Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  An orderly life was her chosen defence against depression. She had a box of wooden letters sent from England and began teaching Percy to read and to speak his own tongue. Her father was asked for books with pictures of animals and for a copy of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Lessons, from which Mary had learned her own first words. Percy was not yet ‘my beloved boy’ – her lost William occupied that role – but he was ‘my dear boy’ and, when the Hunt children complained of his shouting at them in Italian, ‘poor little darling’.26 She walked down the winding hill path to the shore, she sketched the views, she studied Greek. In the mornings, she copied out Shelley’s manuscripts before turning to Byron’s unstoppable Cantos. For the Liberal, she wrote a short story, ‘A Tale of the Passions’,¶ reworked an old essay on Giovanni Villani and wrote another, much livelier piece, about Rousseau’s beloved Madame d’Houtetot. ‘I have made my first probation in writing & it has done me great good, & I get more calm,’ she recorded on 10 November. After transcribing parts of Edward Williams’s salvaged journal, she began a more ambitious project, a life of Shelley. Notional chapter headings – ‘France – Poverty – a few days of solitude & some uneasiness’ – suggest that she had serious intentions, but the few surviving pages of the project show how emotionally unfit she was for the task. She had only got as far as his schooldays when her account drifted off into an agonized acknowledgment of her own position. ‘I am one cut off in the prime of life from hope, enjoyment & prosperity … the rock on which I built my hopes has crumbled away,’ she wrote on the last page.27

  Godwin strongly supported his daughter’s wish to make her living as an author. Writing to her in November 1822, when she was plotting a drama to be set in medieval Italy, he urged her to consider the increasingly fashionable field of travel-writing. Lady Morgan’s strong views on politics had not stood between her and success; Mary, too, might make her name in this field. Independence was not a hopeless dream. ‘Your talents are truly extraordinary,’ he told her. ‘Frankenstein is universally known … and respected.

  It is the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of. You are now five and twenty. And, most fortunately, you have pursued a course of reading, and cultivated your mind in a manner the most admirably adapted to make you a great and successful author. If you cannot be independent, who should be?28

  Godwin had not neglected the life of Castruccio which Mary had sent him at the beginning of 1822. He had renamed it Valperga, probably to distinguish the book from Machiavelli’s well-known study of Castruccio. The female characters, especially Beatrice, ‘the jewel of the book’, struck him as admirable. The novel’s main problem lay in its length: ‘it appears, in reading, that the first rule you prescribed yourself was, I will let it be long,’ he scolded his daughter. ‘It contains the quantity of four volumes of “Waverley”.’29 The long battle accounts were reduced or banished to bring it down to an acceptable three–volume length. An edition of 1,250 copies was published by the firm of Whittakers early in 1823. By May, Godwin could congratulate his daughter on having sold almost half the impression: ‘You have realized talents which I but faintly and doubtfully anticipated,’ he told her.30 Mary had wanted to make him a gift of the profits; she did not take up a kind suggestion from her stepmother to Mrs Mason that the advance should be restored to her ‘if ever you are in want of it’.31

  The reviews were friendly, although none of the critics thought the new novel a worthy successor to Frankenstein. To Mary’s disappointment, they declined to be horrified by Beatrice’s blasphemy. ‘I am surprised that none of these Literary Gazettes are shocked,’ she told Mrs Gisborne.32 Analogies between Castruccio and Bonaparte, which struck them as banal, and which Mary reportedly denied having intended to suggest, attracted more comment than the power to foresee which Mary felt was such a remarkable force in all her work. ‘Is not the catastrophe [of Euthanasia’s death at sea] strangely prophetic?’ she asked Mrs Gisborne. ‘But it seems to me that in what I have hitherto written I have done nothing but prophecy what has arrived to. Matilda fortells even many small circumstances most truly …’33 She was very proud of her clairvoyance: ‘And what art thou? I know, but dare not speak,’ Shelley had asked in his introduction to The Revolt of Islam, addressed to her. He had, she sincerely believed, paid homage there to her prophetic gift. Every one of her presentiments had been followed by a tragedy. Nobody ever pointed out to Mary that, dreading everything, she was likely on occasion to be proved right.

  By August 1823, when most of the reviews of Valperga had appeared, Mary was ready to pretend that she had no great opinion of the novel. It was, she told Hunt, ‘merely a book of promise, another landing place on the staircase I am climbing’, but it annoyed her that the Hunt brothers had given it only a few lines in the Examiner.34 Publicly, she was insouciant; privately, she was irked. Sixteen years later, she urged Richard Bentley to add the book to his popular standard series, with a preface written by herself. It deserved ‘fair play; never being properly published’, she wrote.35 Perhaps Charles Ollier, through whom she sent this request, failed to pass it on; more probably, Bentley, a shrewd businessman, smelt a poor seller and decided to resist. Valperga remained out of print until the 1990s.

  *

  Comforting relics were assembled and sent out to Genoa by Thomas Love Peacock: a ring which had belonged to her mother, a little diamond cross which Shelley had once given her, various books, manuscripts and the writing-desk containing her own letters. But, in the unfortunate absence of a will made by her husband, what Mary needed most was money.

  Byron, for whose name Shelley’s conventional and unliterary father felt scant respect, had already approached Sir Timothy about Mary’s financial position, anticipating only that they might need to negotiate the exact sum she should receive. The response came in February 1823. It was not friendly. Mary, Sir Timothy said, was the woman who chose to be his son’s mistress when he was already married; she had ‘in no small degree, as I suspect, estranged my son’s mind from his family, and all his first duties in life’. There could be no question of making her an allowance or of further communication on such a distressing subject.36 To his own lawyer, William Whitton, Sir Timothy conceded that his son’s death was ‘a melancholy event’ and that his second marriage was probably legal: ‘He was particular in that respect.’37 Whitton, whose daughter had married his client’s older, illegitimate son (whose existence in no way softened Sir Timothy’s condemnation of others’ transgressions), had his own family’s interests at heart; they did not include offering help to Mary Shelley or recognizing her son’s rights. With Mary and little Percy out of the picture, Whitton could hope that the Shelleys might favour his own son-in-law.38|| One sop was offered to Mary, but it was not a generous or kindly one. Sir Timothy was willing to maintain his grandson, but only on condition that Percy was removed from his mother’s care and fostered by a third party, to be chosen by the Shelleys.39

  Byron, cynically familiar with a world in which women had no rights over their children, thought this offer better than nothing; Mary was astonished that he could imagine her accepting ‘a beggarly provision under the care of a stranger’. Besides, ‘I should not live ten days separated from him [Percy],’ she wrote to Byron on 25 February She wondered why he could not see what her father understood so clearly, that by surrendering her son she was acknowledging her unsuitability to be his mother? There was also a practical aspect, as Godwin had been quick to perceive. By giving up Percy, she weakened her claim to Shelley’s heavily encumbered estate: ‘the advantage to them [the Shelley family] if the will came to be contested would be too immense –’ she told Byron. It was a cruel shock; three months earlier, she had been making arrangements to have a seal engraved with the Shelley crest. Then, she had supposed that she would be recognized by Sir Timothy as a member of their family; now, she found herself rejected, disowned.

  Seeking advice from everyone she knew, Mary found that no clear picture emerged. Byron urged h
er to leave Italy and give up her child; Mrs Gisborne and Trelawny advised her to stay in Italy; Mrs Mason and Godwin thought she should return to England, but keep charge of Percy. Hogg’s response to a long appeal for legal counsel from Mary never reached her, but Jane Williams hinted that he shared her own view: Mary should let Percy go and keep out of the country. ‘Indeed, you surprize me by saying that wise heads think that my presence might hurt my negociations with my father-in-law,’ Mary sharply responded; just how did Jane imagine Percy was going to be bestowed on the Shelleys, if his mother stayed in Italy?40

  Departure, by the time Mary wrote this letter to Jane in April, had become the only option. Byron had decided to donate the Bolivar to the Greek cause and to go out there himself, together with Pietro Gamba, ‘half mad with joy at the very idea’, and Trelawny, to whom Mary was asked to pass on an invitation to join them. ‘I cannot continue to live under Hunt’s roof,’ Mary told Jane on 10 April; she planned to leave for England immediately after the birth of Marianne’s child. Byron remained most generous in his offers, she added, and then undercut the tribute by supposing that the £2,000 bequeathed to him by Shelley for his executorship would help to keep him sweet.41 We should not take too much notice of this acid aside; Mary’s letters to Jane show that she was anxious to mask her affection for Byron. Only when writing to this correspondent did she consistently denigrate and mock him. Her prudence was well-advised.

  Mary and Jane had, so far as she knew, lived like sisters in their first weeks of widowhood. Jane should have been delighted to hear of her return to England. If so, she made a remarkably good job of hiding her feelings. ‘I am sure,’ she wrote to Mary on 27 March, ‘your return can bring nothing with it but misery to yourself & the knowledge of this will destroy the pleasure I should otherwise have in seeing you.’42 Other letters followed, in a similar vein.

  A less innocent woman than Mary might have wondered at the intensity of Jane Williams’s campaign to keep her away from England, but Mary, as Claire tartly reminded her a quarter of a century later, was uncommonly good at not looking closely at things which might wound her.43 The truth of the situation seems to have been that Jane’s connection to Shelley, combined with the tragic circumstance of her ‘widowhood’, had given her an importance she had never previously enjoyed. Hogg, always fascinated by the women Shelley loved, heard enough of his friend’s feelings for Jane – and from whom but Jane herself could he have learned them? – to be drawn into a new pursuit. He may not have encouraged Jane’s storytelling – one letter, written in 1824, suggests that he was shocked by her relish for deception44 – but he did not stop her. Unchecked, she recounted the stories of Shelley’s unhappiness, his envy of her own marriage, his despair at being married to such a cold and unsympathetic wife. By August 1823 Hogg had been persuaded that Mary’s sense of bereavement was only ‘imaginary’.45

  Hunt, at least, now knew that Jane was an unkind, untrustworthy witness. Throughout the winter of 1822, he was haunted by a brief visit he had paid in October to the deserted Villa Magni, and to ‘those melancholy rooms’ to which Shelley had been returning when he drowned.46 Mrs Williams’s stories of Shelley’s unhappy marriage had been persuasively told; Mary’s occasional outbursts added credibility to Jane’s account. At some point in June 1823, however, Mary and Hunt had a long discussion during which he and she both spoke their minds and became reconciled. ‘You know somewhat of what I suffered during the winter during his alienation from me,’ Mary wrote to Jane, not knowing what coals of fire she was heaping on her friend’s head; ‘he was displeased with me for many just reasons, but he found me willing to expiate as far as I cd the evil I had done, so his heart was again warmed.’47 Here, Mary was too harsh on herself; Hunt sent a stinging rebuke to Jane Williams. Writing to his friend Vincent Novello, he urged him to be kind to Mary when she reached London, and to ignore her deceptive air of reserve. He had by now come nearer to understanding the apparent contradiction in Mary’s nature, the cool exterior concealing strong emotions:

  She is a torrent of fire under a Hecla snow; but I believe, as Mr Trelawny a friend of his [Shelley’s] tells me he believed, even when most uneasy with her, that she had excuses of suffering little known to anybody but herself; these ought now to be more readily granted her on account of the touching remorse she confesses for ever having treated him with unkindness.48

  Even here, it is plain that Mary, under whatever duress, remained discreet. Trelawny and Hunt could only guess at what these ‘excuses of suffering’ had been. They might have been caused by her own ill health or her worries about her family; they might have related to the Naples baby, to Shelley’s feelings for Claire, Jane Williams and Emilia Viviani, or to the loss of her three children. She provided no details, but both Trelawny and Hunt now knew that she had been given real cause for unhappiness.

  *

  Mary’s last weeks at Albaro were clouded by what she later described as Byron’s ‘unconquerable avarice’.49 He had, the day after Marianne Hunt’s safe delivery of a child on 9 June, promised to arrange and pay for Mary and her son to travel in comfort to England. Hunt, to whom Mary now turned for advice, was largely responsible for disrupting this arrangement.

  On 28 June, Hunt reminded Byron of his promise. Such unwillingness was apparent on his side, or so Hunt told Mary, that Hunt decided to mention the thousand pounds still owing from the wager with Shelley on their respective inheritances. Byron, put in the wrong, took umbrage. Instead of paying the wager, he promptly resigned his claim on Shelley’s estate to twice that sum for his duties as executor. He did, however, continue to insist that he would pay Mary’s travel costs. Mary felt obliged to refuse his offer after being shown various notes and letters Hunt had received from Byron. These, she told Jane Williams on 2 July, were ‘so full of contempt against me and my lost Shelley that I could stand it no longer’.

  Hurt may have caused Mary to exaggerate Byron’s contempt; he remained baffled by her sudden hostility. Anxious to do well by her, he made a tactful arrangement for Hunt to collect the necessary sum from his banker in Genoa and tell whatever story he liked to save Mary’s pride. Hunt took the money and, shockingly, kept it. John Cam Hobhouse, visiting Genoa in 1828, was shown the signed receipt.50 Mary remained convinced that Byron had broken his promise. He did not, after all, care even enough to help her to travel in comfort. She never knew that Hunt had been given money for this purpose.

  It is a sad little story, made more so by evidence of Mary’s own efforts to bridge the gulf opened by Hunt between herself and Byron. ‘Di bueno! I don’t know what to say to you, my dear, for I can’t do anything,’ Teresa wrote in response to the first of several appeals for help.51 Distraught herself at the prospect of Byron’s imminent departure, Teresa had little time for Mary’s wounded feelings. She did pass on Mary’s anxious request that Byron should forget whatever pain she had caused him. Sharp words had clearly been spoken. On 10 July, Teresa reported that Byron sent her greetings and wanted Mary to know that ‘he had no feeling of enmity’.52

  Trelawny, Teresa’s brother and Byron embarked for Greece on 13 July, together with Byron’s horses, dogs, doctor and enough medicine to cure the ailments of a battalion. (Storms kept them anchored in port for a further five days.) One of Byron’s last actions was to ask Mary if she would visit the Casa Saluzzo directly after his departure and comfort his heartbroken mistress. This is not a request that a man with a bad conscience would have found easy to make. Byron believed he had behaved decently. Hunt had been provided with funds for his family’s move to Florence and for Mary’s journey to England. It was not until they were at sea that Trelawny, by his own account, revealed that he, not Byron, had paid Mary’s fare. Byron insisted on repaying the sum and then, so Trelawny said, forgot the debt.53

  Trelawny’s version, as so often, was a half–truth. Mary had borrowed a little money from him; the deficiency had been supplied by Mrs Mason, who loaned it but asked for repayment ‘should you ever grow rich’.54 Perhaps she
was easing her conscience; Margaret Mason had never disguised the fact that she preferred Claire to Mary, an injustice which had been fuelled by Mrs Godwin’s spitefully inaccurate accounts of Mary’s behaviour in the summer of 1814. Mary left Albaro on 25 July, burning with indignation at Byron’s apparent meanness, and singing the praises of Trelawny’s ‘unalterable goodness’. The only kind thing she could find to say of Byron now was that he had kept her at Genoa long enough to restore her friendship with Hunt, ‘one whom I am sure can never change – ’55

  Travelling without an escort, Mary was determined to make her way across France as quickly as possible, ‘alone with my child’, she reminded Jane Williams on 30 July. Perhaps her thoughts were of her mother’s trip to Norway and Sweden with little Fanny at much the same age. Percy, now almost four, was a cheerful traveller: ‘he has been very good & is no trouble to me at all,’ Mary told the Hunts on the same day. Once, when she had to rebuke him for ‘self-will’, she was amused to be complimented by an impressed father of six: ‘“Madame – vous avez du caractere.”’56 The scenery and passers-by provided her with rich material for the lively, tender letters she sent the Hunts from every halt, filling them with affectionate messages to the unruly tribe of children who were now on their way to new lodgings in Florence. (‘How is Thorny’s temper, Johnny’s verses – Mary’s “Deuce takeits” – Swinburne’s quiet looks … Percy’s martyrdom – Henry’s “Magnificent eyes” – & little Vincent’s gentle smiles … Percy wants to send Sylvan a play thing …’57)