Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

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Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley Page 69

by Charlotte Gordon


  8 tempting to wonder Charles Robinson introduces this question, speculating about what would have happened if Mary Shelley had “turned her hand to redeeming her mother rather than her husband by her editorial and biographical work.” Robinson, “A Mother’s Daughter: An Intersection of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” in Writing Lives, ed. Buss, Macdonald, and McWhir, 130.

  9 “[Her husband’s] malady demanded” MWS to Octavian Blewitt, November 15, 1850, Letters MWS, 3:387.

  10 “with the sun shining” MWS to Isabella Booth, May 26, 1850, ibid., 3:376.

  11 Mary also talked to Jane Rolleston, Talks with Lady Shelley, 90.

  12 In a red-draped corner This description of the shrine is from Seymour, MS, 542.

  13 “[Shelley], in burning words” Shelley Memorials, ed. Lady Jane Gibson Shelley (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1859), 77.

  14 “the utmost malice” Trelawny, Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author, 230.

  15 “Mary Shelley’s jealousy” Trelawny to CC, April 3, 1870, Forman, ed., Letters of Edward John Trelawny.

  16 For almost two hundred years As a result of the scandals that surrounded Wollstonecraft’s name, Cora Kaplan argues that Mary Wollstonecraft’s life has been analyzed far more closely than her work. “Wollstonecraft’s Reception,” in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Claudia Johnson, 247.

  17 What Wollstonecraft termed “outlaws” Wollstonecraft, Maria, 318.

  BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE: PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY’S LETTERS

  “There are no neutral facts or neutral editors,” Betty Bennett, the editor of Mary Shelley’s letters, warned readers when she was in the midst of editing Mary Shelley’s voluminous and problematic correspondence. “There are only theoretical and interpretative editorial processes that, like ‘the awful shadow of some unseen Power,’ should not float unrecognized among us.”1 This is particularly true of Percy Shelley’s letters. Even though Percy died almost two hundred years ago, there is still no authoritative edition of Shelley’s letters. Warring factions continue to contest their opponents’ right to publish Shelley’s correspondence.

  Mary Shelley appointed her daughter-in-law, Jane Shelley, as the literary executor of the Shelley papers. But Jane sought to control what biographers published about her beloved mother-in-law by curtailing the access of researchers to the original sources. Ultimately, Jane printed her own book, Shelley and Mary, in which she presented her own edited versions of Shelley’s and Mary’s letters.

  In 1909, ten years after Jane Shelley died in 1899, Roger Ingpen published the first comprehensive edition of Shelley’s correspondence. For the next fifty or so years, Ingpen’s volume was the standard text. But in 1964, Frederick Jones published a two-volume edition of Shelley’s letters, instigating a conflict with the editors of Shelley and His Circle (1961), who argued that Jones had overstepped his rights by publishing letters owned by the Pforzheimer Collection. This dispute has never been fully resolved, and so today there are two separate editions of Shelley’s letters, both of which purport to be the standard texts. However, these editions differ markedly. The Shelley and His Circle edition retains much of the spontaneous feeling of the original letters, as the editors have meticulously transcribed and annotated each letter, providing the reader with a far more accurate sense of the letters as physical objects, complete with spots from sealing wax and postmarks. The Jones edition, on the other hand, is far more polished, but, as the scholar Daisy Hay notes, it lacks “the impetuous, idiosyncratic immediacy of the originals.”2 The differences between the editions are a necessary warning to readers that letters are, as Hay says, “always editorially constructed, and that the published epistle has a separate existence to the autograph scrawl.”3 For this book, I consulted all the available sources, the Shelley and His Circle edition as well as the Ingpen and Jones editions. I have also used the letters that Mary Shelley published after Percy died in an edition she entitled Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments. For each letter, I have supplied the citation source I used. The Jones and Ingpen editions were particularly useful in terms of supplying biographical context, while the Shelley and His Circle edition helped me understand the circumstances under which Shelley was actually composing each letter.

  1. Betty Bennett, “The Editor of Letters as Critic: A Denial of Blameless Neutrality,” in Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 6 (1994), 222.

  2. Daisy Hay, “Shelley’s Letters,” in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Anthony Howe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 210.

  3. Ibid., 211.

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