Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Political events brought their meetings to an end in the spring of 1821. ‘AM calls with news about Greece,’ Mary wrote in her journal on 1 April; – ‘he is as gay as a caged eagle just free.’ News had come from the prince’s cousin, Prince Ypsilantis, that an army of 10,000 had been raised to serve the cause of Greek freedom. Their Greek lessons were suspended for more important work, but long letters written in French, their most fluent common language, allowed the prince to continue to share his ambitions for Greece with a sympathetic and admiring confidante. They are affectionate letters, but there is no hint of passion in them; they do not lead one to think that Mary’s relationship ever went beyond a devoted platonic friendship.

  What did Shelley think? Would Shelley have cared? Publicly, he dedicated Hellas to Mavrocordato ‘as an imperfect token of the admiration, sympathy, and friendship of the author’. Privately, he may have shared the opinion of a French historian who noted towards the end of the century that Mavrocordato ‘n’avait pas cette éloquence qui excite l’enthousiasme … il ne frappait pas l’imagination …’6 Mary’s enthusiasm for Mavrocordato puzzled him. A few days after the prince’s departure, Shelley told Claire that he was ‘a great loss to Mary, and therefore to me – but not otherwise’.7

  *

  Mary’s friendship with the prince, continued in correspondence long after he left for Greece on 26 June 1821, needs to be considered in the context of the last of Pacchiani’s introductions, a beautiful Italian girl called Teresa Viviani with whom Shelley became passionately involved during their time at Pisa. The Shelleys met her in early December 1820, in the same week that they were introduced to Mavrocordato. It is possible that Mary’s immediate interest in Mavrocordato, an interest which Shelley did not share, helped to drive him – as a very willing victim – into Miss Viviani’s receptive arms.

  They renamed her Emilia. It sounded more appealing and Emilia Viviani seemed born to the part of a romantic heroine, with her clear white skin and thick black hair which she wore loosely coiled, Greek style, on the nape of her neck. Emilia was the daughter of the governor of Pisa and imaginative enough to claim that her expensive and privileged boarding-school, two hundred yards from her father’s home, was a prison in which a heartless stepmother had condemned her to dwell until marriage. The Shelleys were horrified by her tale. They believed it all.

  Emilia’s school, adjoining the convent of Sant’ Anna, is still partly visible among the classrooms of a university annexe on Via Carducci. So is the drab plot of kitchen garden which was Emilia’s only view of the outside world from the grim little rooms in which she kept the two caged birds the Shelleys gave her, together with a painting of the madonna and a portrait of her favourite saint. She changed saints quite frequently, but Mary only noticed that later. Initially, she was as outraged as Shelley to learn that an intelligent and sensitive young woman could be locked up until forced into marriage. She made daily visits to the school; Claire was urged to write consoling letters to their lovely young friend.

  Satirizing Emilia later as Clorinda in one of her most beguiling stories, ‘The Bride of Modern Italy’, Mary showed her choosing a new saint for every new love-affair: ‘tell me, sweet Clorinda, how many saints have been benefited by your piety?’8 Mary had the measure of Miss Viviani by the time she wrote her elegant, mocking tale. In the early months of 1821, she was sufficiently moved by the pathos and beauty of their ‘imprisoned’ friend to draw on her for one of the most important characters in Valperga. It was after meeting Emilia that Mary introduced a second heroine, the young prophetess of Ferrara.‡

  Beatrice of Ferrara’s rejection of God had nothing to do with Emilia. Neither did her gift for prophecy, which owed more to Mary’s faith in her own mysterious power to apprehend future events. But Beatrice’s looks, her raven black hair, her oval face, her dark eyes, show that Emilia Viviani also made a contribution. Beatrice prophesies from the convent of Sant’Anna in Ferrara, a name which echoes Emilia’s convent school of Sant’ Anna in Pisa too precisely to have been picked by chance. It is tempting to see poor Beatrice’s miserable end as a lovingly chosen punishment by a creator who had, by then, lost all sympathy with the young Pisan.

  Shelley had always liked the idea of satellite sisterhoods; a few weeks after his first meeting with Emilia in December 1820, he began writing a new poem in celebration of this subject. Why, he asked, not for the first time, should exclusive love be regarded as a benefit to mankind?

  I never was attached to that great sect,

  Whose doctrine is, that each one should select

  Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend,

  And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend

  To cold oblivion …

  There was nothing new here to distress Mary; what might have upset her more was Epipsychidion’s clear indication that she was no longer Shelley’s muse. Emilia, in the opening stanzas of his poem, was given Mary’s own former role as the moon, ‘thou Beauty, and thou Terror! / Thou Harmony of Nature’s art! Thou Mirror / In whom, as in the splendour of the Sun, / All shapes look glorious which thou gazest on!’ When the moon reappears in the central section of the poem, it represents Mary, but in the cruellest form. Here, she has become the planet’s winter face, trapping the poet

  Into a death of ice, immovable; –

  And then – what earthquakes made it gape and split,

  The white Moon smiling all the while on it,

  These words conceal: – If not, each word would be

  The key of staunchless tears. Weep not for me!

  This is the state from which loving ‘Emily’ leads him back to warmth; Claire, represented by the comet, ‘beautiful and fierce’, is urged to return and to become ‘Love’s folding-star’ while the Moon, as Mary, ‘will veil her horn / In thy last smiles’. Finally, the poet dreams of perfect union with ‘Emily’ on ‘an isle under Ionian skies, / Beautiful as a wreck of Paradise’ where they will become, in one of Shelley’s favourite poetic fantasies

  the same, we shall be one

  Spirit within two frames, oh! wherefore two?

  One passion in twin-hearts, which grows and grew,

  Till like two meteors of expanding flame,

  Those spheres instinct with it become the same,

  Touch, mingle, are transfigured …

  Shelley prudently chose to keep his poem out of Mary’s sight until the summer of 1821. She was familiar with and had for a time shared his faith in a more generous scheme of love than monogamy. But how can she have responded to a poem which robed her in ice and which celebrated the writer’s fusion, ecstatic and all-consuming, with the young girl to whom Epipsychidion was explicitly addressed? There was no attempt at concealment: Shelley unambiguously dedicated his work ‘to the noble and unfortunate lady, Emilia V—, now imprisoned in the convent of —.’ True, he intended to publish it anonymously, claiming that the author had died in Florence; what comfort can that have been?9

  Mary, at the beginning of 1821, was still unaware of the nature of the poem her husband was writing; there are, however, hints that she was already having difficulty keeping up with his enthusiasm for their new friend. Emilia, filling time with writing flowery letters, assured Shelley – ‘my Percy’ – of her undying love; mischievously, she confided her fears that ‘the beautiful Mary’ was growing less affectionate. ‘Mary does not write to me. Is it possible that she loves me less than the others do?’ she asked him ten days after their first meeting.10 On 24 December 1820, after thanking Mary for a gift of a chain, ‘the symbol of that which binds and will eternally bind our hearts’, Emilia reproached her for being ‘a little cold’, before delivering a barbed tribute to ‘Mia adorata Amica’: ‘I know that your husband said well when he said that your apparent coldness [freddezza] is only the ash which covers an affectionate heart.’

  How far did Shelley go in his relationship with Emilia? Writing to Claire on 16 January 1821, he assured her that there was no mixture ‘of that which you call love’ in hi
s feelings for their friend; nevertheless, there are some indications that he behaved recklessly. Claire later recalled that he tried to persuade Mrs Mason to disguise herself as a man in order to play the part of Emilia’s suitor and rescue her from the school. To join him? He would hardly have wished to send her home to an angry father and an unloving stepmother. On 3 September 1821, on the eve of a more conventional alliance arranged by her parents, Emilia nervously requested Shelley to be ‘very prudent’ and to take care to write to her in a more distant way. Writing to Byron eleven days later, Shelley told him that a good deal of fuss was being made in Pisa about his ‘intimacy’ with the governor’s daughter. ‘Pray do not mention anything of what I told you,’ he added, ‘as the whole truth is not known and Mary might be very much annoyed at it.’ He did not, however, say what the ‘whole truth’ was and Byron did not ask.

  Mary already knew enough by mid-September 1821 to have been annoyed and distressed. She had been shown Epipsychidion,§ and had been told that Shelley intended to publish it. She was also aware that Emilia, shortly before her marriage, had attempted to extract a large sum of money from Shelley, a form of blackmail to which she drily alluded in a letter to Mrs Gisborne the following year.11 His relationship with Emilia had, she admitted in this letter, caused ‘a good deal of discomfort’, but she was carefully unspecific. The relationship was airily dismissed as ‘Shelleys Italian platonics’. Emilia was said to be leading her husband and his mother ‘a devil of a life’.12 The Shelleys never saw or heard from her again.

  *

  Pacchiani had been generous with his introductions, but his friends had all, with the exception of the amiable, slightly dull John Taaffe, been foreign; the Shelleys, estranged from the Gisbornes, weary of Medwin and seeing little of Mrs Mason in a year when her health was bad, longed for English company. Learning that John Keats was intending to visit Italy for his health, Shelley had already urged him to join them at Pisa in the winter of 1820–1. His intentions were generous; after reading Hyperion with Mary during the previous autumn, he believed that Keats might yet become one of the great poets of their time. But Keats, sensing condescension and thinking, perhaps, that Pisa sounded a dull spot, opted for Rome, where he died in April 1821.

  The Shelleys, by then, had found all the English company they required in the form of Tom Medwin’s friends, Edward Williams and his unofficial wife, Jane. This handsome young couple became their close companions, and a welcome replacement for Tom as he set off through Italy in search of a rich wife. ‘We see the Williamses constantly,’ Shelley wrote to Claire on 9 June 1821; but his praises were surprisingly limp. They were, he told her, ‘nice, good-natured people, very soft society after authors and pretenders to philosophy’. The Williamses were, it seemed, reaping the benefits only of comparison with Pacchiani and John Taaffe.

  Mary was, initially, more enthusiastic. The Williamses arrived in Pisa on 19 January. By the first week of February, she had decided that she liked Edward enough to let him try his hand at drawing her while she drew him out about their history and what had brought them to Pisa. More limited in his education than either Medwin or Shelley, Williams had left Eton for the navy after less than a year’s schooling. He went on to serve with Medwin in India and, like him, had retired on half-pay when the army was reformed after the Napoleonic wars. Mary had heard enough of lions and tiger-hunts from Medwin; she was more interested in hearing the romantic story of Edward’s love for Jane.

  A year younger than Mary, Jane Cleveland was of military stock, the sister of a general in the Madras army, the wife, at sixteen, of a bullying naval captain in the East India Company from whom, with her brother’s approval, she had separated the following year. Shortly thereafter – the date was never quite clear – she fell in love with Edward Williams. As boldly as Mary herself, she had broken with convention and in 1819 left England as his wife, although no divorce had taken place. Like Mary again, she had lived at Geneva, where their son, Edward Medwin, was born in February 1820 and named for their closest friend. Now they were expecting their second child, due in March.

  This was a tale to win Mary’s sympathy. She had not, at first, been much impressed by Jane, a slight, clinging young woman with dark hair, huge eyes, a swanlike neck and a long, downturned nose. While admiring her skill at flower arranging, her graceful appearance when seated at the pedal harp and the skill with which she could convert herself into a dashing Indian sultana in turban and silk pantaloons, the Shelleys initially found her less congenial than Edward, who had ambitions to become a playwright and whose skill as an artist was enviably assured. Jane seemed to have no especial talent. Neither Shelley nor Mary were aware of the capacity for mischief-making which had already caused trouble at Geneva.13¶

  Mary, always tormented by the thought that her birth had killed Mary Wollstonecraft, gladly helped at the birth in March of Jane’s Rosalind (‘Dina’). Jane’s old-fashioned indolence after the birth allowed Mary the treat of replacing her as Edward’s daily walking companion in a wonderfully sunny and springlike April. With Alexander Mavrocordato wrapped up in his plans for Greece, she was pleased to have this new and agreeable friend. Knowing nothing of boats, she shared Shelley’s admiration for Williams’s naval chat; when, on a moonlit canal trip from Livorno to Pisa with Henry Reveley, the young men’s light-bottomed craft tipped over, neither Mary nor Shelley had the practical skill to understand that their nautical friend Edward had been at fault for raising a full sail in a high wind.14 The expedition marked the return of Shelley’s passion for water. In the old days, he had been content with paper boats or rowing on a stream; now, with Williams to encourage him, he began to dream of open seas.

  Williams had lost most of his money when a banking house in Calcutta suddenly failed; like the Shelleys, he was delighted to find that splendid homes could be rented for a pittance in the vicinity of Pisa. In March, the Shelleys had taken Casa Aulla, a Prini home which is now the Hotel Victoria; in May, while they rented another Prini house at San Giuliano, the Williamses settled nearby in the country house of Marchese Poschi, on the road towards Pugnano.

  The Poschi house seemed to them all to have dropped straight from paradise. Its gardens were shaded by cypresses and sweet-smelling limes; its grand central staircase swept up to the third floor as though in expectation of – at least – a king’s arrival. Here, from June to the end of summer, the two families romped and chatted and laughed. Basking in such easy, undemanding company, Mary felt her own girlhood returning. In Pisa, unpleasant gossip was spreading about Shelley’s involvement with Emilia Viviani; away from the city, in the airy, frescoed rooms of the Williamses’ home, she could ignore it. Working on the last chapters of Valperga, ‘a child of mighty slow growth’,15 she had little to worry her at home beyond a day’s illness in little Percy and a baffling silence from Skinner Street. ‘I have not heard from Papa this age,’ she wrote anxiously to Mrs Gisborne, now somewhat but not entirely forgiven, on 28 May. ‘Pray enquire if there are letters for us at the Leghorn Post Office.’ She had, perhaps, forgotten Shelley’s decision to act as her censor. In retrospect, Mary remembered only the laughter in the garden, the languid ease of long summer days. ‘Do you remember,’ she wrote to Jane Williams on 15 October 1822, ‘… how we used, like children, to play in the great hall or your garden & then sit under the cypresses & hear him [Edward] read his play?’ By then, she was anxious to bury any memories of Shelley which could cause her pain.

  Shelley’s health was, as Mary’s letters sadly noted, no better. The ‘nervous irritation’ she described him as suffering from was not only physical in its origin. Writing Adonais, his lament for Keats, had made him painfully conscious of his own lack of public recognition. When Mary gave him her corrected second draft; of Valperga to read in July, his immediate thought was that she should not prejudice the book’s chances by calling herself ‘the author of Frankenstein’.16 Better, he reasoned, to try for popularity than to link the new book to a work which had been viewed as mischievous a
nd dangerous. This was caution bred of despondency.

  Watching the simple affection of Jane and Edward Williams, Shelley was bitterly aware of the lack of ease between Mary and himself. Unfairly, he longed for the freshness of first love, the calmness of a Jane who never seemed to quarrel or to show the nervous, excessive devotion with which Mary fretted over their last remaining child. At home, she seemed always taken up with the baby or her studies, but he noticed that she also found time to write to her scholarly Greek prince. Shelley was not a man who ever looked for fault in himself; no sign in his letters appears of a conscience, an awareness that his own behaviour with both Claire and Emilia might have been hard for his wife to bear, especially in the summer when she first read Epipsychidion. She had no cause to be cold; a change was required. Not until 1839 was Mary able to admit in public that this was the summer in which, in a draft notebook, he addressed to her one of his cruellest poems. It was all the more hurtful for being couched in tones of sorrowful reproach. The fault, naturally, was all hers.

  We are not happy, sweet! our state

  Is strange and full of doubt and fear:

  More need of words that ills abate;