Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Godwin courts and marries, 1, 2;

  melancholy, 1, 2;

  Opie portrait of, 1n, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9;

  pregnancy by Godwin, 1, 2, 3, 4;

  marriage relations, 1;

  character, 1;

  educational principles, 1, 2;

  dies giving birth to Mary, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

  funeral and grave, 1, 2 & n, 3, 4, 5;

  Godwin’s Memoirs of, 1, 2, 3;

  influence on Godwin, 1;

  on women’s role, 1;

  in Paris, 1, 2;

  fosters orphan girl, 1;

  MS and Jane read on elopement to Continent, 1;

  influence on elopement of MS and PBS, 1;

  visits Windsor, 1;

  MS likened to, 1;

  and Fanny Wright, 1;

  MS lies about marriage to Godwin, 1;

  body exhumed and reburied, 1;

  finger ring preserved, 1n;

  ‘The Cave of Fancy’ (unfinished novel), 1;

  Lessons, 1, 2, 3;

  Letters from Norway, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

  Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, 1, 2;

  Mary, 1n, 2;

  Original Stories, 1n, 2;

  A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark, 1;

  Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 1n;

  A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 1, 2, 3;

  A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

  Wolpert, Lewis, 1

  Wood, Mrs Somerville, 1, 2

  Woodberry, Edward, 1

  Wordsworth, William: declines to contribute to Juvenile Library, 1; MS meets, 1

  Worthing, Sussex, 1, 2

  Wright, Frances (Fanny), 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

  Wright, Gabrielle, 1

  Wright, Joseph, 1

  Young Italy movement, 1

  Zambelli, Lega, 1

  1. William Godwin and his friend Thomas Holcroft at the Treason Trials, 1794, from a courtroom sketch by Sir Thomas Lawrence

  2. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, painted by her friend John Opie in 1797, several months before her daughter Mary’s birth

  3. Detail from ‘The New Morality’ (1798), by James Gillray, from the Anti-Jacobin Review. Holcroft is in leg irons; Godwin reads his work. Coleridge and Southey flank the Cornucopia of Ignorance from which tumble the works of Erasmus Darwin, Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Paine is the crocodile, while Fox bestrides Leviathan (the Duke of Bedford)

  4. The Polygon, Somers Town, where Mary spent her first years

  5. St Pancras Churchyard, 1815, with the river Fleet in the foreground and Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave allegedly to the right of the church, between the trees

  6. An illustration by William Blake to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories, prefiguring the monster’s appearance before his creator in her novel, Frankenstein

  7. Skinner Street from Fleet Market; No. 41, the house taken by Godwin as his bookshop, is on the left

  8. Ramsgate, where Mary Godwin spent six months at a boarding-school in 1811

  9. Mary Shelley’s Scottish friend Isabella Baxter Booth, as Lady Jane Grey, c. 1814–16

  10. The only surviving portrait of Claire Clairmont, painted in Rome by Amelia Curran in 1819

  11. Mary Shelley’s stepbrother Charles Clairmont, painted c.1835 when he was teaching in Vienna

  12. This sketch, possibly of Mary Shelley but dated from the costume to c. 1825–30, was allegedly copied from a miniature painted at Geneva, and given by Trelawny to W.M. Rossetti

  13. Mary Shelley, by Reginald Easton; posthumously executed miniature, c.1857

  14. ‘Clytie’: this bust of a Roman lady, now at the British Museum, was, despite the low forehead, considered by her contemporaries to be very like Mary Shelley

  15. A possible portrait of Mary Shelley, 1833–43, currently attributed to Richard Rothwell

  16. This may be the self-portrait from 1822 which Sir Percy and Lady Shelley were allowed to copy in 1863 when they were shown it at Lerici

  17. Mary Shelley, by Richard Rothwell, 1839–40

  18. Elizabeth Pilfold, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s mother, miniature from a painting done by Romney in 1794, when Shelley was two years old

  19. Timothy Shelley, his father, a Sussex squire and owner of Field Place, who inherited the baronetcy in 1815 on the death of his father, Sir Bysshe; miniature from a companion painting by Romney

  20. Amelia Curran, portrait of Shelley, 1819, reworked in 1822–3

  21. The Curran portrait of Shelley. Photocopies show up the full, sensual mouth which Miss Curran tried to reduce and prettify in the reworked painting

  22. As Shelley became increasingly etherealized, so his face became more improbably pixie-like. This is a typical interpretation of the Curran painting, first engraved by William Finden

  23. Edward Ellerker Williams’s watercolour of Shelley, c.1821–2, bears out Thornton Hunt’s recollection that the poet had become quite corpulent by the time of his death

  24. Byron, drawn by Count d’Orsay at Genoa in 1823. The sketch was evidently executed after one of Byron’s periods of ferocious dieting

  25. The Villa Diodati, rented by Byron in 1816: the house where, famously, the idea of writing ghost stories led to the birth of Frankenstein

  26. John Polidori, Byron’s clever young doctor, as he was in 1816 when he met Mary at Geneva. The portrait is by F. G. Gainsford

  27. The Auberge at Sécheron in the early nineteenth century

  28. The Mer de Glace, by J.W.M. Turner. Visiting Chamonix and the Mer de Glace in 1816, Mary found one of Frankenstein’s most celebrated settings

  29. The first page of volume 3 of Frankenstein, showing Mary Shelley’s own hand

  30. Mary and Shelley’s first country home, the Bishopsgate cottage near Windsor which they took in the summer of 1815 and where Shelley wrote Alastor

  31. Albion House, Marlow, where Mary, Claire and Shelley lived in 1817–18, showing the house after its later conversion to cottages

  32. Leigh Hunt, by Samuel Lawrence. Following their meeting in 1818 Mary Shelley became a lifelong friend of Hunt and his family

  33. William Shelley, ‘little Willmouse’, painted by Amelia Curran shortly before his death at Rome in the summer of 1819

  34. Allegra, Claire’s daughter, called ‘the little commodore’ by Mary and much loved by Shelley, who left £6,000 for her care in a bequest to Claire

  35. Margaret King, later Lady Mountcashell, in the simple costume which rather startled William Godwin in 1800; from an engraving made in Paris by Edmé Quenedey, c.1801

  36. In Pais, the Shelleys spent some time at Casa Galletti visible here on the far left

  37. Casa Prini, the summer home at Bagni di San Giuliano rented by the Shelleys during their time at Pisa. Their garden bordered on the artificial canal

  38. Thomas Medwin, Shelley’s cousin, disliked and mistrusted by Mary Shelley

  39. Francesco Pacchiani, ‘the devil of Pisa’, professor at the university there on whom Mary drew for some less likeable aspects of character in her novel Valperga

  40. Edward Ellerker Williams: the self-portrait washed ashore in the wreckage of the Don Juan

  41. Jane Williams, by George Clint. Mary Shelley was also friendly with Clint, a skilled miniaturist who captured Jane’s languid beauty

  42. Alexander Mavrocordato, in a memorial painting by J. G. Hiltensperger celebrating great liberators; he is shown in 1822, at Missolonghi, where Byron died two years later

  43. Edward Trelawny, as he might have looked in 1821, when he first met Shelley and Mary. The drawing is by Edward Duppa

  44. These drawings by Edward Ellerker Williams are assumed to represent the Don Juan or ‘Ariel’ and, below it, Byron’s boat, the Bolivar

  45. A romantic impression (by Henry Roderick Newman) of the Villa Magni under attack from the sea

  46. Shelley’s cremation through the Victorian eyes of Louis-Edward Fournier. Note Shelley’s well-preserved corpse

 
; 47. Byron, from a cut-out made by Leigh Hunt’s talented wife Marianne when the Hunts and Mary Shelley were Byron’s neighbours at Genoa in 1822–3

  48. Teresa Guiccioli as a young bride in 1818, after a drawing by John Hayter. She had not yet met Byron

  49. The Strand, near Villiers Street, shown by George Scharf. This is where the Godwins were living when Mary returned to London as a widow in 1823

  50. John Howard Payne, the actor and playwright who fell in love with Mary in 1825, painted here as Hamlet by Charles Robert Leslie

  51. Payne’s friend and occasional collaborator, Washington Irving was one of the few men Mary was prepared to marry. The painting is by Gilbert Stuart Newton: Mary saw it being executed

  52. An evening at Dr Kitchiner’s home in Warren Street, by George Cruikshank

  53. Thomas Moore, by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Mary saw Lawrence working on this portrait three months before his death in January 1830

  54. Richard Rothwell, the handsome Irish artist who first painted Mary Shelley in 1831, and thereafter became a good friend

  55. John Murray, the publisher, to whom Mary Shelley frequently applied for commissions both for her father and herself. The portrait is by H.W. Pickersgill

  56. Samuel Rogers, the banker poet who became one of Mary’s kindest supporters in the 1830s (caricature bust by Jean Pierre Dantan)

  57. Harrow on the Hill, where Mary moved in 1833, in order to enable her son to remain at the school as a home-boarder

  58. Trelawny’s third wife, Augusta Goring, painted by John Linnell in 1827. Mary advised Augusta to stay with her husband; Trelawny, in due course, left her

  59. Godwin at seventy-six, drawn by W. Brockenden. The resemblance to his daughter is noticeable

  60. Sir Percy Florence Shelley, photographed c. 1880 when he was sixty years old

  61. ‘He is a gentleman’: Sir Percy Florence Shelley, from a cartoon by ‘Ape’, for Vanity Fair, December 1879

  62. Lady Shelley, looking sweetly determined and surprisingly young in her late fifties

  63. Thomas Jefferson Hogg, sketched by Reginald Easton for Jane and Percy, when he was working on his life of Shelley in the 1850s

  64. Mary supports the drowned but draped Shelley: monument by Horatio Weekes, placed by the Shelleys at Christchurch Priory

  65. Apotheosis: Shelley drawn by Alfred Sourd, c. 1913, after Leonardo’s head of Christ

  66. Frankenstein in print: the frontispiece of the 1831 edition

  67. Frankenstein on the stage in 1850: The Model Man, a Christmas pantomime

  68. Frankenstein on screen in 1931: Bruno Rehak’s poster for the film directed by James Whale, and starring Boris Karloff

  About the Author

  Miranda Seymour, celebrated both as a novelist and a biographer, has been a visiting professor at Nottingham Trent University, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

  Her acclaimed biographies include A Ring Of Conspirators, an innovative study of Henry James and his literary circle; Ottoline Morrell: Life On A Grand Scale; Robert Graves: Life On The Edge; Mary Shelley; The Bugatti Queen; In My Father’s House; and Chaplin’s Girl: The Life and Loves of Virginia Cherrill.

  Miranda is also the author of several successful historical novels, including, most recently, The Telling.

  Copyright

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  All rights reserved

  © Miranda Seymour, 2000

  The right of Miranda Seymour to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–27967–8