Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The ‘foolish’ letter, which Shelley had already opened and scanned, was waiting for Mary when she reached Casa Prini late that evening. It filled her with indignation. Perhaps, knowing Mary’s devotion to her father, Mrs Gisborne had preferred to suggest that Mary Jane was their source of information. Certainly, Mary now became convinced that her stepmother had wrecked one of her most treasured friendships. On 17 October, the day after visiting Casa Ricci, she wrote a stern letter, offering her friends the choice between coming to Casa Prini or being regarded as one of the enemy, united to ‘that filthy woman’, Mary Jane Godwin. ‘Now is the time! join them, or us – the gulph is deep, the plank is going to be removed – set your foot on it if you will – and you will not lose the sincere affection of one who loved you tenderly.’

  The challenge was not accepted; the Gisbornes kept their distance until the following spring. Maria’s son Henry did not improve matters when he turned up to request the four hundred crowns needed to complete work on his steamboat. Shelley, who already suspected the Gisbornes of having gone cold on a scheme in which he had made heavy investments, refused. Writing to Claire on 29 October, Shelley described their former friends as ‘the most filthy and odious animals with which I ever came in contact’. But Shelley’s violent expressions should not be taken too seriously; he wrote to John Gisborne on the same day to ask, most affably, for advice on obtaining Arabic grammar-books.

  *

  One reason for Mary’s eagerness to resume her friendship with the Gisbornes was never mentioned in her journals. The Gisbornes, during the Shelleys’ unhappy summer at the Villa Valsovano, had offered them a welcome escape from each other with their easy, undemanding company. By the autumn of 1820, Mary was longing for her dear Maria, a motherly confidante with whom to share her feelings about Claire, to boast of little Percy’s progress and, perhaps, to talk about her life with Shelley.

  Their marriage, as Shelley’s sharp prefatory verses to The Witch of Atlas suggest, was less loving than it had once been. Passion had waned, leaving behind a flavour of discontent. Mary felt that Shelley had put the deaths of their lost children behind him and that he resented the anxious care she lavished on their remaining child. She understood but regretted his decision to shut her father out of their lives and to deny his requests. He said it was for her own good; Godwin’s letters invariably plunged her into despair. Shelley was right, she accepted that; it did not lessen her own sense of obligation and guilt.

  If such feelings held them apart, the Shelleys remained staunch political allies. They had cause to celebrate as, eagerly following the news, they read of a sudden outbreak of revolutions across Europe, promising the downfall of kings and a welcome return of the republican ideals they cherished. An uprising in Spain had led to the declaration of a new constitution in March 1820; Naples had followed suit with a revolt led by a priest and a carbonari faction who promised a radical redistribution of land to the people. There was news of riots in Palermo and of another uprising to the north, in Piedmont. Mary, as she began to write Valperga, a story of the corrupting effects of power, was acutely conscious of the contemporary political situation and the parallels she could suggest. Still haunted by the thought of her father’s imminent ruin and aware only of her stepmother’s role in spreading vicious gossip to the Gisbornes, she planned to let Godwin sell the book for his own profit. If Shelley would not help him, she proudly decided, then she would do so herself. Shelley, still smarting at Mary’s criticism of one of his most imaginative works, told Peacock in November that his wife was raking her new story out of fifty old books. He conceded, however, that the result would be ‘wholly original’.7

  The idea for Valperga was, so Mary remembered, born in 1817 at Marlow; their summer at Bagni di Lucca in 1818 had led her to consider the medieval ruler of Lucca, Castruccio Castracani, as a possible central figure, the Napoleon of the fourteenth century. At Naples in January 1819, she had read more deeply about Castruccio’s life in Sismondi’s massive history of Italy and had been fired by the Swiss historian’s enthusiasm for the democratically minded Guelph states of Tuscany and the idea of local, communal rule. ‘This way of conducting oneself, to live in common, to make a part of one great whole, raises up human beings and makes them capable of the greatest things,’ Sismondi had written.8 This was a view which Mary shared and which she would use to contrast with Castruccio’s thirst for acquisition and his faith in the power of the individual.

  Mary had been unimpressed by Machiavelli’s short and imaginative presentation of Castruccio as an ideal prince, a witty and ruthless tyrant not far removed in character from another Machiavelli hero, Cesare Borgia. Her Castruccio has none of the Machiavellian wit. But, unlike Machiavelli, Mary was not writing to celebrate a hero. Her story would be dominated by two powerful and very different women. The first, the bizarrely named Countess Euthanasia, is Castruccio’s fictitious first love, the woman who shuns his proposal of marriage and seeks to defend the Guelph republics from the tyrant’s acquisitive grasp. Euthanasia, perceived by Claire Clairmont as a portrait of Shelley, is an imaginative embodiment of the Shelleys’ political ideals. Intelligent, pious and fearless, she owes much of her nature to the eleventh-century Grand Countess Matilde di Canossa, a woman who combined scholarship and beauty with uncommon courage. The fact that Matilde was the daughter of Princess Beatrice strengthens the likelihood that Mary had her in mind, since Beatrice was the name she chose for the second most important female character in the novel, Beatrice of Ferrara. A sixteen-year-old prophetess and heretic, Beatrice falls passionately in love with Castruccio and offers herself to him shortly after they meet. She pays for her boldness with a life of penitence and woe; perhaps Mary, who gave herself to Shelley when she was sixteen, was allowing Beatrice to play out her own feelings of anguished self-blame and regret.

  By the time they moved to Casa Prini, Mary had found the background to her story; she had not yet decided on its precise location. On 12 August, while Shelley left San Giuliano to climb Monte San Pellegrino, Mary and Claire went off together on a cheerful and unusually sisterly expedition to Lucca. Claire copied out the inscriptions over Castruccio’s tomb in the church of San Francesco; Mary energetically climbed the tower above the Palazzo Guinigi. It is, she told Leigh Hunt three years later: ‘an old tower as ancient as those times – look towards the opening of the hills, on the road to the Baths of Lucca, & on the banks of the Serchio & you will see the site of Valperga …’9 What Mary had actually seen was the bulk of the disused Convento del Angelo. This was the site she chose for the home of Castruccio’s first love.

  Originally named ‘Castruccio, Prince of Lucca’, Mary’s novel only became Valperga in 1823, when William Godwin had the manuscript in his hands and was looking for a simple but striking title. It remains a puzzle why Mary should have given this name to Euthanasia’s home. There is a Valperga in Italy, but it is in Piedmont, a long way north of Lucca. It is not even clear that Mary knew of its existence.† The most likely explanation is that she intended to make a connection to Walpurga, the missionary saint who travelled from England to Germany and whose body was believed to exude a sacred fluid, a protection against the black arts which later became associated with Walpurgis Night. Mary had become fascinated by superstitious customs during her months at San Giuliano, taking careful note of local beliefs and visiting a mountain grotto said to be haunted by spirits. Witchcraft, in her novel, is the final undoing of poor Beatrice, whose attempts to regain Castruccio’s love lead her to seek the help of Fior di Mandragola, a forest witch. Euthanasia, as Valperga’s flawless custodian, is immune to the witch’s powers; Beatrice dies, lovingly tended by Euthanasia, of the drugs with which Fior di Mandragola briefly bewitched her eyes.

  Euthanasia’s own death was, in Mary’s view, one of the finest scenes in the novel. Imprisoning the Countess after her rash decision to join a plot to overthrow him, Castruccio realizes that he cannot stain his hands with the death of this saintly woman. Instead, he decides to send h
er into exile. Her death at sea, en route to banishment in Sicily, is related not as a tragedy but as the welcome release from life which her name implies. Too sceptical to canonize her, Mary succeeded, nevertheless, in creating a triumphantly appropriate ending for her secular saint.

  Earth felt no change when she died; and men forgot her. Yet a lovelier spirit never ceased to breathe, nor was a lovelier form ever destroyed amidst the many it brings forth. Endless tears might well have been shed at her loss; yet for her none wept, save the piteous skies, which deplored the mischief they had themselves committed: – none moaned except the sea-birds that flapped their heavy wings above the ocean-cave wherein she lay; – and the muttering thunder alone tolled her passing bell, as she quitted a life, which for her had been replete with change and sorrow.10

  It is, as always with Mary Shelley’s fiction, difficult not to read her own continuing melancholy into her haunting meditations on the transience of life. Into her elegy for Euthanasia, she put as much of her present self as she had given of her past to the reckless, passionate young Beatrice who offers her body to Castruccio and rejects the existence of God.

  *

  Sending a brief letter to Godwin in August, Shelley had reported that Mary now seemed wholly absorbed in caring for little Percy. The tartness of the comment suggests resentment; Shelley found it hard to understand how nervously Mary watched over their one remaining child.

  But Percy thrived and, with a novel in progress and Claire restricted to paying occasional visits, Mary grew happier. Shelley was distant, except when reading to her from a newly arrived volume of John Keats’s poems, or when they talked about political matters; the landscape was beautiful enough to offer consolation. Her journal entries, always terse in periods of unease or unhappiness, began to expand. Sitting out in the garden in October with her pen for a paintbrush, she carefully recorded the slow gathering of evening clouds in the distance while Venus glittered above San Giuliano, ‘and the trunks of the trees are tinged with the silvery light of the rising moon’.11

  A lyrical account of medieval farm life in the first chapters of Valperga shows how closely Mary drew on her own surroundings. The setting here is said to be Este; everything about it suggests the tranquil landscape around Pisa.

  The hedges were of myrtle, whose aromatic perfume weighed upon the sluggish air of noon, as the labourers reposed, sleeping under the trees, lulled by the rippling of the brooks that watered their grounds. In the evening they ate their meal under the open sky; the birds were asleep, but the ground was alive with innumerable glow-worms, and the air with the lightning-like fire-flies, small, humming crickets, and heavy beetles; the west had quickly lost its splendour, but in the fading beams of sunset sailed the boat-like moon, while Venus, as another satellite to earth, beamed just above the crescent hardly brighter than itself, and the outline of the rugged Apennines was marked darkly below.12

  Mary, peaceful, busy, doting on her pretty child, flourished in Claire’s absence. Shelley, however, pined for her return. Claire’s impetuousness, her warmth and her relish for adventure had become necessary to him; he did not see why he should have been obliged to exile her from his home. Late in October, news reached him that a rich acquaintance of his cousin Thomas Medwin was looking for companions to travel to the Middle East the following spring. Shelley’s first thoughts were not of his wife but of Claire, pining at Dr Boiti’s home in Florence. Claire, he knew, would jump at the chance of such a trip. ‘This man has conceived a great admiration for my verses,’ he wrote to tell her, ‘and wishes above all things that I could be induced to join his expedition.’

  How far all this is practicable, considering the state of my finances I know not yet. I know that if it were it would give me the greatest pleasure, and the pleasure might be either doubled or divided by your presence or absence.

  All this will be explained and determined in time; meanwhile lay to your heart what I say, and do not mention it in your letter to Mary.13

  Claire’s reply has not survived; we will never know whether she was prepared to accept an invitation which offered her the chance to replace her stepsister as Shelley’s companion. Perhaps she had lived with him long enough to treat such suggestions with scepticism; perhaps, as much as Mary, she understood that fantasy and reality walked side by side, often indistinguishably, in his mind. What Shelley wrote, in his correspondence as much as in his poetry, could never be relied on as evidence of his serious intentions or desires. Nevertheless, it was Claire, not Mary, who heard about the plan to travel abroad. It is possible and even probable that Shelley, in the autumn of 1820, was contemplating leaving his wife and child for his sister-in-law.

  *

  On 22 October a new and, from Mary’s point of view, most unwelcome guest arrived at the Casa Prini. A portrait of Thomas Medwin, painted when he was about forty, shows the long face of a slightly dodgy vicar, not a vocation to which Shelley’s second cousin ever felt the call. Four years older than Shelley, Medwin remembered him as a miserable little schoolboy at the Syon House Academy, as a budding writer of romantic novels and a sulky attendant at local dances in Sussex. They had lost touch when Medwin, bored with studying law in his father’s offices at Horsham, went off to join the 24th Light Dragoons in Hindustan. A retired half-pay lieutenant who spent his spare hours hunting lions and tigers in the style of the day, Medwin preferred to use his nominal title of Captain; it sounded better and Medwin, a diligent courter of rich ladies and high society, had a care for such niceties.

  Medwin was not a particularly attractive character, but he was not a fool. With Shelley’s help and tactful editing, he published a collection of poems and essays about his experiences in India. He was already fluent in Spanish when he arrived at Bagni di San Giuliano; he was keen to work at Arabic with Shelley. He knew Latin well enough to translate Catullus in later life. He had a good memory and a lively imagination. He deserves some credit for renewing his friendship with his cousin at a time when Shelley’s work was little-known and undervalued and when his connection with Byron, the most celebrated poet of the age, had become remote. Medwin’s respect for Shelley’s genius was heartfelt and this, coming from a cousin who had poetic ambitions of his own, was generous.

  Mary couldn’t stand him. ‘He sits with us,’ she wrote in a fury to Claire,

  & be one reading or writing he insists upon interrupting one every moment to read all the fine things he either writes or reads … He intends he says to translate all the fine passages of Dante … when he cannot make sense of the words that are [there] he puts in words of his own and calls it a misprint … S[helley] does nothing but conjugate the verb seccare & twist & turn Seccatura in all possible ways. He is Common Place personified.14

  A seccatore, the word which even kind-hearted Shelley came to agree that his cousin deserved, was the name given to the Italian equivalent of the club bore. Lady Morgan, in her book on Italy, blamed the seccatore’s existence on the Italian habit of refusing to talk about serious subjects: ‘men, thrown upon trifles, become tedious in their discussions.’15 So it was with poor Medwin as – one can’t help imagining – lifting a hand to stroke his military moustache, he invited the Shelleys to hear another reading from his Indian journal or a passage from his Dante translation. Mary was, however, impressed by his attempt to cure Shelley’s illness with hypnotic skills learned in India. According to Medwin, she became skilled enough herself as a trance-inducer to cause Shelley to try and leave their bedroom by the window, ‘fortunately barred’. Alarmed by her success, Mary made no further experiments.16

  On 25 October, three days after Medwin’s arrival at Casa Prini, the Serchio broke its banks. The narrow canal, lying at a level higher than the houses of San Giuliano, flooded down the back gardens of the little crescent and into the square in front, surrounding the buildings and finally bursting through the doors. Mary, calmly aware that neither the house nor its furniture were her concern, was entranced by a scene which could have been painted by her beloved Salvato
r Rosa.

  It was a picturesque sight at night to see the peasants driving the cattle from the plains below to the hills above the Baths. A fire was kept up to guide them across the ford; and the forms of the men and the animals showed in dark relief against the red glare of the flame, which was reflected again in the waters that filled the Square.17

  Medwin had a delightful memory of them all scrambling into a boat from the upper windows of Casa Prini the following day. Mary’s journal shows this to have been one of his many little fictions. The weather brightened, the flood receded; four days later, they went by carriage to Pisa and into new lodgings.

  Casa Galletti, on the north bank of the Lung’ Arno, stood next to the gloomily splendid marble palace of the Lanfreducci family; the builder, a former prisoner in the Crusades, had chosen to have a chain and the words ‘Alia Giornata’ carved over his door to remind himself of the value of hope. Shelley, conscious of a fretful and discontented Claire at Florence, sent off another of his treacherous notes. Mary, the baby and the Italian maids were ensconced on the lower floor, he told her; he and Medwin had managed to obtain rooms above: ‘congratulate me on my seclusion’.18 A revealing aside in his letter apologized for the fact that the last had been so dull; ‘as it was taxed with a postscript by Mary, it contained nothing that I wished it to contain.’ ‘Taxed’ is not an affectionate word; it underlines the growing coldness of Shelley’s feelings towards his wife.

  ‘ complaining of dullness,’ Mary anxiously noted on 4 November. She was probably unaware of Shelley’s plot to go adventuring in the East with her stepsister, a scheme which collapsed only because Medwin’s rich friend failed to stay in touch; all Mary knew was that if Claire grew bored, Shelley would want to bring her back to join them. Still, in Pisa, Claire could always be dispatched to the house of Mrs Mason, who appeared to dote on her. A few days later, Mary learned that Claire would, indeed, be joining them for the four weeks leading up to Christmas. She did not record her thoughts.