Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Reserve or censure come not near

  Our sacred friendship, lest there be

  No solace left for thee and me.

  Gentle and good and mild thou art,

  Nor can I live if thou appear

  Aught but thyself, or turn thine heart

  Away from me, or stoop to wear

  The mask of scorn, although it be

  To hide the love thou feel’st for me.17

  *

  A form of reconciliation had been achieved with the Gisbornes since the estrangement of the previous year. On their way from Livorno to make a new life in England, they consented to make a short stay with the Shelleys. The day after they left, 29 July, Mary sat to Edward Williams once again for a miniature portrait; she planned to give it to Shelley for his birthday the following week. Events were against her; a letter from Byron in Ravenna brought the dramatic news that the brother and father of his young mistress, Teresa Guiccioli, had been expelled from their home for involvement with one of the score of secret societies which had sprung up at the time of the abortive revolution in Naples. Byron, while prepared to go with Teresa to share their exile, was anxious to dissuade her from choosing Geneva, where he was still regarded as a figure of scandal by the English colony. Shelley decided to make a cross-country journey to Ravenna to discuss the future. Byron might be persuaded to change his plans and come to Pisa instead. Shelley was also anxious, as was Mary, to know what Byron’s intentions were for poor little Allegra.

  News had reached them in March that Byron had decided, with the support of Teresa Guiccioli and her family, to lodge his four-year-old daughter at the convent of Bagnacavallo. Mary, who regarded the decision as regrettable but practical, had taken it upon herself to explain the situation to Claire. She, as Allegra’s mother, was less calm in her reaction. She had shared the Shelleys’ indignation at the confinement of Emilia Viviani in a convent school; it was beyond her understanding why they did not feel the same horror at the thought of a little girl being banished to what amounted, in Claire’s imagination, to heartless imprisonment. A letter of such hysterical distress was posted off to Byron at Ravenna that Shelley, warm though he usually was in support of Claire, felt obliged to write and apologize. Claire expressed herself as she did, he explained on 17 April, ‘as the result of a misguided maternal affection’. The apology was accepted; Claire was comforted by promises that she might soon be able to return to Pisa and live at the home of Mrs Mason. Not even Shelley felt ready to suggest that she should again live with himself and Mary.

  Shelley did not trouble Mary with the news that he would be taking a small detour on his journey to Ravenna in order to spend his birthday morning with Claire; she may have been shrewd enough to suspect it. Her journal entry for his birthday, 4 August, was heavy with foreboding. Certainly, she was not happy when she wrote it.

  W[illiams] finished my miniature – 7 years are now gone – what changes what a life – we now appear tranquil – yet who know[s] what wind – I will not prognosticate evil – We have had enough of it – When I came to Italy – I said all is well if it were permanent – it was more passing than an Italian twilight – I now say the same – May it be a polar day – Yet that too has an end –

  Two days later, she decided to read Williams her saddest and most personal work, the unpublished manuscript of Matilda. It is hard to imagine what response such a straightforward young man could have made to its revelation of grief and despair. No doubt it unnerved him, and he would have felt angry with Mary for drawing him away from the light cheerful world of the Villa Poschi into the unrelieved darkness of her most secret self. Shelley had probably told him that Mary suffered from depressions; Williams was callow enough to prefer a woman to keep her chin up and a smile on. He liked Mary; he didn’t want to know about her problems.

  There were no more entries in Mary’s journal after her reading of Matilda until the last day of August, when she crisply noted that Claire had visited her for ten days. (Shelley had insisted that an invitation should be issued; Mary had reluctantly assented.) There was usually good reason for a gap in the journal; the cause on this occasion was the frantic letter which Shelley had written to her on 7 August, the morning after his arrival at Byron’s Ravenna home.

  Eleven months had passed since the Hoppners, hot with Elise Foggi’s tale of a child born secretly at Naples to Shelley and Claire, and farmed out by Shelley at the foundling hospital, had sent their spitefully detailed account to Byron. He, until now, had kept their gossip to himself, or so he said. Carefully expressing his own scepticism, Byron gave the letter to Shelley on the night he arrived at Ravenna. (To the Hoppners, Byron had commented that Elise was a dubious source, but that he saw no reason to question the principal details of her story.)

  Shelley’s letter to Mary made no allusion to the baby he had registered as having been born to her and himself at Naples. He reported without surprise the fact that Elise had described Claire as his mistress: ‘all the world has heard so much & people may believe or not believe as they think good.’ What horrified him was the allegation that he had tried to procure an abortion for Claire and, when that failed, had torn the child from its mother and packed it off for adoption. How, he asked Mary, could anybody imagine that a man of his nature would destroy or abandon his own child? He wanted her to send him a letter for delivery to the Hoppners. She should deny the charge made against him, ‘in case you believe & know & can prove that it is false: stating the grounds & proof of your belief. The phrasing was strange; if he was not sure that she believed the charge to be false, how did he expect her to prove it, except by a lie? In a letter written the following day, he apologized for upsetting her but urged her again to act, for the sake of ‘our dear Percy’. This was a threat; if she did not discredit the charge, Percy’s future with them was at risk.

  Composing her reply to Mrs Hoppner, knowing that Shelley would be the first to read it, must have been one of the hardest acts of Mary’s life. She carried it off with uncommon conviction and skill. Making no mention of the mysterious baby Shelley had wanted her to take into their home, she acknowledged that Paolo Foggi had threatened them with ‘false accusations’, while stating that Elise, ‘this miserable girl’, had never been party to her husband’s plots.

  And now I come to her accusations – and I must indeed summon all my courage while I transcribe them; for tears will force their way, and how can it be otherwise? You knew Shelley, you saw his face, & could you believe them? Believe them only on the testimony of a girl whom you despised? I had hopes that such a thing was impossible, and that although strangers might believe the calumnies that this man propagated that none who had ever seen my husband could for a moment credit them.

  She says Claire was Shelley’s mistress, that – Upon my word, I solemnly assure you that I cannot write the words, I send you a part of Shelleys letter that you may see what I am now about to refute – but I had rather die that [than] copy any thing so vilely so wickedly false, so beyond all imagination fiendish.

  I am perfectly convinced, in my own mind that Shelley never had an improper connexion with Claire – At the time specified in Elise’s letter … we lived in lodgings where I had momentary entrance into every room and such a thing could not have passed unknown to me …18

  It was the best she could do. It was an answer which carefully omitted any reference to the child Shelley had named Elena Adelaide. It contained an oath which seemed to be directed to Shelley himself, in response to his hints about Percy’s future. ‘I swear by the life of my child, by my blessed & beloved child, that I know these accusations to be false,’ she wrote. The covering letter with which she sent this long and passionate defence underlined her greatest fear: ‘God preserve my child to me,’ she wrote to Shelley, ‘and our enemies shall not be too much for us.’ She added that there had been ‘cunning’ in Elise’s story. She begged him to think again about his plan to move them to a house near Claire in Florence: ‘I love I own to face danger,’ she told him, �
�but I would not be imprudent.’

  Shelley, in receipt of Mary’s response, gave it to Byron who, after studying its contents, seems to have felt no need to pass it on to the Hoppners. He had already given them the impression that he shared their faith in the details Elise had provided. Curiosity, rather than a wish to salvage damaged reputations, had led him to discuss their allegations with Shelley. The letter which had cost Mary such pains to write was thrust into a pile of other correspondence, and dismissed from his mind.

  *

  Two clear benefits came to Mary from Shelley’s ten-day visit to Ravenna. The first was the news that Byron had agreed to enter a scheme with Shelley and Leigh Hunt to start a new journal, the Liberal All that was required now was for the Hunts to pack their belongings and sail for Italy where, they learned, they would be lodged at the grand home in Pisa which Shelley was going to find and rent in anticipation of Byron’s arrival. Mary, who remained devoted to the Hunt family, was delighted by the prospect of their company. Byron reached Pisa at the beginning of November; it took another eight months before the Hunts, delayed by ill health and bad weather, finally arrived at Genoa.

  The second benefit also related to Byron’s decision to come to Pisa. His presence, Mary supposed, would guarantee the absence of her stepsister. Claire’s feelings of outrage about Allegra’s banishment to the convent of Bagnacavallo had not altered by the end of August. It would, Mary was confident, be impossible for her to contemplate living in the same city as Allegra’s father, particularly when he had his pretty young mistress in tow. Mary was right; the only thing she had not counted on was that Byron would take another two months to make up his mind to come. In the interim, since Teresa travelled to Pisa ahead of him, Mary faced the interesting task of juggling her life between Byron’s past and present mistresses.

  Notes

  1. This description is based on Mario Curreli’s account of Pisa in Una certa Signora Mason (1997) and Lady Blessington’s The Idler in Italy, 2 (1839 edition), pp. 483–505.

  2. MWS‚ Valperga, 2, x (ed. Stuart Curran, Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 280.

  3. Ibid., 3, iv, p. 348.

  4. MWS–CC, 14–15.1.1821.

  5. MWS–CC, 21.1.1821.

  6. Jules Blancard, Etudes sur la Grèce contemporaitie (Montpellier, 1886), p. 331. See also Marion Kingston Stockings extract from J. Millingen, Memoirs of the Affairs of Greece (1831), in CCJ, pp. 473–6.

  7. PBS–CC, 8.6.1821.

  8. MWS, ‘The Bride of Modern Italy’ (1821), CTS, p. 33.

  9. Epipsychidion was first published in 1822 with a revised introductory note by Shelley explaining that the (deceased) author’s poem did not require ‘a matter-of-fact history of the circumstances’ to be understood by ‘a certain class of readers’, to whom it was directed. It is unusual in not carrying any commentary by Mary in her 1839 edition.

  10. I have quoted from the letters in Newman Ivey White’s Shelley, 2 vols. (Secker & Warburg, 1947). The Italian originals can be read in Enrica Viviani della Robbia, Vita di una donna (Florence, 1936).

  11. MWS–MG, 7.3.1822.

  12. MG–MWS, 9.2.1822 (Shelley’s Friends, p. 77).

  13. John St Aubyn–MWS, 10.6.1826 (Abinger, Dep. c. 516).

  14. Henry Reveley’s account of the accident on 16 April 1821 is in S&M, 3, pp. 605–6.

  15. MWS–MG, 30.6.1821.

  16. PBS–Charles Ollier, 21.7.1821.

  17. In 1824, Mary dated the untitled poem to 1814, thus implying an address to Harriet; by 1839, she had set the date as 1821. Emily Sunstein, in R&R, p. 437, notes that Mary’s correction would have been made after she considered the fact that the earliest poem in this notebook dated from 1816. It seems improbable that Mary read the poem in Shelley’s lifetime.

  18. MWS–Isabelle Hoppner, 10.8.1821.

  * Mary’s own feelings about the Ghibellines and the Guelphs are made clear in the first chapter of Valperga. ‘The Ghibelines and the Bianchi were the friends of the emperor, asserting the supremacy and universality of his sway over all other dominion, ecclesiastical or civil; the Guelphs and the Neri were the partizans of liberty.’ Mary, in a year (1821) when the emperors of Russia and Austria joined forces to suppress any changes of government due to revolution and when King Ferdinand of Naples was compelled to ‘invite’ Austrian troops to invade his territory and crush the carbonari rebels, had little sympathy for imperial rulers. ‘We are also highly interested in the result of the Austrian counsels against Naples,’ she had told Mrs Gisborne, with whom she maintained a cool correspondence on practical matters, on 13 December 1820. The Shelleys were evidently keeping close watch on events.

  † The poet as improviser also became something of a cult in England at this time; Thomas Lovell Beddoes’s ‘The Improvisatore’ was the eponymous poem of his popular collection of 1821.

  ‡ Beatrice is also called the ‘Ancilla Dei’, a name which suggests that Mary drew on Suora Ancilla, or Sister Betsy, a young woman who made several visits to the Shelleys in 1820–1. An English girl, who went out from the Godwins to stay with Margaret Mason in Pisa, she became a nun and a nurse at the hospital of Santa Chiara. Claire also referred to her as Elizabeth Parker or ‘Betsy’ Parker in her later correspondence.

  § There is no doubt that Mary saw the poem; in letters which she wrote in 1822–3, following Shelley’s death, she quoted phrases from it, and in particular the hurtful allusions to herself as ‘cold moonshine’.

  ¶ When the Cornish baronet, Sir John St Aubyn, who had entertained Medwin, Trelawny and the Williamses at Geneva, confided in Mary Shelley about his love-life on 10 June 1826, he begged her to be discreet with Jane. ‘There are subjects I entertain few people with,’ he told her, ‘and whatever regard I may have for Mrs Williams, she is not of the number I should choose.’ Edward Trelawny also had strong reservations about Jane’s trustworthiness from early on.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  DON JUAN AMONG THE LADIES

  1821–1822

  ‘I begin to long for the sparkling waves the olive covered hills & vine shaded pergolas of Spezia … if April prove fine we shall fly with the swallows.’

  Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, 9 February 1822

  MARY WAS PERHAPS FEELING A LITTLE GUILTY BY THE SUMMER OF 1821 about the readiness with which she and Shelley had accepted Byron’s decision to place Allegra in a secluded country convent at the tender age of four. She had no wish to share her home with Claire again for any length of time, but a period of gentler relations between the stepsisters followed the letter of 10 August to Mrs Hoppner. There, Mary had defended Claire’s reputation as much as her own, and she had done so with warmth. Claire knew nothing of the charge or of Mary’s response; she did know that she had regained their sympathy on the subject of Allegra’s banishment to Bagnacavallo.

  On 8 September, Mary, Shelley and Claire travelled together up the coast to La Spezia in search of a house by the sea for the following summer. Shortly before or during this three-day excursion, the Shelleys told Claire that they were doing all they could to reunite her with her daughter. On 15 August, shortly after his return from Ravenna, Shelley had written to ask Byron if the little girl could not be lodged with friends at Pisa, perhaps with Mrs Mason, who had two young girls of her own. At Margaret Mason’s house, Claire would be able to see as much of Allegra as she wished without the risk of meeting Byron.

  Shelley’s attempts were unsuccessful. ‘Allegra is not coming,’ Claire sadly noted in her journal on 3 October; she was forced to comfort herself with Shelley’s assurances that the little girl had seemed in excellent spirits when he visited her on his way to Ravenna in August. The nuns were devoted to her. Pretty and lively, Allegra’s main concern had been whether ‘mamma’ was going to send her a dress of gold silk.1 There was no need for Claire to be told that ‘mamma’ was not herself, but Byron’s pretty young mistress. It was Teresa who had persuaded Byron to place Allegra at the convent, just as Emilia Viviani’s pretty young stepmother had ba
nished her husband’s daughter to a boarding-school. This – a hateful custom in the eyes of English visitors – was the way of things in old-fashioned Roman Catholic Italy. A convent education went a long way towards removing the stigma of illegitimacy; in time, Teresa argued, Allegra might make a good Catholic marriage. The more distance placed between her and the unconventional ménage of Mr Shelley, the better would be her chance of a respectable future. Byron, after reading the Hoppners’ reports, had not needed much persuading. If a convent could turn his strong-willed child into a young lady with half his Teresa’s charm, he would feel well satisfied.

  Little Percy, fondly described by Mary as ‘a fine boy – full of life, & very pretty’,2 offered Claire some outlet for her thwarted maternal feelings; this, too, helped to soften Mary’s attitude to her. Claire won more good marks for helping find furniture, both for their own new lodgings in Pisa and for the rooms which the Hunts, when they reached Italy, were to occupy in the palazzo Shelley had found for Byron on the Lung’Arno. Claire’s reward came two days after the disappointment about Allegra; Shelley arrived at her lodgings in Livorno with an invitation to rejoin them at the Bagni di San Giuliano for the rest of October. He stayed on alone with Claire for three days or so, trusting that Mary’s new amiability towards her stepsister would not be affected. Liberal though Shelley may have been in his views, he was not so modern or so generous as to give Mary an equal say when her wishes conflicted with his own. He wished Claire to be with them; his wife’s feelings were of no concern.

  Joyfully accepted by Claire, the new arrangement required considerable dexterity on the part of the Shelleys. Teresa Guiccioli, together with her father and brother, had arrived at Pisa in late August. Mary made a point of calling on this plump, golden-ringletted little lady as soon as she arrived and of offering her friendship. Throughout September, she had been seeing Teresa, affectionately described to Mrs Gisborne as ‘a nice pretty girl, without pretensions, good-hearted and amiable’, almost every day.3 Teresa, growing increasingly nervous that her lover might change his mind about following her, was in need of reassurance; an introduction to Claire would cause nothing but damage.