Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Edward Trelawny was convinced in later life that Mary had been an unfeeling wife to Shelley: why? Part of the answer lies in the fact that Trelawny was, during this time in Pisa, often living with the Williamses. Edward was his closest friend; Edward was also the chosen confidant of Shelley at a time when Shelley was making dissatisfied comparisons between his own marriage and the easy, tender relationship which existed between Edward and Jane. The week after Trelawny’s arrival at Pisa, Shelley sent Williams a letter and a poem, allegedly by another author, which he urged Edward to show to Jane ‘– and yet on second thought I had rather you would not’, he added, unconvincingly.14

  The poem began with the ominous declaration that ‘The Serpent is shut out from Paradise’. This was easy enough to interpret: Shelley was nicknamed ‘the snake’ for his bright eyes and rapid, soundless movements; ‘Paradise’ was evidently the happiness he saw represented by his friends’ domestic bliss. In the fourth and final stanza, he compared this comforting friendship to the ‘cold home’ to which he must return. Nobody reading it could doubt that Shelley was unhappy. The verses were ‘beautiful but too melancholy’, Williams noted on 26 January, but he did not question the sad picture they presented. He had already made a note that Shelley suffered from lack of wifely encouragement and required ‘gentle leading’.15 The poem only confirmed what the Williamses already suspected, that Mary did not support her husband as much as she should. It is probable that they shared their views with Trelawny, their housemate and friend. It is unlikely that any of them troubled to ask Mary for her side of the story. Shelley chose to present himself as the victim; increasingly, his frail health and mournful, needy letters combined in the minds of his friends to form the image of a martyr, bound to a cross-patch of a wife.

  A slight chill estranged the two households of poets on 15 February. Mary noted that Byron’s mother-in-law, Lady Noel, was dead. Williams, learning that Byron was going to benefit from this bereavement to the tune of £10,000 a year, added a memo to himself: ‘See X’mas Day.’ On 25 December, Shelley and Byron had promised that whichever of them inherited his fortune first would pay the other £1,000. But Byron, knowing that it would be several months before he received anything and with Shelley already heavily in his debt for the Hunts’ travelling costs, decided to treat the wager as a joke. Whatever money he had to spare that winter was intended for the Bolivar, the boat he had ordered as a rival to Shelley’s.

  Any irritation the Shelleys may have felt about Byron’s reluctance to keep the terms of their agreement was eclipsed by a new storm blowing towards them from Florence; here Claire and Elise Foggi had met each other on 7 February at the home of a Russian family, the Boutourlins. Elise had called on Claire three days later: a cancelled entry in Claire’s journal for 10 February clearly contains the words ‘Naples and me’. Elise, evidently, had confessed the gossip which she had spread to the Hoppners. Neither Elise nor Claire knew that the story had already reached the Shelleys through Byron. Claire recorded a week of ‘wretched spirits’ in her journal, during which she wrote to and received an answer from Shelley. Claire fiercely obliterated the entry which revealed her reaction to his response; all we know is that she was in a state of violent agitation. Two days later, on 18 February, she wrote to Mary, to Mrs Mason, to Byron and to Charles Clairmont. She was, she announced, going to leave Italy at once and for ever.

  Always impulsive, Claire could usually be coaxed into a calmer mood by the rational arguments of Mary and Mrs Mason, for whom she had a great respect; a servant was hurriedly sent to bring her from Florence to Pisa, where one or both of the ladies could try to reason with her. Mary spent the morning of 22 February describing her own distress at Elise’s gossip and suggesting the best way to deal with it. It was good that Elise had appeared. Claire had always been close to her; she, if anybody, could exert some influence, force Elise to retract her hideous accusations. The notion of going off to another country was absurd; how could Claire think of such a thing when Mrs Mason and Shelley had been put to such trouble and expense – Margaret Mason had provided the introductions, Shelley the financial support – to give her a new life in Florence?

  The counselling sessions, which probably followed some such lines, were effective; Claire returned meekly to Florence on 25 February. All Mary knew of the sequel was that Elise Foggi had finally – on 18 April – produced two letters denying her role as a spreader of scandal. One went to Mary, the other to Mrs Hoppner.16 She did not know that Claire had, on 12 March, made a note in her journal that she had given ‘the Naples commission’ to Elise’s husband. This entry was vigorously cancelled in the new ink with which Claire began the next day’s entry.17 Its precise significance is still impossible to guess.

  Even without knowledge of the mysterious Naples commissions, Mary must often have felt bound to a wheel of fire by her stepsister’s demands and dramas. The business with Elise was still being settled when Claire, towards the end of March, announced that she could bear the separation from her daughter no longer. ‘17 March: Copy – walk with Jane – write to Claire – dine at the W’s. Very weary,’ Mary wrote. Her letter had no effect. On 21 March, Claire fired off a new idea. Allegra must be abducted from Bagnacavallo and the Shelleys must help her. Not even Shelley was up to this romantic plan; Mary tartly pointed out that, even if Claire managed to escape abroad with her daughter, somebody would have to answer for the consequences – and that somebody was likely to be Shelley. Byron might even challenge him to a duel: ‘I need not enter upon that topic,’ she added darkly, ‘your own imagination may fill up the picture.’18 Shelley, while seconding Mary’s prudent advice, had other things to say. Claire was urged to write to him on ‘another subject respecting which, however, all is as you already know’.19 Her letters were to be directed not to Hodgson – a name which they had evidently used before in secret correspondence – but to Joe James and sent, not to the Tre Palazzi, but to the Post Office.20 This secret subject had, we must suppose, something to do with their private relationship and, perhaps, with the mysterious commission which Claire had recently given to Paolo Foggi.

  Writing on 20 March to warn Claire not to try to abduct Allegra, Mary was reduced to frightening her with superstitious warnings of the kind to which they were both susceptible. Spring had always been a time of bad luck for them both, she wrote, beginning with their dreadful weeks at Marchmont Buildings in 1815, just before Claire left for Lynmouth, and ending with the awkwardness of the Emilia Viviani affair of spring 1821. She could have gone on, but did not. The spring of 1822 was now being marked by the ascendancy of Jane Williams. In April, having failed to obtain a harp, Shelley gave his new muse a beautifully inlaid guitar in a close-fitting box.21† The poem accompanying the gift took The Tempest for its theme; Edward and Jane were invited to see themselves as Ferdinand and Miranda, while Shelley presided over them as Ariel, their magical guardian, locked inside the instrument until Jane should choose to release him with song. It was possibly in response to this offering that Williams sent a jovial invitation to a duel: ‘I feel that I must parade you at 10 paces if you go on thus – If you will call yourself or send your second we will point out the ground.’22

  It was, in a sense, all a game; Williams was not excluded and was, indeed, rather flattered to see his dim but beautiful wife so admired. The victim of the game was Mary. Shelley could pretend that he was imprisoned in the hollow body of an instrument, ready to vibrate with song at a sympathetic touch. Mary, too proud to acknowledge such an ordinary woman as her rival and too apprehensive to press Shelley about the current nature of his feelings for Claire, was the real prisoner, trapped by her impossible, games-playing husband into the role of ice-queen. Given the way Shelley was flirting with Jane and conspiring with Claire, it is hard to imagine how Mary Shelley was expected to play the role of a loving wife.

  She was heavy with foreboding and sadness as she felt, perhaps even saw, Shelley slipping away from her: ‘a hateful day,’ she noted on 31 March, the approximate
date of discovering that she was pregnant. A little over a year later, she confessed to Jane Williams that she had never expected a ‘natural conclusion [to her pregnancy] – I wished it – I tried to figure it to myself but all in vain’.23

  Edward Williams’s journal, prosaic and self-satisfied, is a revealing document. On 8 March, he solemnly recorded his shock when Byron interrupted Shelley’s declamation of a stanza of Childe Harold to ask what ‘infinite nonsense’ he was repeating. Not to know his own poem! And to decry it! Williams lacked a sense of humour; it never occurred to him that Byron was joking. With the same pompous gravity, Williams recorded on 15 March that he had read the first act of his new play – he was very proud of it – to Mary and that she had suggested various ‘alterations’. The word seemed somehow to suggest that she had improved on his work; chewing on his pen, Williams added, ‘alterations which I consider as amendments’. He could not quite bring himself to acknowledge that Mary had a superior mind to his own.

  This habit of misinterpretation showed up again on the dramatic evening of 24 March. The Williamses were waiting in the Shelleys’ flat to dine with them when Trelawny burst in with news of an ugly incident with an Italian soldier, a dragoon, on the way back from their usual sport of shooting at half-crowns in the Cisanello orchard. Shelley had been knocked off his horse, another man had been wounded and one of Byron’s servants had stabbed the dragoon in the stomach with a pitchfork. The soldier, now being tended by Vaccà in the hospital, was expected to die. ‘Trelawny had finished his story,’ Williams went on,

  when Lord B. came in – the Countess fainting on his arm – S[helley] sick from the blow – Lord B. and the young count [Gamba] foaming with rage – Mrs S[helley] looking philosophically upon this interesting scene – and Jane and I wondering what the devil was to come next –24

  Here, as clearly as anywhere, we see the view the Williamses had of Mary. Unstirred by her husband’s injuries, she stood there calmly, observing; would Jane, would any loving wife, have been so detached, so cold? It is completely at odds with the account given in Mary’s letter to Mrs Gisborne of 6–10 April. From Mary, not Williams, we learn that she had been present at the incident: ‘It happened that I, and the Countess Guiccioli were in a carriage close behind, and saw it all, and you may guess how frightened we were,’ she wrote. They had not gone to the Williamses’ home, but to the Palazzo Lanfranchi, where Teresa had become hysterical with alarm. Edward Williams used his journal to write himself and his wife into the centre of a drama which had scarcely impinged on his evening at the Tre Palazzi. Mary, far from being the cold observer presented by him, had been an active participant, and remained so.

  The following day, when the uproar over the wounded man was so great that Trelawny was afraid to leave his rooms, Mary went alone to the hospital on the other side of town. ‘Go to the hospital – a day of bustle & nothings,’ she wrote with her usual restraint. What she had actually discovered was that Masi, the young dragoon, was expected to die of his wounds. Dr Vaccà made it clear that the English friends of Lord Byron were no longer welcome in a city where blood had been spilt.

  Against expectation, Masi survived. Byron, with a clearer sense than the rest of the group of Mary’s coolness in a crisis, gave her the long job of copying out the various statements which were taken. Matching his apparent nonchalance with her own, Mary carried out the commission while letting it be known that she would prefer the job of copying poems. ‘Excuse this annoyance from womankind  allow me to hope that it will not be long before you employ me on my usual interesting task. Is there any hope of our ever getting a copy of the Vision of Judgement?’25 Byron, already grateful for Mary’s conscientious friendliness to his young mistress, must have been amused by such clearly stated priorities.

  *

  Hearing of the difficulty of obtaining houses near La Spezia, Byron decided to give up his plan for spending the rest of the summer there with his Pisan cronies; instead, he announced his intention of taking a house near Livorno. This opened the way for Claire to rejoin the Shelleys. Full of strange forebodings about Allegra’s health, she arrived in Pisa on 15 April and was smuggled into Mrs Mason’s house, out of sight of the Lanfranchi palace where Byron was still in residence. On 23 April, Claire left with the Williamses to make a further search for suitable homes near La Spezia. ‘Evil news,’ Mary wrote in her journal that evening. Claire’s unease had been prophetic; Allegra was dead of typhus.

  For once, Shelley and Mary were in absolute agreement. All that mattered now was to get Claire away from Byron, whom she would – and did – hold responsible for callously abandoning a five-year-old child and allowing her to die. On 26 April, after confiding the dreadful news to the Williamses, Mary and Trelawny took Claire back to La Spezia. Only one house was now available, a lonely building beside the sea which they had previously contemplated and rejected. Trelawny left them on 28 April, travelling north to join his friend Daniel Roberts in Genoa and supervise work on the boats. ‘Heard from Mary at Sarzana that she had concluded for Casa Magni,’ Edward Williams noted the following day, ‘– but for ourselves no hope.’

  A separation at this tense stage of their lives was unthinkable. On 1 May, the Williamses, Claire and the Shelleys crowded into the four habitable rooms of the house on the beach which Mary had reluctantly decided to take. After a day’s unpacking and sorting, they spent the evening ‘talking over our folly and our troubles’.26 Beyond the shuttered windows, a raging sea beat in on a rocky shore.

  Notes

  1. PBS–MWS, 15.8.1821.

  2. MWS–MG, 6–10.5.1822.

  3. MWS–MG, 30.11.1821.

  4. CC–MWS, 31.10.1821.

  5. The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, ed. Roger Ingpen (Dutton, 1903), P. 289.

  6. E.J. Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron and the Author (1878; Penguin Books, 1973), ch. 2, p. 63.

  7. Ibid., pp. 64–5.

  8. MWSJ, 19.1.1822.

  9. Trelawny, Records, ch. 3, p. 68.

  10. Mary went to services on at least four occasions in Pisa, besides the baptism of the Williamses’ daughter.

  11. MWS–MG, 7.3.1822.

  12. MWSJ, 7.2.1822.

  13. MWS–MG, 9.2.1822.

  14. PBS–Edward Williams (hereafter EW), 26.1.1822. (Six words have been deleted.)

  15. EW, Journal, 8.1.1822 (Shelley’s Friends). The original journal is in the British Library (adds. 36622).

  16. Elise’s letters are in the Murray archive. Both are dated 12 April 1822, but Claire’s journal suggests that they were completed on 18 April.

  17. Examined with infra-red, it still proves virtually unreadable. Claire’s wish to hide her entry – the pen is certainly hers – tells us that there was something worth concealing.

  18. MWS–CC, 20.3.1822.

  19. PBS–CC, 24.3.1822.

  20. PBS–CC, 31.3.1822.

  21. The guitar was sold in 1898 by Jane’s grandson, on condition that the purchaser, E.A. Silsbee, should give it to a public institution in Great Britain. Silsbee presented it to the Bodleian Library, through Richard Garnett, in the same year. The poem is also at the Bodleian (Ms Shelley adds. e. 3, fols. 2v–3r).

  22. EW–PBS, n.d. (Bodleian, Ms Shelley adds. c. 12, fol. 24).

  23. MWS–JW, 31.5.1823.

  24. EW, Journal, 24.3.1822.

  25. MWS–Byron, 12.4.1822.

  26. EW, Journal, 1.5.1822.

  * Trelawny invented a privateering hero, de Ruyter, with whom his spectacular adventures took place. The name was probably an unconscious recollection of the story of Admiral de Ruyter, who led the Dutch fleet in a highly successful raid on the English fleet in the Medway in 1667. Trelawny could have heard the story as a schoolboy.

  † The guitar, of Pisan make, is now at the Bodleian Library, Oxford.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  AT THE VILLA MAGNI

  May–August 1822

  ‘As only one house was to be found habitable in this gulph, the W[illiamses] have taken up
their abode with us, and their servants and mine quarrel like cats and dogs … “Ma pazienza” …’

  Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, 2 June 1822

  MARY, AS MUCH AS SHELLEY HIMSELF, HAD ALWAYS LOVED BEING near water. The blue depths of Uri, the sparkling crescent at Torquay, the dazzling breadth of Lake Geneva, the lazy shaded Thames, the rushing Serchio, the yellow, beguiling Arno: she could almost have drawn a portrait of her marriage in lakes and rivers and seas. None could rival the beauty of the bay of Lerici, glittering under the noonday sun, drenched in the silver of moonlight, boiling and lashing like a nest of serpents on a day – and there were many such – of squalls. Shelley, indifferent to the discomfort of a crowded house and the grumbles from hot attics of their Tuscan servants, was ready to proclaim that this was paradise. Sailing in the bay, or listening to the nightingales which, according to one visitor, sang sweeter and louder in the woods behind Lerici than anywhere else in Italy,1 he was as free as the Ariel Jane Williams was always willing to charm out of her guitar. The weather, capriciously shifting from black skies and torrential downpours to days of blind, baking heat, reflected his own quicksilver temperament. This was Shelley’s rainbow’s end, his perfect home.

  Lerici was a little fishing town, overshadowed by an old grey fortress standing above the sea. Centuries earlier, this had been the site of a cult of Diana, goddess of the woods and the moon. Henry James caught the scent of its sinister aspect when he spent a long autumn afternoon visiting the bay in the 1870s and lingered long enough to see, with eyes quickened by the knowledge of what had happened here fifty years earlier, how intently the ‘pale faced tragic villa stared up at the brightening moon’.2 Above it, dark woods of chestnut and ilex cloaked the hills.