Jane, rallying from Trelawny’s treacherous assault, spent the 1880s in a whirl of Shelleyan activity. Her main task was to edit the Boscombe collection of letters into four volumes, privately published as Shelley and Mary in 1882. Many letters were committed to the flames at this time; alterations took place wherever Lady Shelley found something that displeased her. Amelia Curran was turned into the author of a letter written by Claire about nursing little William Shelley in his last days; Shelley’s mention of the fact that Mrs Hoppner had accused him of urging Claire to take ‘violent medicines’ to terminate her supposed pregnancy in Naples was omitted. Linking passages threw blame, wherever it might be supposed to fall on Mary’s coldness, on to Jane Hogg. This was all of a piece with Lady Shelley’s willingness, at Garnett’s suggestion, to remove anything from public view which reflected badly on the Shelleys’ marriage. One letter from Shelley to the Gisbornes, in which he described his marriage as hell, went missing; another, from Hogg to Jane Williams about Mary’s failings as a wife, was destroyed. The strength of Jane’s obsession shows up most clearly in the fact that, threatened with libel by Harriet’s grandson if she made any more slanderous allegations, she found a way out by writing her own view of Harriet’s character and behaviour in a long note placed in the flyleaf of every copy of Shelley and Mary which was sent out from Boscombe. It is not easy to reconcile this unforgiving old lady with the ‘out and out stunner of a delightful woman’ by whom the artist Edward Lear was so entranced when one of the Shelleys’ yachting trips brought them to Corfu and, briefly, into his life.32
Jane was ready, at last, for the lives of Shelley and Mary to be presented to the world. The official biographers were carefully picked and were given the heavily edited correspondence presented in Shelley and Mary for their source-work. The Dublin scholar Edward Dowden, selected for Shelley – his own great love was Wordsworth – fought hard to paint an honest picture. Sweetening Jane with assurances that he saw Mary as ‘the best influence, for man & poet, of all his life’,33 he was willing to paint Harriet black as a coal-scuttle, but only with the documents to substantiate the claim. It would, he smoothly assured her, be indeed ‘a great point’ to vindicate Mary, but he could not do it without proof.34 The arrival in Dowden’s hands of the miserable, bewildered letters Harriet had written to Miss Nugent in 1814–15 was not good news for the Shelleys; neither was Garnett’s reminder to them that Dowden ‘is not writing as an advocate, as I did in the Relics, but as an historian …’35 Dowden did not take kindly to suggestions that his new findings might be reshaped or suppressed by the Boscombe censors; his readiness to ‘arrange’ the light in which Shelley’s passionate letters to Claire should be presented was small comfort.36
Dowden’s first pleas to be shown more than a handful of the Boscombe letters had been refused. In the autumn of 1885, with his research almost finished, he was finally granted a peep at the riches tucked away there during a one-night visit to the Shelleys’ home. He was shocked to discover how many of the texts he had been given to work from were mutilated or inaccurately transcribed; a fascinating record of his reactions exists in the form of his own annotated Shelley and Mary, passed via Richard Garnett to the British Museum. Purchasing the right to see the letters which Mr Buxton Forman had bought from Claire before her death in 1881, Dowden had another shock. The Shelleys had disguised her birthdate, encouraging him to see Claire as a mature woman capable of exerting a powerful influence on an impressionable girl, and old enough to have known just what she was doing in her flirtation with Shelley. Now, for the first time, he realized that Claire had been the youngest of the three.37
Given the trying circumstances in which Dowden worked, his book was impressively truthful and informative. Tact was maintained, however; members of the newly formed Shelley Society (this was an age besotted with Keats, Browning, Tennyson and Shelley, all of whom had their own societies) could read his book without anguish. The Esdailes pronounced themselves content (Claire’s recollection that Harriet’s last relationship had been with a respectable army officer was incorporated); Garnett praised the biographer’s self-restraint.
Dowden’s book was published in 1886 and was modestly successful: two thousand copies sold during the first two years. In 1889, thus offering no competition, Florence Marshall’s life of Mary appeared.†† The musical and conscientious daughter of a clergyman, Florence Marshall had come with high recommendations, probably from Garnett or the Shelleys’ literary neighbour at Boscombe, Sir Henry Taylor. Lady Shelley had been a little cowed by Dowden’s academic qualifications; she felt confident of controlling a timid lady biographer. Woman to woman, she advised Florence on how best to approach her subject. She must be wary of Harriet (‘worldly & frivolous, hard to her husband’) and sympathetic to Mary (‘truthful, modest & unselfish’).38 It was not expected that she should look too deeply into anything that might prove unpleasant. Lady Shelley helped her along by destroying the letters written by Mary’s mother to Fuseli, which she had acquired in 1884.
Florence Marshall was content to be led. Mary, as wife and widow, was painted in just the colours Lady Shelley could have wished, muted, respectful. Trelawny and Hogg were rebuked for having published inaccurate accounts of her (interestingly, Mrs Marshall considered Hogg’s ‘ironical’ eulogies of Mary’s talents more shocking than Trelawny’s hostile comments). No mention was made of the recently discovered letters from Mary to Claire about Gatteschi. Mary was defended for not having written Shelley’s life (her own part in it had been too large, too influential, Mrs Marshall explained, for objectivity) and lauded as a devoted mother. Almost the only criticism Mrs Marshall was prepared to make concerned her subject’s writings; she admired Frankenstein, and that was all. As a way out, she offered the novel idea that Mary’s literary genius had been arrested by her attachment to Shelley; the comet had become an unadventurous satellite.
Jane Shelley did not object to Marshall’s approach; moral reputation was of more importance than literary status, after all. Just as in Shelley’s case, she was happy to see the fiery, more dangerous side of his nature overshadowed by examples of his gentleness and by emphasis on his least radical works; she was well-pleased by Mrs Marshall’s desire to emphasize Mary’s religious nature, to defend her reluctance to write a life of her husband as having been prompted by a kindly wish to protect the ‘erring’ – that is, Claire – from publicity, and to see both Claire and Jane Hogg roundly condemned. Mrs Marshall’s overworked analogy between Mary and the girl in the Hans Andersen tale who tortures her hands weaving nettle shirts for the salvation of her brothers seemed wholly appropriate to this history of a life of sacrifice.
Percy died shortly after Marshall’s anodyne portrait of his mother was published. He was buried in 1889 in the family grave at St Peter’s, together with the ashes of his fathers heart.‡‡ Resourceful Jane, comforted by Robert Louis Stevenson’s tribute to Sir Percy’s fine soul, ‘honest as a dog’s’, ordered her own name to be engraved below her husband’s in preparation for her own demise.
She was alone now; even Trelawny had gone. (His last attachment, Miss Taylor, took his ashes to Rome in 1880 in a small walnut box. After some altercation over whether she should be fined for importing the remains of a body without permission, they were laid in the grave beside Shelley’s, just as Trelawny had wished.39) Zealous as ever, Jane continued with what had become the high purpose of her life. Sweetened with the promise of £500 and the news that Shelley’s admirers would pay for the cost of installation, University College, Oxford, accepted a statue of the poet in 1893; the Bodleian, in the same year, agreed to become a repository for a third of the Boscombe collection of Shelley manuscripts and letters, with certain restrictions imposed. (These included a box of letters which were not to be examined until 1922, the centenary of Shelley’s death.§§) Admirers like young Maud Brooke and Edward Woodberry, editor of a new collection of Shelley’s poetical works, were rewarded with glowing accounts of Mary; letters continued to be diligently
sought and purchased, including those which Mary had written to Jane Williams shortly after Shelley’s death. Sadly, since it appears to have been lost, Lady Shelley never saw the painting of her mother-in-law by ‘Cleobulina’ Fielding which Richard Garnett, visiting Jane Hogg’s grandson in 1903, thought ‘the best I had seen’.40 There can be little doubt that Jane Shelley, had she been shown the portrait, would have bought it and saved it for posterity.¶¶
Dying, after several years of ill health, in 1899, Lady Shelley was given short shrift by the Athenaeum. Her wish to show Shelley as ‘a faultless hero of romance’ had won only one unflinching defender in Richard Garnett, the obituarist wrote; that approach ‘has been abandoned by all unprejudiced investigators. The whole matter forms a curious episode in literary history.’41
The Athenaeum’s snappish response suggests that Lady Shelley’s endeavours had not been entirely successful; George Bernard Shaw, paying a visit to the Shelley chapel at University College in the 1890s, wondered when they were going to put up a relief of the poet ‘in a tall hat, Bible in hand, leading his children on Sunday morning to the church of his native parish’.42
*
Tempting though it is to lay all the blame for the reconstruction of Shelley on Jane Shelley’s shoulders, Mary herself has to share the burden. It was Mary, not her daughter-in-law, who had used her notes and prefaces of 1839 to suggest that Shelley’s political zeal would, with maturity, have waned and to plead his case by claiming that ‘the stamp of such inexperience’ was on all he wrote. It was Mary who had assured the readers of Queen Mab that Shelley had never wanted to see the poem published. Printing a letter he had written to this effect for publication when a pirated edition appeared in 1821, she suppressed the fact that Shelley had written privately that its appearance was rather amusing and that he had asked to be sent copies of it by Leigh Hunt and Horace Smith.
Shelley’s reputation as a radical poet had survived in spite, not because of Mary’s efforts. She had been friendly with Robert Dale Owen in the late 1820s, but it was no thanks to Mary that the Owenite workers of the early to mid-nineteenth century treated Shelley’s Queen Mab as their Bible. The poem’s influence is apparent from the fact that it was constantly reprinted and quoted from in radical journals and advertised in Chartist pamphlets and papers. Thomas Medwin had noticed this and commented on the fact in his life of Shelley; Trelawny regarded it as cause for celebration. Mary did not.
‘I have no wish to ally myself to the Radicals,’ Mary had written firmly in October 1838, while acknowledging that she now differed in this respect from both her husband and her father. It was probably her awareness of George Lewes’s radical politics which prompted her decisive rejection of his request to write Shelley’s life in 1839. It will not do as an excuse to say that Sir Timothy did not wish a life to be written; Mary had, by 1839, become adept at slipping copy into editors’ hands and at providing anonymous information; her connection to Lewes need never have been declared, especially since he was a close friend of Leigh Hunt’s.
Lewes’s magnificent extended tribute to Shelley, published in the Westminster Review in April 1841, tells us the kind of biography he would have written, had he been allowed. Praised, in the year after Thomas Carlyle had given a celebrated talk on heroes and hero-worship, as ‘the original man, the hero’, Shelley was presented by Lewes not as a quivering sensibility or a frail martyr, in the style increasingly favoured by Mary herself, but as a political reformer, a champion of the oppressed. It is not that Mary did not say this in her own prefaces; she constantly alluded to Shelley’s zeal for reform and for social improvement, but she did everything she could, however unconsciously, to make him sound more like a lady philanthropist than a political rebel. She drained him of all sense of risk and danger, the very thing which made him such an exciting and inspiring poet to the working man or the middle-class radical. Lewes, not Mary, was ready to celebrate Shelley as a voice springing straight from the white heat of the French Revolution. We should not, then, be too hard on Jane; in her diligent promotion of Shelley as wistful dreamer, cruelly misunderstood by those who did not know him personally, she was only pursuing the course already marked out by Mary.
*
‘That’s her final give-away for me,’ Katherine Mansfield wrote indignantly to John Middleton Murry in December 1920, after reading an inaccurate report of Mary Shelley as having carried Shelley’s relics home from Italy under a glass case perched on her knees. ‘Did everybody know? Oh didn’t they just? I’ve done with her.’ Mansfield was always excitable in her reactions, but she was not alone by 1920 in reacting against Jane Shelley’s loving portrait of Mary as the supreme example of devoted widowhood. William Michael Rossetti’s wife Lucy, thirty years earlier, had written a sharply critical life of Mary, a life which, while it drew directly on Trelawny’s Records, was probably also fuelled by the Rossettis’ long-standing friendship with George Lewes. Lucy Madox Rossetti disliked the way Mary had played down Shelley’s radical nature; Katherine Mansfield was writing in the postwar years when there were widows and mothers whose tragedies eclipsed Mary’s loss.
Eleven years after Jane Shelley’s death, Edison made the first Frankenstein film. Another, now lost, was made in 1915, but 1931 was the year in which Boris Karloff, directed by James Whale, gave Mary’s uncherished creature new life and, for the first time, the pathos of his original. The films spawned; the author dwindled. Rosalie Glynn Grylls’s excellent biography of 1938, wedged between The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), with Karloff, and Son of Frankenstein (1939), with Karloff again, aroused modest interest. Muriel Spark’s short life, marking the centenary of Mary’s death, sensibly gave considerable space to the one great work which now entirely overshadowed the author. But the view expressed by Richard Garnett in his 1897 essay on Mary for the Dictionary of National Biography continued to stick: she must, Garnett wrote, have been ‘magnetized’ by her husband to produce a novel so far beyond her normal reach. Frankenstein, although little read, had become a work of mythic power, an allegory flexible enough to be adapted to almost any contemporary situation; Mary, colourless, mournful, pliant, seemed less convincing than Shelley as its author.
Mary’s letters, first published in 1944 from copies which had often been scrubbed of vitality for the sake of decorum, did little to rescue her. Neither did it help that Richard Holmes gave this ‘darkly handsome’ woman such a poor write-up in his scintillating life of her husband. Shelley: The Pursuit (1974) memorably identified Shelley as a man in flight from responsibility, a free-loving anticipator of the commune-loving 1960s, mismatched to a sulky, bad-tempered wife. (Holmes was more lenient towards Mary in a later work, Footsteps (1985). Professor Jean de Palacio’s brilliant and enlightening Mary Shelley dans son oeuvre (1969), a work which sadly remains untranslated, was directed at the specialist reader.
The last thirty years have seen a dramatic change in Mary Shelley’s status. Much of this has been due to the feminist critics and biographers who have, in rescuing her from the Victorian view, discerned a writer of high ambition and considerable talent, if not genius. Matilda, published in 1959 after lying untouched for years among the Shelley archives (Garnett first saw it at Boscombe in 1905 and was unsure which of the Shelleys was its author), has been subjected to intensive scrutiny and praised as a work of courageous self-revelation; Valperga has become one of the most widely discussed of Mary Shelley’s works, seen by one recent editor as a brilliant riposte to Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, praised by others for its subversive criticism of masculine power and for its interpretation of Italy’s contemporary problems through her past. Betty T. Bennett’s indispensable three-volume edition of Mary’s letters (1980–4) has been complemented by an admirable edition of the Journals (1987) by Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Emily Sunstein, publishing an authoritative biography of Mary in 1989, regretted that, in a period of re-evaluation of her work, the woman remained overlooked. Sunstein’s Mary was a passionate, impetuous woman, cast in her mother�
�s mould, a ready challenger of the conventions, a great editor, a major literary figure. Challenging Rosalie Glynn Grylls’s presentation of Mary as, in Emily Sunstein’s words, ‘a morbid moper’, she offered a new vision:
Aspiration, enthusiasm, challenge, active mind and spirit, and optimism were among her cardinal qualities, contrary to the impression that she was temperamentally cool, quiet and pessimistic, and it was her incapacity for resignation to cold reality that eventually wore her down.43
Eight years later, in the bicentennial celebrations of her birth, Mary’s life was of less interest than her varied literary career, as historian, editor, travel-writer, novelist and poet. Judging by the number of papers on it, Lodore threatened to eclipse the popularity of Valperga, although strikingly little attention was paid to the novel’s autobiographical content. The Keepsake stories, even, had become worthy of scholarly examination and debate. Her mother, while sharing in the celebrations, was almost as thoroughly overshadowed as Godwin and Percy Shelley.
Given this new-found veneration it is not surprising that the news, in 1997, of the discovery of a ‘new’ manuscript by Mary Shelley was greeted with high excitement. (It was new to English readers; Italians had already read excerpts of Maurice in a book on Lady Mountcashell which was published by Mario Curreli that year.) A lost Ode by Keats could hardly have prompted more jubilation. Claire Tomalin’s researches into the family in whose possession the little manuscript had remained added to the charm and interest of the find.
Maurice, while engaging, was no great work. Why, then, the excitement? It was not, on this occasion, limited to a few knowledgeable professors. The public responded to the discovery with an interest not shown, for example, towards recently found letters of Shelley and Byron, or, from another well-loved era, an unpublished poem by Siegfried Sassoon.
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