Shelley was busy as an editor and writer. She wrote the novels The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). She contributed five volumes of Lives of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French authors to Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. She also wrote stories for ladies' magazines. She was still helping to support her father, and they looked out for publishers for each other. In 1830, she sold the copyright for a new edition of Frankenstein for £60 to Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley for their new Standard Novels series. After her father's death in 1836 at the age of eighty, she began assembling his letters and a memoir for publication, as he had requested in his will; but after two years of work, she abandoned the project. Throughout this period, she also championed Percy Shelley's poetry, promoting its publication and quoting it in her writing. By 1837, Percy's works were well-known and increasingly admired. In the summer of 1838 Edward Moxon, the publisher of Tennyson and the son-in-law of Charles Lamb, proposed publishing an edition of the collected works of Percy Shelley. Mary wanted to include in this collection an unexpurgated version of Percy Shelley’s epic poem Queen Mab.  Moxon wanted to leave out the most radical passages as too shocking and atheistical, but Mary prevailed, thanks to Harriet de Boinville, who agreed to Mary’s request to borrow her own original copy gifted by Percy Shelley. Mary was paid £500 to edit the Poetical Works (1838), which Sir Timothy insisted should not include a biography. Mary found a way to tell the story of Percy's life, nonetheless: she included extensive biographical notes about the poems.

Shelley continued to practice her mother's feminist principles by extending aid to women of whom society disapproved. For instance, Shelley extended financial aid to Mary Diana Dods, a single mother and illegitimate herself, who appears to have been a lesbian, and gave her the new identity of Walter Sholto Douglas, husband of her lover Isabel Robinson. Shelley also assisted Georgiana Paul, a woman disallowed for by her husband for alleged adultery. Shelley in her diary about her assistance to the latter: "I do not make a boast-I do not say aloud-behold my generosity and greatness of mind-for in truth it is simple justice I perform-and so I am still reviled for being worldly".

Mary Shelley continued to treat potential romantic partners with caution. In 1828, she met and flirted with the French writer Prosper Mérimée, but her one surviving letter to him appears to be a deflection of his declaration of love. She was delighted when her old friend from Italy, Edward Trelawny, returned to England, and they joked about marriage in their letters. Their friendship had altered, however, following her refusal to cooperate with his proposed biography of Percy Shelley; and he later reacted angrily to her omission of the atheistic section of Queen Mab from Percy Shelley's poems. Oblique references in her journals, from the early 1830s until the early 1840s, suggest that Mary Shelley had feelings for the radical politician Aubrey Beauclerk, who may have disappointed her by twice marrying others.

Mary Shelley's first concern during these years was the welfare of Percy Florence. She honoured her late husband's wish that his son attend public school and, with Sir Timothy's grudging help, had him educated at Harrow. To avoid boarding fees, she moved to Harrow on the Hill herself so that Percy could attend as a day scholar. Though Percy went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, and dabbled in politics and the law, he showed no sign of his parents' gifts.

Final years and death

In 1840 and 1842, mother and son travelled together on the continent, journeys that Mary Shelley recorded in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844). In 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died at the age of ninety, "falling from the stalk like an overblown flower", as Mary put it. For the first time, she and her son were financially independent, though the estate proved less valuable than they had hoped.

n the mid-1840s, Mary Shelley found herself the target of three separate blackmailers. In 1845, an Italian political exile called Gatteschi, whom she had met in Paris, threatened to publish letters she had sent him. A friend of her son bribed a police chief into seizing Gatteschi's papers, including the letters, which were then destroyed. Shortly afterwards, Mary Shelley bought some letters written by herself and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a man calling himself G. Byron and posing as the illegitimate son of the late Lord Byron. Also in 1845, Percy Bysshe Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin approached her, claiming to have written a damaging biography of Percy Shelley. He said he would suppress it in return for £250, but Mary Shelley refused.

In 1848, Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St John. The marriage proved a happy one, and Mary Shelley and Jane were fond of each other. Mary lived with her son and daughter-in-law at Field Place, Sussex, the Shelleys' ancestral home, and at Chester Square, London, and accompanied them on travels abroad.

Mary Shelley's last years were blighted by illness. From 1839, she suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing. On 1 February 1851, at Chester Square, she died at the age of fifty-three from what her physician suspected was a brain tumour. According to Jane Shelley, Mary Shelley had asked to be buried with her mother and father; but Percy and Jane, judging the graveyard at St Pancras to be "dreadful", chose to bury her instead at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, near their new home at Boscombe. On the first anniversary of Mary Shelley's death, the Shelleys opened her box-desk. Inside they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his poem Adonaïs with one page folded round a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart.  

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