by Janet Todd
Legend has it he once made a paper boat from a £50 note – by the way a thing of beauty (as well as immense value) with its intricate engraving.
Jane Austen, who values money no more than is proper but who knows – who better? – the value of a banknote, is appalled.
‘He yearns for dissolution,’ says Rachel, untouched by the top-hatted, churchgoing Shelley Fran’s creating – or indeed by his careless extravagance. ‘Apparently, he swims in the streams, though some record he can’t swim. Is he wooing death?’ She shrugs.
‘If it’s a matter of sleeping forever or being awake forever, I know what I’d choose,’ interrupts Fran. ‘If a decayed body weren’t horrid, I doubt we’d be so appalled at dying. Silence and sleep or noise and wakefulness. No contest.’
Rachel smiles. Shelley dresses up oblivion as Elysium. Is he afraid of nothingness?
Fran, Rachel and Thomas are back together at the B&B facing the first dinner prepared by Mrs Price. She’s allowed them to bring in a bottle of wine beforehand – and pay for glasses and corkscrew. They decide to drink it in the cluttered sitting room before dinner.
‘So, truly, what’s so special about Shelley in your view, Thomas?’ asks Rachel. She likes to hear him praised.
‘Purity. Purity of spirit,’ he replies.
‘Sex?’ asks Fran, forgetting her earlier embarrassment at Cambridge station.
The others ignore her.
‘Evil was for him an accident on earth,’ says Thomas, ‘but it was real and warring with the power of good. To let it in was dangerous to mind and body.’
‘Quite a jejune idea,’ says Fran.
‘Not really. The body and soul were identical for Shelley.’
‘Hmm,’ murmurs Fran losing inhibition as wine washes her veins, ‘and you agree? So much more pleasant for a young, healthy and, if I might say, pleasantly muscular, person to think. In my case I don’t want my soul to commune with age spots and dewlaps and leaking orifices.’
Thomas exhales sharply, swallows and goes on. Rachel settles her face into an enigmatic expression. It dispels awkwardness in most reasonable people, though it always infuriated her demanding mother. ‘He thought the soul became encrusted with stones, shells and growths, so that in time it became heavy as lead. But these encrustations could be sliced off with a sharp knife.’
‘Not too easy with the ageing body, or do you propose plastic intervention?’ says Fran.
Thomas tries again to ignore the interruptions; ‘shock-jock’ swims through his mind and, happily, exits.
‘But he thought too the body was frail and exposed, hence the search for eternal beauty and love.’
‘In other people,’ sniffs Fran, now irrepressible. ‘Beauty elsewhere. Other people had to measure up. Where he could grumble and rumble, he did.’
Thomas gives her a steely look. Annie should have come: she’d have kept her friend in check.
‘He was always anxious about his own health. One moment he worried about typhus, at another syphilis and consumption. He called himself a feeble, feverish being. He read up about disease and tried cures. He’d have had a field day Googling.’
Thomas smiles at Fran. A generous man, he wants to include her if he can, despite her infuriating ways. ‘Mercury, Cheltenham salts, Scott’s vitriolic immersions, poultices of caustic, warm baths, Mesmerism and leeches. He ate little, weighed what he ate, and filtered his water through a stone. Butter horrified him. When years back he visited Wordsworth’s friend Southey, Mrs Southey’s buttery biscuits stuck in his throat.’
Jane Austen usually avoids commenting on other shadows, but can’t resist nimbly descending the stairs to whisper to Fran, Your Shelley’s a hypochondriac. Had I known this, I might have lodged him in Sanditon and dosed him with asses’ milk.
I do agree, Fran whispers back. He could have been mates with Sir Edward Denham and talked high poetry. They both giggle.
Thomas assumes his allusion to butter biscuits has provoked this response. ‘But, seriously, it was the world’s slow stain that affected him. A poet of his calibre is indeed more delicate, more sensitive than others.’
I fancy, Jane Austen continues, I’d have had little time for him in life.
And he less for you, thinks Thomas, who has a strange tickling in his head that makes him recall, for no reason he can see, Jane Austen and her inflated self-satisfaction, her now outrageous popularity. He feels an urge to provoke.
‘The materiality you so like in, for example – and it’s a random choice – Jane Austen, is more a female thing in art,’ says Thomas turning to Fran, who hears a snigger in her right ear.
I like a glass, a good fire, yes butter too.
‘We don’t have to pit Shelley against Jane Austen,’ says Rachel. Back in Cambridge Annie had mentioned Fran’s habit of quoting and channelling the novelist. Rachel’s been on the look-out but feels nothing ectoplasmic.
‘Well we’re here braving wind and rain. Instead of settling by a log fire in a comfortable boutique hostelry in Austen’s Hampshire.’
‘Nothing comfortable about log fires in summer. They bring on asthma,’ says Fran.
Rachel hopes this niggling will stop tomorrow when they’re by the lakes. ‘It’s an image of comfort. Make another if you want – perhaps hot tea and buttered toast.’
Jane Austen hears that. My delight, she says, especially when a little on in years. In Sanditon I wrote of a family cosily by a summer fire, buttering toast. A faraway look enters her eyes.
‘Shelley was vegetarian, as I am,’ Thomas concludes.
‘Ah,’ says Rachel, remembering him avoiding Annie’s cheese but demolishing her hare and orange paté, ‘we’re having Welsh lamb and new potatoes for dinner.’
‘Let me quote Shelley on the carnivore: “as Plutarch recommends, tear a living lamb with his teeth and, plunging his head into its vitals, slake his thirst with the steaming blood …”’
‘Jeez,’ exclaims Rachel catching Fran’s eye, ‘vegetarians are so aggressive!’
‘I can compromise,’ says Thomas. ‘Eating meat isn’t eating human flesh. Anyhow, Shelley was inconsistent. Sometimes he demolished bacon and veal chops. I’m actually vegan, like my wife, but I know the concept is too advanced for our landlady.’
A young leveret, a brace of partridges, a leash of pheasants, a dozen of pigeons, mumbles Jane Austen.
‘You wouldn’t perhaps mind, Thomas, if we ate the lamb while you toyed with the veg and avoided the gravy?’ says Rachel.
‘I love gravy,’ says Thomas, ‘always have.’
11
‘One good thing about this road, no roundabouts,’ says Thomas next morning as they drive together towards Elan Valley. Sun streaks through a benign rain. ‘Today will be better.’
They arrive at Garreg Ddu by way of the café, Cwm Elan deep below. They get out of the car.
‘Bleak,’ says Thomas looking round.
‘Labour suffered here,’ says Fran. ‘Miners and farmers living in miserable conditions. The gentry in their mansions chose to see the picturesque and beautiful, not the industry their comfort rested on.’
Rachel smiles, ‘I agree, Fran. Whatever his love for the lower orders, Shelley’s never anything but upper class.’
Fran looks at Rachel’s boots – how many different types of footwear has the woman brought? She wriggles her toes in the same old lace-ups.
‘Privileged perhaps,’ says Thomas flicking his tongue over gelled lips. ‘But Shelley can still feel grief at seeing and losing the ideal.’ Fran raises her eyebrows at Rachel, who turns away.
Thomas tries again. ‘Shelley glimpses something transcendent, then mourns the loss.’
‘Just Romanticism, surely,’ says Fran not unkindly.
‘Maybe, but Shelley catches our feeling of imprisonment more than any writer I know. He makes us feel how we’re manacled to systems.’
And duty? That London flat? All those babies?
Sensing Fran’s thoughts, Rachel nods encouraging
ly to Thomas. ‘Go on.’
He recites:
All things are recreated, and the flame
Of consentaneous love inspires all life: …
The balmy breathings of the wind inhale
Her virtues, and diffuse them all abroad:
Health floats amid the gentle atmosphere,
Glows in the fruits, and mantles on the stream.
Holding Thomas’s eye, Rachel pretends to whisper to Fran, ‘The place is unsettling him.’
Sensitive to women’s asides, even when facetious – his wife and motherin-law speak in low tones while cooking–Thomas grunts, ‘OK, let’s bring in Harriet Number Two, Harriet Westbrook. That’s what you want.’
‘We do. It’s my cue,’ says Rachel, twirling each booted foot to ease her ankles. ‘Let’s talk and walk over rough ground in Romantic manner.’
Having seen the pretty schoolgirl, Shelley is smitten. Young and unformed, this Harriet may be saved from convention, groomed into a noble soul. Her headmistress tears up one letter breathing liberty and atheism, others get through.
‘She should have been more vigilant.’
Perhaps she smells an advantageous match. As for young Harriet, she’s deferred to a sister twice her age most of her life; easy to switch to a handsome, charismatic, sexy – some might say over-sexed – youth of nineteen. She swallows his stories of family persecution. As good as romance.
She hates school, she writes. What fifteen-year-old doesn’t? It’s enough. A mere four months since he’d been sent down from Oxford, weeks after quitting Elan Valley, Shelley plucks Harriet from her cosy life and thrusts her into his own erratic orbit.
He urges free love, she holds out for marriage. She has that much sense.
They’re hitched in Edinburgh in August 1811, neither sets of parents, trade or gentry, consulted or consenting. The marriage register names the groom a ‘Farmer, of Sussex’.
‘And all the while,’ adds Rachel, ‘he’s writing to his friends how much he hates “matrimonialism”. An ineffable sickening disgust rises in his gorge when he thinks of monogamy.’
‘He’s only following radical thought,’ urges Thomas. ‘In his 1790s Political Justice, William Godwin wrote that marriage was an affair of property, and the worst of all properties.’
‘It’s coming back,’ interrupts Fran, finding it hard simply to listen with the place intruding and Jane Austen muttering in her ear. ‘Godwin changed tack later, I remember. After marrying Mary Wollstonecraft.’
‘Yeah. He revised the work. He was soon on his second marriage.’
‘But Shelley stays with the first edition.’
‘The young can never bear their elders’ common sense,’ mumbles Fran.
Comic, thinks Rachel glancing at Fran, that simultaneous urge to talk and not be heard.
Eager to make a revolutionary of the loving little girl, Shelley takes Harriet (and her older sister) to Dublin, where he prints copies of a pamphlet Address to the Irish People. Priced modestly at 5d., it’s intended to ‘awaken in the minds of the Irish poor a knowledge of their real state’. It offers ‘a rational means of remedy’.
Of course it fails: Ireland never cared much for English saviours. By April 1812 the Shelleys are at Cwm Elan.
‘I haven’t heard everything,’ interrupts Thomas, ‘too blustery. I take the social vision more seriously than you, Rachel. Tom Grove mocks his cousin’s habit of rescuing people from comfort; but, even if comfortable, Shelley’s waifs have dull lives: he lets them see beyond, want something more. So, with Harriet. Not so despicable.’
‘Well,’ says Rachel, better pleased today than yesterday, having drunk a stronger brew of coffee at Elan village café than the B&B served, ‘I expect it’s Shelley himself that Harriet and her successors want, rather than “something more”. Sadly for them he tends to rescue and move on.’
‘I dislike charisma,’ sniffs Fran. ‘Usually just immense self-centredness.’
‘Old-lady speak,’ laughs Rachel. ‘We all have heroes.’
‘Back to Harriet,’ says Thomas flexing his shoulders. ‘There was real love. In his first long poem, Queen Mab, Shelley writes a moving tribute to her: “thou wert my purer mind;/Thou wert the inspiration of my song”.’
As they amble over the wet ground by the water, the rain unsure now whether to go or stay, Fran mulls over heroes. Is Rachel right? Isn’t it Shelley’s life, that predatory, destructive, overwhelmingly glamorous life, that’s brought them all here? Her memories and tale of poor Betty Pugh are adding little.
‘Jane Austen might have read Queen Mab,’ she says interrupting her own thoughts. ‘She’s writing Mansfield Park when it was published.’
‘Nope. Never distributed. He stored most copies at William Clark’s bookshop in London, where – and even you must admit this, Thomas – with his ability to get everyone else into trouble, years later they’re discovered and sold on the black market. Clark is imprisoned for publishing blasphemous libels: by then Jane Austen and Harriet Shelley are dead.’
‘Truce,’ says Thomas. ‘Shelley’s views on revolution change: he tries to suppress the sale. Not his fault.’
‘Mary Shelley is better at suppression. When she prints her dead husband’s poetry, she omits his tribute to Harriet. I’ll go on.’
Sir Timothy is outraged at the imprudent match and won’t fund it. Yet the young couple don’t live badly. Shelley can point tradesmen towards his expectations (none anticipated Sir T’s extraordinary longevity). A carriage is ordered, used and not paid for. Claims of creditors are fatuous, evaded by skipping town.
Rachel nods to Fran, who’s reluctant to expose her prim, lower-middle-class soul again.
‘Yes,’ says Rachel. ‘He drinks the best green tea and keeps his hair back with the finest tortoiseshell. Aristocrats are gilded flies’ – as they walk she’s rubbing her hand along the soft green moss on some standing boulders, enjoying the sensation – ‘but oh the deliciousness of being one as well as scorning them. For all his revolutionary tendencies, Shelley knows what’s essential for a gentleman.’
‘OK. If you follow Shelley round Britain, you usually find his house by looking for the best in the neighbourhood.’
It saddens Fran that Thomas and Rachel aren’t more excited about Elan Valley. Can’t they see with her eyes? She feels tender towards the trodden ground.
‘Maybe we’ll do that one day,’ says Thomas, struck by a sudden joy at his freedom. He coughs to show he’s been exclamatory.
After an hour or so of silent walking, the three settle on separate rocks, sheltered by a bank shiny with dripping water.
The youngsters are summering in Cwm Elan with Tom Grove and Henrietta. This time Shelley’s so enthusiastic about the valleys he determines to stay. He hears of a fine mansion for rent, seat of the Lewis Lloyds, maybe a mile and half further into the hills along steep terrain, close to a meeting of streams.
Only Fran visualises the house, Nantgwyllt – Welsh for wild brook. ‘Go on, Rachel,’ she says, not attempting to restrain her eagerness.
To some eyes, the house with its flat grey façade is too austere; others find it elegant. All admit its magnificent setting: framed by trees, with a lawn falling towards the bubbling water. The projecting spur on which it sits forms a sort of island.
‘Shelley loves an island,’ adds Thomas. ‘Such an enclosed and cut-off place haunts his imagination all his life.’
Round the house mountains and rocks make a barrier which ‘the tumult of the world may never overleap’. To Shelley it appears the very place for his commune, the utopia of ‘amiable beings’, ‘asylum of distressed virtue’, ‘rendez-vous of the friends of liberty and truth’.
Rachel, Thomas and Fran stare over the reservoir. ‘Somewhere there,’ says Fran. It’s a guess.
Everyone must come – including William Godwin. Amazingly he’s still alive. Bring his family of girls. A Miss Hitchener too, a schoolteacher some ten years older than Shelley.
‘I reme
mber her,’ exclaims Fran, ‘a grown-up among children.’ Throughout the courtship and bedding of Harriet he’s been writing intense erotic letters to her; she’s his soul-mate, his soul-sister, will be the star of the commune. Sadly, when he sees Miss Hitchener in the flesh, he finds her ugly; swiftly she’s demoted.
Only pretty women in this story. Too many characters spoil a plot.
‘Young men demand physical as well as intellectual beauty,’ remarks Fran.
But not the other way round, intrudes Jane Austen. You’ll remember Henry Crawford in Mansfield Park appearing plain to the Bertram girls till his charm makes him handsome.
Lizzie Bennet? She isn’t the belle of the ballroom when (on a second attempt) she attracts rich Mr Darcy with her sparkle.
Try to remember I created them, chuckles Jane Austen. That’s the point.
All Shelley needs is £98 for rent and near £1000 for stock. His name’s persuasive in the area: there are, at first, no impediments to credit. Before paying a penny, Percy and Harriet move in. Their baggage trundles up the valleys. It includes boxes of books for arranging in the grandest room, a library of classical and radical texts.
Like ailing Henrietta Grove in Cwm Elan, Harriet finds bleaker Nantgwyllt bad for chesty ailments. Ill when she arrives, she’s slow to recover. The house is often cold and damp even in summer.
‘But,’ interrupts Fran, looking at Thomas, ‘the bleakness which hikers and bikers so like wasn’t so extreme then. Many of the bottom slopes were densely wooded with oak, ash, spruce and Scots pine. Still, no denying, it’s a harsh place. In winter, snow lingers in the deep valleys, the house is unreachable. Shelley visited Cwm Elan in spring and summer. Not hard to imagine how he’d fare through the cold claustrophobia of a winter in remoter Nantgwyllt.’
Rachel smiles at Fran – a little loftily, Thomas thinks. He smiles too.
‘The suicide rate in Radnorshire was always high,’ adds Fran. ‘It was a local boast, along with having the fewest people per square mile in England and Wales, and the most sheep. Shelley doesn’t sound a winter person.’