Medwin joined the party that fall, and later he would remember how Byron asked Shelley to critique a poem he had just written, The Deformed Transformed. Everyone waited to hear Shelley’s opinion, expecting him to shower compliments on his lordship’s head. But when at last Shelley announced his verdict, he startled the group of Byron fans by saying he “liked it the least of all his works…it smelt too strongly of Faust.” Byron made a show of destroying the manuscript, tossing it into the fire, though in fact he had another copy carefully stowed away in a desk drawer.
Although Byron often made Shelley feel inadequate, and although Shelley’s eccentricity, paired with his righteous indignation about nearly everything (from the cruelty of eating animals to the condition of the working classes), irritated Byron, they were still fascinated by each other. In company, they ignored everyone else, speaking exclusively among themselves, an arrogance that no one protested; instead, conversation ceased so people could listen to the two masters. The poets exaggerated their conversational styles to make their differences more readily apparent—Byron becoming more Byron-like and Shelley more Shelley-like. In his diary the worshipful Medwin tried to capture what it was like to hear them:
[Byron’s] talk was at that time…full of persiflage.…Both professed the same speculative—I might say, skeptical turn of mind; the same power of changing the subject from grave to gay; the same mastery over the sublime, the pathetic, the comic.…Shelley frequently lamented that it was almost impossible to keep Byron to any given point. He flew about from subject to subject like a will-o’-the-wisp.…Every word of Shelley’s was almost oracular; his reasoning subtle and profound, his opinions, whatever they were, sincere and undisguised; whilst with Byron, such was his love of mystification, it was impossible to know when he was in earnest.…He dealt too in the gross and indelicate, of which Shelley had an utter abhorrence, and often left him in ill-disguised disgust.
Byron had the insight to see that Shelley’s work, although it had yet to win acclaim or gain a significant following, was extraordinary. Watching Shelley’s dangerous exploits with Williams on the wintry Arno from the safety of his balcony, Byron used nautical imagery to capture his sense of Shelley’s genius:
[Shelley] alone, in this age of humbug, dares stem the current, as he did today the flooded Arno in his skiff, although I could not observe he made any progress. The attempt is better than being swept along as the rest are, with the filthy garbage scoured from its banks.
On Wednesday nights, the whole group dined at his lordship’s; afterward, the two poets stayed up until the early morning talking about ships, poems, and, sometimes, women. To Edward Williams’s delight, the poets included him and his newly arrived friend, the dashing Cornish sailor Edward Trelawny, in their inner circle. Mary felt a little shut out from this boys’ club. “Our good cavaliers flock together,” she wrote Marianne, “and as they do not like fetching a walk with the absurd womankind, Jane…and I are off together and talk morality and pluck violets by the way.”
Mary had plenty to keep her busy, however. She finished copying Valperga that December and sent it to England in January with a stern note from Shelley to their publisher that demanded good financial terms for his wife. While she waited to hear Ollier’s response, Byron, who had retained his respect for her talents, asked her to be his copyist, a job she gladly assumed, since she was still an avid admirer of his poetry. For Shelley, Mary’s enthusiasm for Byron’s work was unnerving, especially since Shelley himself had not written much since his lordship’s arrival. Fortunately, there was always the beautiful Jane Williams, who seemed eager to listen to his thoughts and feelings, who did not have writing projects of her own, and who frequently expressed her admiration for his many talents.
One of her most interesting attributes was that she could speak some Hindi. She had spent part of her girlhood in India, where her father had been a merchant, and she sometimes included Indian melodies in the songs she sang—an exoticism that Shelley loved. He listened to her for hours, rapt and inspired. Here at last was his new muse. Emilia had been a disappointment. Mary was too cold. Claire was far away in Florence. Jane’s beauty would inspire him to write great poetry—of this he was sure.
For Jane, Shelley’s show of interest was a singular triumph over the intellectual Mary. Was it possible, Jane wondered, that Shelley, the genius, preferred her to his brilliant author wife? She trained her dark eyes on the poet, and her worshipful presence—balm to his unadmired soul—led him to compose lyrics of praise, just as he had hoped. He bought her an expensive guitar, inlaid with mother-of-pearl, which he could not afford, and called himself Ariel, the guardian spirit of Miranda (Jane).
It is likely that Jane missed this reference to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as she was not well read and had never heard of most of the authors Shelley mentioned. Yet far from minding this, Shelley was reminded of how pleasant it was when a woman did not have her own opinions. He had enjoyed that quality in Emilia, too—an ironic reversal for someone who had once found Mary’s education and brilliant abilities so superior to Harriet’s ignorance—but his feelings for Jane ran deeper, he decided. Emilia had been a sham. Now it was Jane—her soulful musicality and her worshipful eyes—who represented Shelley’s ideal woman. He had always enjoyed playing the teacher, and he began a crash course in literature for this new object of his fascination. By spring, she could be counted on to take Shelley’s side on every issue, from history to politics, as well as in any domestic conflicts. In fact, Jane loved nothing more than when he complained about his wife and could always be counted on to contribute her own negative remarks about Mary. According to Jane, the ways in which Mary had failed her husband were positively myriad.
If Mary was aware of Shelley and Jane’s duplicity, she hid it remarkably well, finding her own solace in Edward Williams’s friend Trelawny. The twenty-nine-year-old seaman had arrived in Pisa in January, right after the Christmas holidays, and at first he seemed to Mary to be everything a real man should be. The younger son of a titled Cornish family, Edward Trelawny said that he had served in the navy—although his biographers cast doubt on this claim—and that he had quit the service at age twenty to roam the world. He did not mention that he lived on only £500 a year and had abandoned a wife and two daughters back in England.
Trelawny was a dashing figure. He had an elegant mustache and long hair that he pushed behind his ears. In her journal, Mary was rhapsodic about his many splendors, noting “his Moorish face…his dark hair, his Herculean form.” He seemed larger than life, capable of anything. His voice was loud, “His ‘Tremendous!’ being indeed tremendous,” as one friend observed. To Mary, he was like a comet, waking her from “the everyday sleepiness of human intercourse.” Brigands, battles, faraway lands, shipwrecks—there was nothing he had not experienced, or so it seemed; listening to his stories was like reading The Arabian Nights.
The dashing Edward Trelawny, Edward Williams’s friend. (illustration ill.30)
At the end of January, Shelley slipped a seven-stanza poem he titled The Serpent is shut out from Paradise under the door of the Williamses’ apartment. Shelley was fascinated by snakes—their role in mythology, not only as demonic symbols but also as symbols of rebirth and reincarnation. Thus Williams knew that this was meant to be an autobiographical poem, and when he and Jane read it, its meaning was clear. The “Paradise” Shelley was shut out of was the paradise of the Williamses’ married life. He was sad and alone; his home with Mary offered him no peace and his feelings for Jane only made him lonelier. He declared that he was going to have to avoid the Williamses—a resolution that he soon broke:
III.
Therefore if now I see you seldomer
Dear friends, dear friend! Know that I only fly
Your looks because they stir
Griefs that should sleep, and hopes that cannot die:
The very comfort that they minister
I scarce can bear; yet I,
So deeply is the arrow gone,
Should quickly perish if it were withdrawn.
IV.
When I return to my cold home, you ask
Why I am not as I have ever been!
You spoil me for the task
Of acting a forced part on life’s dull scene,—
Shelley had told Edward he could read the poem to Jane, but that “the lines were too dismal for me to keep.” Williams did read the verses to Jane, who was flattered by Shelley’s proclamations of love, but Williams was not unduly concerned, nor was he jealous. In his journal he gave the event no more weight than anything else that happened that day:
Shelley sent us some beautiful but too melancholy lines—Call’d on Lord B. and accompanied him to the [shooting] ground—Broke a bottle at 30 paces. Dined with Mary and Shelley.
Williams did, however, feel sorry for his friend. Mary was not a person he would ever want to be married to. In his eyes, Mary complained too much, admired Byron too enthusiastically, and fussed too much over Shelley’s sailing adventures. She could be argumentative and moody. She worried about her son. She nagged about money. She was not as beautiful as Jane. No wonder Shelley was unhappy. Her gaiety surfaced only occasionally; to both Jane and Edward, she seemed a resentful, unpleasant young woman without any real charms. Entering when they did, they had no way of knowing that Mary had once idolized her husband, still believed in his poetic genius, and continued to view him as the only person with whom she could be fully “natural.” When he doubted his abilities as a writer, he could always turn to her. The same held true for Mary; when she was unsure of herself, she knew that Shelley would say, “Seek to know your own heart & learning what it best loves—try to enjoy that.” Before he read Valperga, for instance, he had written to her, “Be severe in your corrections & expect severity from me, your sincere admirer. I flatter myself you have composed something unequalled in its kind, & that not content with the honours of your birth & your hereditary aristocracy, you will add still higher renown to your name.”
Despite Shelley’s faith in her work, however, bad news came from London that spring. Ollier, their publisher, had refused to offer acceptable terms for Valperga. Shelley and Mary wanted £500 and had assumed that £400 would be the lowest they would get; thus, it was a shock not to sell the book at all. Mary was deeply disappointed. She had hoped the work would pay their debts and help her father. Secretly, she had expected to receive good reviews; she was proud of her achievement.
On the heels of Ollier’s rejection, Godwin wrote to say that he was about to be evicted from Skinner Street. Worried, guilty, and wanting desperately to win her father’s approval, Mary instructed Ollier to give Godwin the manuscript as a gift, telling Godwin to use his literary contacts to try to sell the book and to keep the money if he succeeded. But somehow Godwin managed to avert disaster without Valperga. He received an infusion of funds and decided to wait until the market improved to try to sell the book. Two more years would pass before he did find a publisher, causing Mary to lament privately to Mrs. Gisborne, “I long to hear some news of it—as with an author’s vanity I want to see it in print & hear the praises of my friends.”
Unfortunately, when Valperga was finally published, although most reviewers praised Mary’s graceful style, they missed the complexity of the story entirely, and so Mary never received the accolades she felt were her due. On the title page, she identified herself as the author of Frankenstein, asserting her credentials both as a radical and a writer, and yet her powerful homage to her mother was viewed as a tragic love story rather than the highly charged political tale it really was. The one critic who noticed her rebuttal of Machiavelli chastised her for portraying Castruccio as “modern and feminine” rather than “glowing and energetic.” He ignored her antiwar philosophy and her condemnation of male ambition—points immediately evident to the modern reader—and instead condemned her for her lack of piety, writing her off as a member of the “Satanic School,” the label that poet Robert Southey had bestowed on Shelley and Byron. To the rest of her contemporaries, Valperga was merely historical fiction, a novel by a female writer, and as such was not to be taken seriously, either philosophically or politically. For Mary, it was disconcerting to have her ideas ignored, her politics dismissed. She had thought she might be pilloried by conservatives, but she had also assumed that she would become a heroine for liberals. Instead she was to be discounted.
In Pisa, on February 7, Trelawny took Mary to a ball at the home of an elegant Englishwoman, Mrs. Beauclerk, and waltzed with her, something Shelley had never done. Afterward, she gushed about the evening in her journal:
During a long—long evening in mixed society, dancing & music—how often do ones sensations change—and swift as the west wind drives the shadows of clouds across the sunny hill or the waving corn—so swift do sentiments pass.
She was overwhelmed by her feelings. One word from Trelawny could “excite [her] lagging blood. Laughter dances in the eyes & the spirits rise proportionably high.” Like her Greek prince, he made her slender will-o’-the-wisp husband seem frail, even effeminate.
Trelawny admired Mary’s mix of solemnity and humor that could sometimes turn giddy, her “calm gray eyes” and her “pedigree of genius.” He was also impressed by her “power of expressing her thoughts in varied and appropriate words, derived from familiarity with the works of our vigorous old writers.”
A few days after the dance, celebrations began for the Pisan Carnival. Unable to resist the excitement, the entire group decided to attend one of the public masked balls. Mary put on a Turkish costume and Jane wore her “Hindustani dress”—a turban and silk bloomers, a costume she was proud of as it commemorated her girlhood in India. They strolled along the Arno, critiquing the other costumes, then danced until three in the morning.
For the next few weeks, Mary saw Trelawny almost every day. Mrs. Beauclerk, the hostess of the ball Mary had attended with him by her side, had taken a liking to Mary, and she urged other English hostesses to include the Shelleys on their guest lists. Many refused, not wanting to mix with the “League of Incest,” but the possibility that the notorious Lord Byron might accompany the Shelleys was too much for some to resist. And so on the strength of Mrs. Beauclerk’s recommendation, as well as their acquaintance with the famous poet, the Shelleys were invited to soirees and fetes, teas and dances. Shelley had no interest in such occasions, but Mary took full advantage of them, bringing Trelawny along as her escort. Now, when Shelley dined at Byron’s and did not come home until the early morning, Mary did not mind, because she, too, was staying out late. Indeed, she was discovering there was a certain power to being an attractive young woman in the world. A Greek count, a friend of her Greek prince, told her that she had “the prettiest little ways, the prettiest little looks, the prettiest little figure…the prettiest little movements in the world.”
When they were not at parties, she and Trelawny dined together, went for long walks, and discussed their dreams for the future—all with Shelley’s tacit permission, since the poet spent most of his time with Byron or the Williamses. As with the mysterious Claire episodes, the key journal pages from this time are missing. The irony, of course, is that these missing pages serve as flags, marking events that either Mary or her descendants did not want others to know. This makes it seem likely that a brief romantic interlude did occur that winter—but also that it did not go much further than a few kisses, as Trelawny almost certainly would have capitalized on such an experience later in life, either in his memoirs or in the letters he would one day write to others about Mary. As for Mary, although she might have been swept up in the excitement of these attentions, she discovered that she was pregnant shortly after the dance, a circumstance that bound her once again to Shelley. Besides, as the weeks passed, she had begun to feel there was something untrustworthy about Trelawny. She could not quite put her finger on it, but although she found him enormously attractive, his tales were so fantastic that she wondered if he was all he appeared to be, writing
to Mrs. Gisborne the day after the dance, “for his moral qualities I am yet in the dark[;] he is a strange web which I am endeavoring to unravel.” She was dazzled, yet suspicious—not realizing, or not wanting to realize, that danger could lie ahead, that Trelawny might one day do her irreparable harm.
Mary was not the only one being courted by Trelawny over these few months. Eager to attach himself to the rich and the famous, he set himself the task of also winning over Byron and Shelley. This task was made somewhat easier by the fact that both poets admired soldiers as well as nautical men. According to Trelawny, when he apologized for not having read more poetry, Shelley replied, “You have the advantage; you saw the things that we read about; you gained knowledge from the living, and we from the dead.” Shelley enlisted the newcomer’s help in a scheme he had been dreaming about since December—to build a boat that was sleek, gorgeous, and, most important of all, faster than Byron’s magnificent new vessel, the Bolivar, named to honor the South American revolutionary who was one of Byron’s heroes. Trelawny assured Shelley that he was just the man for the project and set right to work. On January 15, Williams wrote that Trelawny had produced “the model of an American schooner.” On the strength of Trelawny’s design, they hired an acquaintance of Trelawny’s, a Captain Roberts, to build the boat in Genoa. Shelley wanted it finished by spring so they could take it with them to La Spezia, the coastal town they had visited the preceding August, where he wanted to spend the summer.
To trust so completely someone he had just met was entirely in keeping with Shelley’s impulsive nature. He treated Trelawny as though they had known each other since childhood and never realized—or worried—that Trelawny was fond of stretching the truth. As one early biographer said, “Trelawny…found that a little fiction set off the facts to great advantage.” He enjoyed telling stories about himself, and in these stories, “he meets and overcomes all odds; it is truly a glorious Trelawny, the Trelawny of his own imagination.”
Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley Page 44