Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  Miss Curran earned her living by painting. She was not a particularly talented artist, but she probably hoped for more than the verbal thanks she received from Shelley for producing portraits of the entire family. Mary, who always regarded herself as an impossible subject for artists, was not much pleased by the result. ‘“You can have it,”’ Edward Trelawny quoted her as saying years later, ‘“but it is unfinished, and she has made a great dowdy of me; I care nothing about it.”’26 She cared enough, however, to try to rescue the portrait from Trelawny’s keeping in the last years of her life.

  Young William Shelley began sitting for his portrait on 14 May. Like all who met him, Amelia Curran was enchanted by the little boy’s pretty looks and high spirits; William was everybody’s pet. More at ease by now in Italian than his own language, he chattered while he sat for her as a bohemian elf, a nightshirt pulled down from one shoulder, a rose clasped in his hand. A few days later, he sickened with a childish ailment, worms. Shelley returned from a day-trip to Albano on 23 May to find Mary worried and William no better; a week later, Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne that they had decided to follow Dr Bell’s own change of summer plans and settle near Lucca or Florence. She could only feel confident about William if Dr Bell was in charge. Evidently uneasy, she added that he ‘is so very delicate – and we must take the greatest possible care of him this summer’.27

  William grew feverish and then comatose. On 2 June, Dr Bell called three times. On 5 June, Mary admitted to Mrs Gisborne that they were in despair, although the little boy had, by strenuous efforts, been revived from ‘the convulsions of death’ the previous day ‘The hopes of my life are bound up in him,’ she wrote. Shelley spent sixty hours sitting by the bed and on at least one occasion broke down in tears. On 7 June, William died of malaria. The knowledge that he could have been spared if they had left Rome a month earlier, as originally planned, was almost unbearable. His parents buried him in the quiet Protestant cemetery at Rome where, a few months earlier, they had wandered as tourists. Attempts to locate the grave a few years later revealed that the little corpse had been moved and lost. Like his sisters, William lies in unmarked ground.

  The Shelleys, Claire and the young English nanny, Milly Shields, left Rome as soon as William had been buried. They spent the next three months living near Livorno in a large stone villa, cool in summer, freezing as the autumn grew damp, out in the flat fields of the vineyards between the slopes of Montenero and the sea. By 1826, reviewing a collection of sketches of Italian life, Mary felt detached enough to write a charming and evocative account of life among the small farms, of fireflies flickering over the dark cornfields, the calls of the grape-pickers from tree to tree as they challenged each other at improvising rhymes. In retrospect, shivering in a damp London winter, it seemed to have been paradise.28 In the summer of 1819, she could think of nothing but her loss. She had been a mother three times; each time, the child had been snatched from her. ‘Oh, oh, oh fate, cruel giver of evil gifts, almighty shade of Oedipus, black Erinys, how overwhelming you are,’ Shelley had written, quoting Aeschylus, at the end of her first journal. What sin, she wondered, could have merited such relentless punishment?

  The old-fashioned concept of divine retribution was not one Mary had learnt either from Godwin or from Shelley; she began, nevertheless, to wonder if Harriet Shelley’s death lay at her door and if this was the penalty that was being exacted. The thought would linger, and haunt her.

  Notes

  1. CC–Byron, 12.1.1818.

  2. Mary’s opinion that there ‘was not much in them’ was given in a letter to Trelawny, 28.7.1824. Her view is partly confirmed by the strikingly unscandalous nature of Byron’s later journal notes, published in BL&J, vol. 8.

  3. PBS–TLP, 9.11.1818.

  4. MWSJ, 18.11.1818.

  5. PBS, ‘The Coliseum: A Fragment of a Romance’, in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, ed. Mrs Shelley, 2 vols. (1840), 1, pp. 168–82.

  6. PBS–TLP, 17/18.12.1818.

  7. Alphonse Lamartine, Twenty-five Years of My Life (1872), Bk 4, ch. 1.

  8. Anna Jameson, The Diary of an Ennuyée (1826).

  9. MWS–Sophia Stacey, 7.3.1820 (date amended from 5 to 7 by Betty T. Bennett in ‘Newly Uncovered Letters and Poems by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’, Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin, XLVI, July 1997).

  10. MWS–MG, 22.1.1818.

  11. MWS–Isabelle Hoppner, 10.8.1821 (Murray).

  12. The information paraphrased here comes from Richard Belgrave. In his letter to Byron of 16 September 1820 (Murray), Hoppner gave Elise Duvillard Foggi as his source.

  13. The revealing Hoppner correspondence is in the Murray archive.

  14. Elise Foggi–MWS, 27.7.1821 (Murray).

  15. Thomas Medwin, Conversations of Lord Byron (1824), p. 314.

  16. Medwin’s Revised Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1847), ed. Henry Buxton Forman (1913), pp. 205–8. (This was published as ‘A New Edition printed from a copy copiously amended and extended by the Author and left unpublished at his death’.)

  17. See Marion Kingston Stocking in CC, 2, pp. 645–53. It should be added that if, as Professor Stocking suggests, a ‘scrape’ meant that the lady became pregnant at Naples, the problem is deepened, but not solved.

  18. John Polidori, as the anonymous author of Sketches illustrative of the manners and costumes of France, Switzerland and Italy (1820).

  19. Marianna Starke, Travels on the Continent (1819), p. 440.

  20. MWSJ, 2.3.1819.

  21. CCJ, 28.3.1819.

  22. MWS–LH, 6.4.1819.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Isabelle Hoppner–MWS, 6[?].1.1819 (Abinger, Dep. c. 811/3). A hint of Mrs Hoppner’s grim tone can be given here: ‘Cette pauvre petite enfant souffre du froid dans une manière vraiment effrayante, elle est toujours gelée.’ She also drew unfavourable comparisons between Allegra and her own child.

  25. MWS, ‘Valerius, the Reanimated Roman’, CTS, p. 341. Not published in Mary’s lifetime, the story is generally assumed to have been written in 1819.

  26. E.J. Trelawny to the Athenaeum, 1878, in Letters of Edward John Trelawny, ed. Henry Buxton Forman (Oxford University Press, 1910), p. 263.

  27. MWS–MG, 30.5.1819.

  28. MWS, ‘The English in Italy’, a review, Westminster Review, VI (October 1826), P. 335.

  * On 27 March, Mary had noted their brief meeting at Chambéry with Elise’s parents and her illegitimate daughter. At a time which must have been emotionally distressing to Elise, we might wonder whether Shelley had offered her sexual comfort.

  † According to another story told by Claire in old age to her most avid interlocutor, E.A. Silsbee, there had been ‘a Scrape’ with a lady at Naples and both she and Mary had known all about it. The fact that the lady – her nationality was not specified – was still alive made it conveniently impossible for Claire to tell him more. ‘She is under a promise of secresy,’ noted Silsbee, who seems to have been content to report any story that made a good yarn.17

  ‡ On 28 June and 12 July 1814, Godwin noted meeting an Adelaide in the company of the Kenneys, his wife and, on the second occasion, a couple called Mercier. The fact that ‘Adelaide’ has no surname suggests that she may have been a relation, probably of Mary Jane Clairmont.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  A LOSS AND A GAIN

  1819–1820

  Italy – Leghorn [Livorno]

  Wednesday 4th [August 1819]

  I begin my [third] journal on Shelley’s birthday – We have now lived five years together & if all the events of the five years were blotted out I might be happy – but to have won & then cruelly have lost the associations of four years is not an accident to which the human mind can bend without much suffering

  Since I left Rome I have read several books of Livy – Antenor [translation of an ancient travel diary found at Herculaneum] – Clarissa Harlowe – The Spectator – a few novels – & am now reading the Bible and Lucan’s Pharsalia – & Dante
[.] S is today twenty seven years of age –

  Write – Read Lucan & the Bible – S writes the Cenci & reads Plutarch’s Lives – the Gisbornes call in the evening – S reads Paradise Lost to me – Read 2 Cantos of the Purgatorio.

  MARY HAD REASON TO BE MISERABLE, OF COURSE, BUT THE intensity of her grief was terrifying to the two people who shared the Villa Valsovano with her through the late summer of 1819. Her fourth child was due to be born in November; she dreaded the beginning of another cycle of hope, love and loss. ‘I never know one moments ease from the wretchedness & despair that possesses me‚’ Mary told Marianne Hunt three weeks after Williams death. She could not believe that he had been taken from her: ‘William was so good so beautiful so entirely attached to me … Did you ever know a child with a fine[r] colour – wonderful spirits …’1 Claire, truly frightened for the first time of what Mary might do, postponed a planned visit to Allegra, of whom they had heard nothing since April: ‘I cannot imagine how she [Mary] could have been left alone,’ she wrote to Byron a few months later.2

  Shelley was equally unnerved. His gentle, reassuring wife had vanished, leaving behind only an image of her past self. ‘My dearest M. wherefore hast thou gone / And left me in this dreary world alone,’ he scribbled in his jotting book. ‘Thy form is here indeed – a lovely one – / But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road, / That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode …’ A final, very faintly pencilled couplet revealed his determination not to be sucked into the same vortex of despair: ‘For thine own sake I cannot follow thee / Do thou return for mine.’3

  Heat, exercise and work offered Shelley his own defence against sadness. His study was a glazed room on the rooftop, typical of villas in the area, with a view across the vineyards to the sea. His exercise was a morning stroll to the shore with Claire, or to the Gisbornes. Maria, introducing him to Calderón’s great intellectual dramas, may have pointed out the striking kinship between Frankenstein and Life is a Dream in which man, treated as a brute, becomes one. Peacock offered lighter solace with his newest work, Nightmare Abbey. Here was Mary as the grave and brilliant Miss Celinda Toobad; here was Shelley, as Scythrop Glowry, with a tower which could almost be seen as a prophecy of his life in a modern Italian turret; here, Godwin’s novel Mandeville was mocked as ‘Devilman’. But Peacock was at his sharpest in parodying the aura of romantic gloom in which Byron wrapped the part of his persona he reserved for public consumption.4 Smiling at his friend’s ability to offer criticism and yet never cause pain, Shelley went back to his own new play about the family of Beatrice Cenci, a verse-drama closer to Byron than Peacock in its style and subject-matter.

  Plunged in grief, married to a man who refused to be drawn into sharing it, Mary kept to herself. She saw Shelley at meals, sometimes; they met every afternoon for a grim two-hour session translating Dante’s Purgatorio, not a work designed to raise anybody’s spirits. But Mary, as Shelley had recognized, was in that dangerous state of misery that feeds on itself. If he fled to the top of the house, it was because he could not bear to hear his wife accusing herself, and perhaps him, of having killed the children, while wishing, aloud and in her letters, that death would come and visit them again. ‘I ought to have died on the 7th of June last,’ she wrote to Leigh Hunt in September; the date of William’s death was branded on her memory.5

  She might, at such a time, have hoped for sympathy from her father. Godwin, in the summer of 1819, had more than the loss of a little-known grandson on his mind. Unable to pay the back rent on Skinner Street, he was threatened with eviction; a court case was being brought against him for £1,500 in arrears. Set for July, the case was finally heard and given against Godwin in October. Constables, the Edinburgh publishers, were pursuing him for a further £500. He had no one to support him. Charles Clairmont was abroad and penniless; young William Godwin had only survived three weeks of training as an engineer before being sent home with three fingertips missing.6 When Godwin wrote to his daughter, he thought not of her loss, but of her husband’s broken promises and the money which could still be sent to save the business and himself. Writing to Amelia Curran at the end of the summer, Mary wretchedly admitted that William’s death had not lessened her father’s demands and accusations: ‘so I gain care every day.’7 Shelley, meanwhile, had lost all patience with a father-in-law whose only interest in them seemed to be financial.

  All letters but one from Godwin to his daughter during this period have disappeared; the sole survivor is often produced as evidence of his stony heart. It is certainly a tough letter, but it shows a genuine wish to rally Mary’s spirits, to shake her out of despondency. A few harsh words – the lines were very lightly cancelled, remaining entirely legible to his reader – about Shelley’s ‘moral defects’ conceded that ‘they at least do not operate towards you’. Allegra, we should remember, was still assumed by the old Godwins to be Shelley’s child.

  There were, Godwin told Mary in this letter, written just three months after William’s death, two classes of people in the world, the dependent and the supporters. Among this second group, a rare few were capable of changing and improving the human condition. Mary was one of these. She had a duty to society, if not to herself.

  You were formed by nature to belong to the best of these classes, but you seem to be shrinking away, and voluntarily enrolling yourself among the worst.

  Above all things, I intreat you, do not put the miserable delusion on yourself, to think there is something fine, and beautiful, and delicate, in giving yourself up, and agreeing to be nothing.

  Remember too that, though, at first, your nearest connections may pity you in this state, yet that when they see you fixed in selfishness and ill humour, and regardless of the happiness of every one else, they will finally cease to love you, and scarcely learn to endure you.8

  Brutally candid, this was the honest counsel of a worried father. Mary, as Godwin frequently had cause to remind her, was heir to her mother’s depressive nature. Mary Wollstonecraft had made two attempts to kill herself; poor Fanny had succeeded. Following the death of William Shelley, he saw the danger signs in his daughter’s letters. ‘Everything on earth has lost its interest to me‚’ Mary told Amelia Curran on 27 June. ‘I am no[t] fit for any thing & therefore not fit to live,’ she informed Marianne Hunt two days later. It is unlikely that the lost letters to her father struck a more cheerful note. Godwin refused to offer sympathy, believing that it could only deepen grief.

  Brooding and withdrawn, Mary began work, not on the serious and scholarly novel she had planned to write, but on a fiction which would offer some release for her most unspeakable thoughts. The fact that she first called it ‘The Fields of Fancy’ shows that she was thinking about her mother in those late summer months: ‘The Cave of Fancy’ was an early attempt at a novel which Mary Wollstonecraft had abandoned, incomplete.

  Rewritten as Matilda, Mary’s novel is of interest chiefly as a work of self-revelation. It tells the story of a young girl (Mary herself was just twenty-two) whose mother dies giving birth to her. Matilda is subsequently exiled to Scotland while her heartbroken father travels abroad. She is sixteen and dressed in tartan – much as Hogg had remembered Mary when he saw her at Skinner Street in 1814 – when her father takes her back into his charge. Confused by Matilda’s striking resemblance to her mother, he is forced by her questions to admit that his love for her is more ardent than it should be. He flees her presence. Called to a lonely cottage above a seashore, Matilda arrives too late; her remorseful father has already drowned himself. Shown the corpse, she is overwhelmed by the sense that the fault is hers and that payment must be made. Some of the guilt which surfaced here clearly related to Mary’s concern that they were doing nothing to help Godwin at a time when his letters told her he stood on the brink of ruin.

  It is not clear whether Mary showed Shelley the novel while she was writing it, or even if she intended to publish it. The candour of some of her revelations suggests that Matilda began, at least, as a private so
lace, a secret outlet. Courted by a young poet, Woodville, in the later chapters of the book, Matilda broods on her responsibility for the death of her father. It enrages her to see Woodville, just as it enraged Mary to see Shelley, gliding forward ‘as an angel with winged feet might glide along the earth unimpeded by all those little obstacles over which we of earthly origin stumble’.9 Mary, watching how Shelley drew on her misery for his portrait of Beatrice Cenci, allowed Matilda to express her own resentment. She feels ‘like a character that he [Woodville] comes to see act … perhaps he is already planning a poem in which I am to figure.’10 Pathetically, she showed her awareness of how Claire and Shelley must perceive her: ‘I had become unfit for any intercourse … I had become captious and unreasonable: my temper was utterly spoilt.’11

  It seems at first embarrassingly obvious why Godwin, to whom Maria Gisborne proudly showed Mary’s manuscript when she visited London in 1820, should have disliked it. Mrs Gisborne herself thought the novel very fine; her journal recorded with surprise that Godwin, by contrast, considered it ‘disgusting & detestable; and there ought to be, at least if [it] is ever published, a preface to prepare the minds of readers, & to prevent them from being tormented by the apprehension from moment to moment of the fall of the heroine.’12 This, readers have usually supposed, shows that Godwin was alarmed by Mary’s treatment of the father—daughter theme, and that he found it shocking. But incest was a feature of Romantic literature, indeed by 1820 almost a literary cliché; far from being shocked by it, Godwin was ready to praise The Cenci as one of his son-in-law’s finest works.