Hideous Love
Page 13
CLARA EVERINA SHELLEY is Mary and Shelley’s third child and their first girl to live long enough to be given a name.
ELISE DUVILLARD FOGGI is the devoted nursemaid of the Shelleys. They send her to Byron’s to help care for Allegra. She later marries Shelley’s manservant Paolo Foggi.
MARIA GISBORNE cares for Mary and Fanny when they are young children after the death of their mother. When Mary meets Maria again, she is living in the Italian town of Livorno, where Mary and Shelley take up residence for a period.
HENRY REVELEY is the grown-up son of Maria Gisborne who grows attached to Claire and proposes to her.
RICHARD HOPPNER is the Venetian British consul who, along with his wife, takes care of Allegra for a time.
PAOLO FOGGI is Shelley’s manservant and a beloved employee of the family until he later impregnates Elise Duvillard and is forced to leave their employment. He later blackmails Shelley over the baby of Naples.
ELENA ADELAIDE SHELLEY is “the baby of Naples.” Her parentage remains a mystery to this day, although it is certain that Mary, although registered as such, is not her mother.
AMELIA CURRAN is an artist who paints a portrait of William Shelley and who lives in Rome at the same time as Mary and Shelley. She also paints the only surviving portrait of Claire, which Claire is said to have detested.
PERCY FLORENCE SHELLEY is Mary and Shelley’s fourth child, and their only child who will reach adulthood.
TERESA GUICCIOLI is Lord Byron’s mistress. He lives with her family as her acknowledged escort even though she is still married to her husband.
THOMAS MEDWIN is Shelley’s cousin who introduces Shelley and Mary to the Williamses. Thomas writes an account of the time he spends with Byron when the great Lord Byron lives in Pisa.
EDWARD WILLIAMS is an Englishman who, along with his wife, Jane, becomes a part of the Shelleys’ Pisan circle. He and Shelley build the sailboat the Ariel together.
JANE WILLIAMS is Edward Williams’s unofficial wife. They have two children together. She also catches the eye of Shelley.
EDWARD TRELAWNY joins the Pisan circle of expatriates. He is a storyteller and proclaims to know everything about boats. He finds the man who builds Shelley and Edward Williams their boat, the Ariel. Trelawny later writes a controversial memoir of his time with Shelley.
A TIME LINE OF BOOKS
BY MARY SHELLEY
Mounseer Nongtongpaw or The Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris. London: Printed for the Proprietors of the Juvenile Library, 1808.
In 1808 a thirty-nine-quatrain reworking of Charles Dibdin’s five-stanza song Mounseer Nongtongpaw was published by the Godwin Juvenile Library. This version became so popular that it was republished in 1830 in an edition illustrated by Robert Cruikshank. There remains some debate over whether or not Mary is the actual author of this work or whether a prose rendering of hers influenced a man by the name of John Taylor to compose the poem.
History of a Six Weeks’ Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland, with Letters descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni. London: Published by T. Hookham, jun., and C. & J. Ollier, 1817.
Mary based this book (1817), which directly preceded Frankenstein, on journal entries and long letters home to Fanny. She used her mother’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) as a literary model. Mary wrote from an outsider’s perspective, though it is a lovely travelogue. She included Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc” in this book.
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, 3 volumes. London: Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor & Jones, 1818; revised edition, 1 volume, London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1831; 2 volumes, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833.
Nearly two hundred years after it was first published, Frankenstein continues to be read as one of the classic novels in the English language and stands as one of the earliest examples of science fiction. Mary began the book in June of 1816 at the age of eighteen and finished the main writing of it by May of 1817. There are numerous interpretations of Frankenstein, as is true of all of Mary’s writing. One reading of the text supposes the theory that it is a book about the divided self. The idea is that within the civilized man or woman exists a monstrous, destructive force. The creature that emerges from Frankenstein’s experiment reflects the loneliness of both the scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and the narrator, Robert Walton. All three characters long for a friend or companion. Frankenstein and his monster alternately pursue and flee from each other. Like fragments of a mind in conflict with itself, they represent polar opposites that are not reconciled and that destroy each other at the end. Frankenstein endures because of its abundant philosophical inquiries.
Mathilda, edited by Elizabeth Nitchie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.
After Frankenstein, Mary Shelley wrote the novella Mathilda, which was never published in her lifetime, partially because her father found it detestable. A rough draft was originally titled The Fields of Fancy (after her mother’s unfinished tale Cave of Fancy, written in 1787). Although not completely autobiographical, the book contains many elements that are self-reflective. For example, the three characters—Mathilda; her father; and Woodville, the poet—represent Mary Shelley, Godwin (Mary’s father), and Percy Shelley. The novella is in the form of memoirs addressed to Woodville, composed by a woman who expects to die at twenty-two. Written during the late summer and autumn of 1819, when Mary struggled with depression over the deaths of two children in nine months, Mathilda is both furious and elegiac, full of accountability and rife with self-pity. Mathilda may be Mary’s most famous work next to Frankenstein.
Valperga or The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, 3 volumes. London: G. & W. B. Whittaker, 1823.
Mary Shelley began writing her novel Valperga in April 1820 in Florence and was still working on it in Pisa that fall. Difficult years elapsed in Mary Shelley’s life between the novel’s first inception and its completion in the autumn of 1821, which is somewhat indicated by the title change from Castruccio, Prince of Lucca to Valperga. The focus of the novel, published in 1823, changes from Castruccio’s tale to the story of the heroine, Euthanasia. Mary’s father helped her edit this book. Valperga shares with Frankenstein and Mathilda the theme of the fall from the innocent, happy illusions of childhood into the reality of adulthood with its knowledge of suffering. Valperga was the last book Mary wrote while Shelley was still living.
The Last Man, 3 volumes. London: Henry Colburn, 1826; 2 volumes, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1833.
In February 1824, about a year and a half after Percy’s drowning, Mary began to write her bleakest novel, The Last Man. The Last Man has been called a combination of forms—a work of science fiction, an apocalyptic prophecy, a dystopia, a gothic horror, and a domestic romance. Envisioning a horrifying and disastrous future world, it chronicles the disappearance of the inhabitants of Earth as people are killed by war, emotional conflict, or a mysterious plague. It was Mary’s darkest and worst-reviewed book during her lifetime.
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, 3 volumes. London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1830; 2 volumes, Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1834.
The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck was perhaps Mary Shelley’s least successful novel. Impressed by the popularity of Sir Walter Scott’s historical romances, Mary attempted one based on the historical figure Perkin Warbeck, who claimed to be the younger son of King Edward IV. She was under some constraints in the composition of the novel. Mary created Perkin Warbeck as a stereotypically perfect character and then had to manipulate that character to adhere to historical truths.
Lodore, 3 volumes. London: Richard Bentley, 1835; 1 volume, New York: Wallis & Newell, 1835.
Mary Shelley’s novel Lodore is semi-autobiographical and repeats the triangle of characters found in Mathilda: father-daughter-lover. The most popular and successful of her novels since Frankenstein, Lodo
re was the first of Mary’s novels to have a sentimental, happy ending.
Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal, volumes 86–88 of The Cabinet of Biography, in Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopedia, conducted by Reverend Dionysius Lardner. London: Printed for Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman and John Taylor, 1835–1837; republished in part as Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, 2 volumes. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1841.
Mary Shelley became increasingly interested in nonfiction as she aged and wrote three volumes in the Reverend Dionysius Lardner’s popular Cabinet Cyclopedia. He had probably read her essays on Italian literature in the Westminster Review and commissioned similar work for his series.
Falkner, 3 volumes. London: Saunders & Otley, 1837; 1 volume, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1837.
In her last novel, Falkner, Mary Shelley explored another father-daughter relationship. In this book it is between an orphaned girl and her dastardly Byronic guardian, Falkner. Falkner is a perfect finale to Mary’s fictional writing as it encapsulates many of her concerns and uses her greatest novelistic strengths: a hero in conflict with himself, an absent mother, love and domestic responsibility, destiny and victimization—elements she had combined in the writing of Frankenstein nineteen years earlier.
Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France, volumes 102 and 103 of The Cabinet of Biography. London: Printed for Longman, Orme, Brown, Green & Longman, 1838, 1839; republished in part as Lives of the Most Eminent French Writers, 2 volumes. Philadelphia: Lea & Blanchard, 1840.
At the same time Mary was writing about eminent French writers, she was finally able to compile her husband’s work and poetry into four volumes as Sir Timothy (Percy’s father) lifted his prohibition of publishing Percy Bysshe Shelley’s work. Mary accomplished both enterprises beautifully even though her health began to decline during this period.
Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843, 2 volumes. London: Edward Moxon, 1844.
Mary’s last book, an account of summer tours on the Continent with her son Percy Florence and his college friends, was published in 1844. By then she was in ill health, and in 1848 she began to suffer what were, apparently, the first symptoms of the brain tumor that eventually took her life.
Posthumous Works
The Choice—A Poem on Shelley’s Death, edited by H. Buxton Forman. London: Printed for the editor for private distribution, 1876.
Tales and Stories, edited by Richard Garnett. London: William Paterson, 1891.
Proserpine & Midas: Two Unpublished Mythological Dramas, edited by A. Koszul. London: Humphrey Milford, 1922.
Mary Shelley’s Journal, edited by Frederick L. Jones. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947.
Mathilda, edited by Elizabeth Nitchie. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959.
Collected Tales and Stories, edited by Charles E. Robinson. Baltimore & London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.
The Journals of Mary Shelley, 2 volumes, edited by Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
SUGGESTED FURTHER READING
(and partial sources list)
Bennett, Betty, ed. The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 3 volumes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, 1983, 1988.
Feldman, Paula, and Diana Scott-Kilvert, eds. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 2 volumes. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.
Fraistat, Neil, and Donald H. Reiman, eds. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition, Second Edition. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002.
Hay, Daisy. Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry’s Greatest Generation. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010.
Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. New York: Viking Penguin, Inc., 1974.
Hoobler, Dorothy and Thomas. The Monsters: Mary Shelley and the Curse of Frankenstein. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2006.
McGann, Jerome J., ed. Lord Byron: The Major Works including Don Juan and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1986.
Robinson, Charles E., ed. Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley) The Original Frankenstein. By Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley). New York: Random House, Inc., 2009.
Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelley. London: John Murray (Publishers) Ltd., 2000.
www.litgothic.com/Authors/mshelley
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
STEPHANIE HEMPHILL is also the award-winning author of Wicked Girls: A Novel of the Salem Witch Trials, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist; Your Own, Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book; Sisters of Glass; and Things Left Unsaid: A Novel in Poems. She lives in Chicago, Illinois.
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
CREDITS
Cover art © 2013 by Jaroslaw Datta
Cover design by Ray Shappell
COPYRIGHT
This book, although based on real events and real people, is first and foremost a work of fiction. It consists largely of verse, conversations, and descriptions that are fictional, although attributed to real people as imagined or interpreted by the author.
Balzer + Bray is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
Hideous Love: The Story of the Girl Who Wrote Frankenstein
Copyright © 2013 by Stephanie Hemphill
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hemphill, Stephanie.
Hideous love : the story of the girl who wrote Frankenstein / Stephanie Hemphill. — First edition.
pages cm
Summary: A free-verse novel about the Gothic novelist Mary Shelley, a teenager whose love story led her to write one of the great literary masterpieces, Frankenstein.
ISBN 978-0-06-185331-9 (hardcover bdg.)
Epub Edition © JULY 2013 ISBN 9780062209238
1. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797–1851—Juvenile fiction. 2. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822—Juvenile fiction. [1. Novels in verse. 2. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1797-1851—Fiction. 3. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 1792-1822—Fiction. 4. Love—Fiction. 5. Authorship—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.5.H44Hi 2013
2013000237
[Fic]—dc23
CIP
AC
*
13 14 15 16 17 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
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