158-] English Literature
Mary Shelley
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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.
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