Mary Shelley

by Catherine Reef

  Describing Mathilda’s sadness, Mary Shelley might well have been writing about her own: “My heart was bleeding from its death’s wound,” Mathilda confesses. “Never for one moment . . . did I cease to pray for death. I could be found in no state of mind which I would not willingly have exchanged for nothingness.” Mary sent Mathilda to her own father, asking him to find it a publisher, but Godwin hated the novella. The emotions Mary had displayed on its pages were “disgusting & detestable,” he said. The book’s treatment of incest would shock readers, and its ending was simply too sad. He put Mathilda away, showing it to no one and refusing to return it.

  So the summer of 1819 passed. In September, the melancholy household made its way over the bad roads to Florence, where John Bell, the Scottish doctor, was staying. Mary wanted to be near him when her baby was born. Charles Clairmont, Mary’s stepbrother, visited briefly. He had been rambling through Europe on very little money. A young woman named Sophia Stacey also showed up. An orphan raised by one of Shelley’s uncles, Sophia was touring Italy with a chaperone named Miss Parry-Jones. This strict, frowning old woman disapproved of the scandalous Shelleys, but Sophia herself was cheerful and friendly.

  On November 12, Mary gave birth to a boy whom the Shelleys named Percy. It was Sophia Stacey’s idea to give him the middle name Florence, after the city where he was born. “The little boy takes after me, and has a nose that promises to be as large as his grandfather’s,” Mary informed Maria Gisborne. As she held Percy Florence’s tiny form close to her heart, she felt love and an inkling of hope. “Poor Mary begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled,” Shelley wrote to Leigh Hunt.

  This picture of Florence was drawn in 1822.

  Rome had been a monument to the ancient world, but Florence reflected the grandeur of the Renaissance. Paintings and statues by Michelangelo and other great artists filled Florence’s galleries. The fifteenth-century brick dome topping the city’s cathedral remains the largest in the world even today. That winter, the weather grew bitingly cold. Old people swore that Florence had not been so frigid in seventy years. “Wind! Frost! Snow! How can England be worse?” Mary remarked. Wrapped in a heavy cloak with a gray fur collar, Shelley led Sophia and Claire through Florence’s narrow streets to see the sights, with Miss Parry-Jones tagging along. Mary stayed indoors, caring for Percy Florence.

  Sophia Stacey remarked on the Shelleys’ isolated life. They “see no company and live quite to themselves,” she noted in her diary. “He is always reading, and at night has a little table with pen and ink, she the same.” Mary, Stacey commented, was “a sweetly pretty woman” whose looks were “very delicate and interesting.” Mary wore the high-waisted, puffy-sleeved dresses that were then in fashion. She preferred pastel colors—pink, powder blue, and ivory—and wrapped Italian silk shawls around her shoulders.

  Warmer temperatures returned at the end of January, when Sophia Stacey moved on to Rome. Percy Florence was strong enough to travel, so Mary, Shelley, and Claire went to Pisa, the city that would be their home base for the next two years. “We are tired of roving,” Mary said. Maybe so, but in Pisa they moved from one dwelling place to another every few months. They rented rooms in one stone house overlooking the Arno River, for example, only until better ones became available.

  In Pisa, the Shelleys and Claire found a friend, a woman who had been Mary Wollstonecraft’s pupil many years before. Her name was Margaret King when Wollstonecraft knew her, and she had lived an unusual life. When she was very young, her parents had forced her to marry a wealthy nobleman, but at twenty-nine she left her husband and eight children and ran away to Europe. In Pisa, she was using the name Mrs. Margaret Mason. She was living with an Irishman named George Tighe, with whom she had two daughters.

  Mrs. Mason stood six feet tall. She had strong opinions, but she expressed them with charm and good humor. She and Tighe often got together with the Shelleys and Claire for evenings of spirited talk, much like those Mary remembered from Byron’s villa on Lake Geneva. They discussed politics in England and Ireland, what it meant to be an atheist or skeptic, and the amazing power of the human nose. George “Tatty” Tighe had a vast knowledge of soil chemistry, which fascinated Shelley. The poet made detailed notes on the subject in one of his notebooks.

  Mary Shelley wears a shawl in this portrait that was painted after her death.

  Both Mary and Claire grew fond of the couple’s daughters, Laurette, age ten, and Nerina, who was four. Mary wrote a story for Laurette titled Maurice, or the Fisher’s Cot. It told of an orphaned boy who finds a home with a kindly old fisherman in Torquay, the English seaside town that the Shelleys visited in 1815. Maurice stays on in their little cot, or cottage, after the fisherman dies, until he meets a wanderer searching for his son, who was stolen as a small child. Listening to the traveler’s tale, Maurice realizes that he is the man’s long-lost boy. Years later, Maurice returns to Torquay. The fisherman’s cot has been washed away, but he recalls how in that place “he had first discovered that he belonged to good, kind parents; with whom he now lived in content and happiness.”

  The Shelleys moved from one set of rooms to another in Pisa. The city’s famous Leaning Tower can be seen to the left, behind the trees and bushes.

  Margaret Mason helped Claire find a position in Florence. Claire was to live with an Italian doctor and his wife, teaching English to the couple’s children in exchange for her board. It would be good for Claire to get away from the Shelleys, thought Mason, who saw too much bickering between Mary and Claire. The two cared for each other, but they sometimes found it hard to live together in peace.

  Claire left in October 1820, around the time Percy’s cousin Thomas Medwin arrived on the scene. Medwin was four years older than Percy and had served with the British army in India. This talkative gent quickly got on Mary’s nerves. She complained in a letter to Claire, “Be one reading or writing he insists upon every moment interrupting one to read all the fine things he either writes or reads.” Percy used an Italian word to describe him. Medwin was a seccatore—a bore. “He is Common Place personified,” Mary declared. What was more, Medwin had no money. He let the Shelleys feed and shelter him and said nothing about when he planned to leave.

  Medwin had a high regard for Percy Shelley’s poetry, though. He looked admiringly at his cousin bending over his books. “His hair, still profuse, and curling naturally, was partially interspersed with grey,” Medwin noted, “but his appearance was youthful, and his countenance, whether grave or animated, strikingly intellectual.” He viewed Mary not as an author in her own right, but as her esteemed husband’s helpmate. Mary “partook of his genius, and could appreciate his transcendent talents,” Medwin thought.

  Margaret Mason, who had once known Mary Wollstonecraft, befriended the Shelleys and Claire.

  Some friends of Medwin’s came to Pisa in January 1821. Edward and Jane Williams had met in India when Edward was a lieutenant in a British regiment. They lived as man and wife, although they were not legally married. Jane had a husband, an army officer she had married at sixteen, but either she had left him or he had abandoned her. English people like the Williamses who defied society’s moral code—who lived together without marriage, for example—often felt freer to be themselves in Europe than they ever could at home. Edward Williams was a tall man with a ruddy face who boasted that he was an expert sailor. Jane Williams was small with thick dark hair and large eyes. She had a talent for managing money and saw to it that her household managed comfortably on a small income. The couple had a son, also named Edward, who was almost a year old. On March 16, Mary helped Jane give birth to their second child, a girl named Rosalind.

  Mary watched tenderly over her own little one, who was already speaking Italian by the time he was eighteen months old. Percy Florence was “a fine boy, full of life, and very pretty,” she informed Maria Gisborne. She was also writing another novel, Valperga, which features a real person from history. Castruccio Castracani was an Italian soldier o
f fortune who led an attack on Florence in the fourteenth century.

  Ever since coming to Italy, Mary had been thinking about how to describe the landscape. In Valperga, she painted it vividly in words. The beauty of the country around Este “consists in its exquisite vegetation,” she wrote. “Its fields of waving corn, planted with rows of trees to which vines are festooned, form prospects, ever varying in their combinations, that delight and refresh the eye.” The autumn wind swept over the flat land of Lombardy, she wrote, “scattering the fallen leaves of the chestnut wood; and the swift clouds, driven over the boundless plain, gave it the appearance, as their shadows came and went, of a heaving sea of dusky waters.”

  The son of an army officer, Edward Williams was born in India and educated in England. Once grown, he returned to India to serve as an officer himself.

  Born Jane Cleveland and legally married to an officer named Johnson, Jane Williams lived with Edward Williams as his wife.

  Word came from Byron. He was going to be traveling with his current mistress, Teresa Guiccioli. Four-year-old Allegra was no longer living with the Hoppners, so he was leaving her in a convent. It was common in Europe for the illegitimate daughters of well-to-do gentlemen to grow up in convents and be educated by nuns. Mary understood that Byron had tried to do what was best for his daughter, although she wished he had kept Allegra close to people she knew and loved. For Claire, the news was devastating. “The putting of Allegra, at her years, into a convent, away from any relations, is to me a serious and deep affliction,” Claire wrote to Byron. Not only would the little girl be among strangers, but she would be trained in the Roman Catholic faith, and Claire disapproved. Also, who knew how Allegra’s health would be affected? She would be better off with her mother, Claire insisted, and “to be benefited by the kindness and affection of her parents’ friends.”

  Byron coldly dismissed Claire’s worries. He claimed that he had always planned to place Allegra in a convent or English boarding school. Whether she was raised Catholic or Protestant made no difference to him. Byron would not, however, let Allegra be taught atheism by Percy Shelley. A desperate Claire came up with a scheme to kidnap Allegra. She pleaded with Shelley to help, but he advised patience. “You have no other resource but time and chance and change,” he told her.

  Over the next several months, Mary made a clean copy of Valperga and watched her little one grow. The Shelley and Williams families gathered often for dinner at the end of the day. In November 1821, Byron came to town with Teresa Guiccioli and a menagerie of dogs, monkeys, and exotic birds. Mary liked Byron’s twenty-year-old mistress. She was a “nice pretty girl without pretensions, good hearted and amiable,” Mary said.

  Lord Byron and Teresa Guiccioli savor a relaxing, musical moment.

  There were excursions to the countryside, where Shelley, Byron, and Edward Williams shot pistols at coins tossed into the air. Shelley and Edward Williams ordered a boat and talked of sailing it that summer along the Italian coast. Mary and Jane Williams listened to their conversation but were not part of it. They said to each other, laughing, “Our husbands decide without asking our consent, or having our concurrence.” The women were less than pleased with the notion of a boat. “But,” Jane said, “speaking would be useless, and only spoil their pleasure.”

  Edward Trelawny possessed the air of an adventurer.

  Someone new showed up. Edward Trelawny was a dark-bearded adventurer who had left England at twelve as a volunteer with the Royal Navy. Having quit the navy after seven years of service, he was making his way through Europe. Mary liked him. “There is an air of extreme good nature which pervades his whole countenance, especially when he smiles, which assures me that his heart is good,” she stated. Trelawny held her attention as he told stories about himself, and it hardly mattered that he had made many of them up. He “could not, even to save his life, tell the truth,” Byron said. Mary responded, “I am glad to meet with one who, among other valuable qualities, has the rare merit of interesting my imagination.” Trelawny described Mary as someone who was “witty, social, and animated in the society of friends.” He saw, though, that she could be “mournful in solitude.”

  Mary wished she could be happier with Percy, but he was spending too much time with his male comrades and ignoring her. He was even paying attention to other women. For a while, he became obsessed with a beautiful Italian teenager named Teresa Emilia Viviani, who was the daughter of the governor of Pisa. Her parents had placed her in a convent school while they finalized details of her arranged marriage. Seeing “Emilia” as a damsel in distress, Shelley toyed with the idea of stealing her away from the convent. He gave her pet birds and dedicated verses to her. He encouraged her to feel sorry for him, telling her that Mary was a cold wife. The infatuation ended when Emilia married and went to live with her husband’s family.

  Shelley also singled out Jane Williams for attention. He bought her a guitar, and he composed a poem about her playing it. He wrote that in her music he heard

  The clearest echoes of the hills,

  The softest notes of falling rills,

  The melodies of birds and bees,

  The murmuring of summer seas . . .

  He convinced Jane and Edward Williams that Mary—who was pregnant for the fifth time—cared nothing for him. Observing Mary, who again kept her feelings to herself, the Williamses felt sympathetic toward Percy. His wife, they agreed, ought to have been a more loving companion.

  By April 1822, everyone was thinking ahead to the warmer months. Byron and Guiccioli were moving to a seaside home at Livorno, and Trelawny would soon follow. The others planned to stay some forty miles north, on the beautiful bay of Lerici. Once Byron had packed up to leave, Claire came, having been invited to spend the summer with the Shelleys. On April 23, she went to Lerici with Jane and Edward Williams to look for a house large enough to hold them all. While they were away, word reached Pisa that Allegra had died of typhus, an infectious disease spread by lice and other parasites. The Shelleys told Claire nothing when she returned two days later. Percy feared that news of her child’s death would drive Claire mad.

  They hurried her off to Lerici, to the only house that had been for rent. Villa Magni was big and rundown. It was also isolated. The Shelleys, Claire, and the Williamses all lived together on the one floor that was habitable. Buying food and other supplies required a three-mile trip and a river crossing that was impossible in storms. “Had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas, we could scarcely have felt ourselves further from civilization and comfort,” Mary said.

  Villa Magni sat in a lonely, isolated spot.

  The others tried to shield Claire from the truth about her daughter, but she sensed that something had happened. One evening she entered a room where the others were talking and asked flat out if Allegra was dead. The strength and quiet composure she showed after hearing their honest answer surprised everyone, especially Claire herself. “I had a stern tranquillity in me suited to the time,” she wrote. “I bid defiance to the dark visitings of misfortune and to the disastrous hauntings of Fate. You cannot inflict more than I will proudly bear.” Claire had changed. She was no longer the capricious girl who shrieked when hearing ghost stories. She had matured into a woman who could weather life’s cruelest blows. Byron sent her a miniature portrait of Allegra and a lock of her hair. Claire wished to see the body, but Byron was already shipping it to England for burial.

  The Shelleys’ distress over the little girl’s death was more apparent. Percy started sleepwalking and seeing things that were not there. One night he walked out with Edward Williams to view the moonlight reflecting on the bay. Williams recalled what happened: “He complained of being unusually nervous, and stopping short, he grasped me violently by the arm, and stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach under our feet.” Williams asked Shelley what was wrong; was he in pain? Shelley’s only answer was to say, “There it is again—there.” He pointed toward something he alone could see: Alle
gra’s body rising from the waves, smiling and clapping.

  A strong sense of dread descended on Mary. For no clear reason, she came to see Lerici as a perilous place for her family. She begged Percy to leave. Her pleading became hysterical after May 12, when the new boat was delivered by sea. Mary’s behavior proved to Jane and Edward that she was a nag, that Percy’s claims about her were true.

  When Mary collapsed in pain one day in June, they were sure she was faking. But Mary was having a miscarriage, and she began to bleed uncontrollably. Wasting no time, Shelley sent for a doctor and for ice, but there would be a long wait until help came. Mary drifted toward unconsciousness. “I lay nearly lifeless,” she later wrote about the ordeal. The others fed her sips of brandy and rubbed her body with vinegar and cologne to revive her. After seven hours, the ice arrived. Claire and Jane hesitated to apply it without the doctor’s advice, but Shelley sprang into action. He filled a tin tub with ice and water, lifted Mary into it, and ordered her to sit still until the hemorrhaging stopped. Shelley’s quick thinking saved Mary’s life. She was out of danger by the time the doctor showed up.