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.
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