Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The villa which the Williamses were still renting from the Poschi family provided an answer; staying with them, Claire could visit or be visited with no risk of meeting the young woman who had serenely banished Allegra to a convent on the other side of Italy. (Bagnacavallo was twelve miles from Ravenna.) Mary, still busily copying out her novel, kept no diary in October, but Claire’s journal records a period of leisured contentment, of teaching Italian to Edward Williams, reading German with Shelley and – despite almost daily downpours – enjoying her routine four-mile walk to San Giuliano and back. We can, again, make what we wish of an entry for 18 October when Mary went to spend the night with the Williamses while Shelley and her stepsister stayed alone at the house in San Giuliano; the signs are that the relationship between Claire and himself remained loverlike in its intensity. On 11 December, he told Claire that his love for her was still a source of ‘disquietude’ to him and that he was suffering, in her absence, from ‘a solitude of the heart’.

  Shelley’s own plan had been for Claire to stay near them throughout the winter, living with the Williamses, or so he told her. Mary was set against this scheme; so, for different reasons was Mrs Mason, who passionately believed that Claire could only benefit from an independent, scandal-free life. The case which this eminently sensible woman made was hard for Shelley to reject. Winter was the social season in Pisa, with the Tuscan court arriving from Florence and a swarm of English visitors moving into the Lung’Arno palaces. Scandal would be inescapable – and Byron would be furious. Did Shelley really want to incur Byron’s wrath?

  He did not. Claire spent her last day in Pisa at Casa Silva with Mrs Mason, packing up her possessions and stopping to write a spiky note to Mary. She wanted money from Shelley but she didn’t want him to bring it himself ‘because he looks singular in the streets’. She wanted all her possessions sent over at once and ‘if you could out of your great bounty give me a spunge I should be infinitely obliged to you.’4 The following morning, 1 November, Claire returned to the Boitis in chilly Florence. Travelling away from Pisa’s sunny towers, she saw Byron approach and pass her, rattling along the dusty road in his monstrous Napoleonic carriage at the head of a train of horses and the menagerie of monkeys, dogs and exotic birds acquired on his travels.

  *

  Shelley had done handsomely by his friend and the travelling zoo. The Palazzo Lanfranchi, looking south across the Arno towards the Shelleys’ own new winter residence, was a great stone fortress of a building with a magnificent marble staircase, frescoed walls and enough creaks and groaning doors to promise an army of spectres for company. The rooms were, if anything, too vast; he felt forlorn. Teresa was settled nearby with her family; the Hunts, while sending assurances that they would come by balloon if it could speed their arrival,5 were still in England, forced back to port by storms. Wistfully, Byron urged Augusta Leigh to come and keep him company, bringing, if she must, her husband. The offer was not taken up; Teresa’s brother Pietro Gamba and a gang of male cronies who included Shelley, Williams, the newly returned Tom Medwin and John Taaffe, became Byron’s regular companions.

  Across the yellow river, in a long suite of rooms looking away from the Lanfranchi and out over the magnificent gardens to the rear of the adjacent palace, the Shelleys had settled on an upper floor of the tall Tre Palazzi di Chiesa on 25 October. They were, for the first time in their Italian travels, surrounded by furniture found and paid for by themselves. The windowsills were bright with flowers bought by Mary in the local markets. The Williamses, after sharing their rooms for the first three weeks, moved into an apartment on a lower floor. The two families were constantly in and out of each other’s rooms, dining together at the end of days so glorious, Mary wrote to Mrs Gisborne on 30 November, that ‘the burning sun of winter drives us to seek the shade’. She hinted at other sources of pleasure, since ‘Claire is returned to her usual residence, and our tranquillity is unbroken in upon’. She wrote with rapture of Byron’s latest poem, Cain, as appearing ‘almost a revelation from its power and beauty’, and with enthusiasm of a new plan, to go with Shelley to Greece, when her heroic friend Mavrocordato had freed it from the Turks, to ‘one of those beautiful islands where earth, ocean, and sky form the Paradise’. Pisa, she added for good measure, had become ‘a little nest of singing birds’ since the arrival of Byron and Teresa.

  This sounds like happiness, but Mary’s moods were as volatile as her husband’s. The same letter is full of complaints about the neglectful behaviour of Charles Ollier, the publisher who was sending them no news either about Shelley’s Hellas, completed that autumn, or about Mary’s novel. ‘Ollier treats us abominably,’ she lamented. Shelley had, two months earlier, sent their English publisher a long, detailed and laudatory account of Valperga, on which Mary was still working. The response had been overwhelmingly disappointing. Ollier, perhaps because he had done so badly out of Shelley himself, refused to be tempted into making a commitment. One can hardly blame him; to take an unfinished book on a husband’s recommendation, sight unseen, is not businesslike.

  Mary’s complaint of 30 November marked the beginning of a last anxious month of revisions to a work which she now feared might not only fail to raise the substantial sum she wanted to give to her father, but might never be published at all. She was proud of Valperga. She had looked forward for months to seeing it in print. Now, her spirits sank. ‘Correct the novel – read a little Greek – not well,’ she noted on 30 November. ‘Read the Hist, of Shipwrecks – not well – correct the novel,’ she wrote the following day. (She was growing anxious about the Hunts’ sea journey to Italy in winter.) On 5 December, she read ‘Milton on divorce’. Tacitus followed: ‘a dismal day’. Shelley, writing to Claire on the last day of the year, reported that Mary ‘has suffered terribly from rheumatism in her head, to such a degree as for some successive nights entirely to deprive her of sleep’. Laudanum and the disagreeable method of scalding to raise blisters on the skin provided little relief. In January 1822 she reluctantly decided to let Godwin take the manuscript and do the best he could for it himself.

  This was her private life. Publicly, after Byron’s arrival in Pisa, Mary showed every appearance of joining in and enjoying the daily rituals which now revolved around their famous neighbour. Both Byron and Shelley were excellent shots, who enjoyed competing. Emilia Viviani’s father, in his capacity as governor of Pisa and because he felt no great warmth towards Shelley or his friends, forbade any such sport in the Lanfranchi garden; instead, the sportsmen went off on most afternoons to fire their weapons in the orchard of a handsome old farm at Cisanello, two miles east of Pisa. Byron, plump and pale at this stage in his life, had become so averse to being stared at that he had himself driven to the city gate in a closed carriage before climbing into the saddle of a skittish but broadbacked Flanders mare. Shelley, Taaffe, Medwin and Williams ambled beside him while Jane Williams and Mary rolled along behind in Teresa Guiccioli’s carriage. Sometimes, if Mary felt well enough, the two Englishwomen dawdled at the rear of the procession, poking at any interesting flowers or grasses in the hedgerows with the points of their furled umbrellas. They discussed their relief that, even though Mary was suffering, both Williams and Shelley appeared to be thriving in the beneficial climate of Pisa. Shelley was ‘not quite well but he is much better’, Mary informed Mrs Gisborne on 21 December; the climate and the company were doing him good. She almost always mentioned his name in conjunction with that of Edward Williams now. The two of them had become engrossed by boat-building plans.

  Shelley, Edward Williams had written shortly after his own arrival at Pisa, was a delightful companion, ‘extraordinarily young, of manners mild and amiable, but withal full of life and fun’.6 The person to whom he was sending this description in April 1821 was his Cornish friend Edward Trelawny, then living in Switzerland and passing his time on shooting and hunting expeditions. Trelawny heard from Williams again in early December; this time, his interest was caught by the news that Byron was at Pisa.
Trelawny knew little or nothing about Shelley in 1821; everybody knew about Byron. He was already keen to visit; his perfect opportunity came when Williams wrote again on 26 December. The news now was that they were all planning to shift up the coast the following summer and do plenty of sailing. Boats were required. Byron, naturally, wanted something handsome; Williams and Shelley were hoping for something fast and sleek. Trelawny knew – or claimed to know – everything relating to ships; would he join their ‘select committee’ to help with the design? Might his naval friend Daniel Roberts in Genoa take on the commission to build either, or both, the craft?7 Trelawny arrived at Pisa on 14 January 1822, three weeks after Williams’s invitation.

  Mary, brooding over stories of shipwrecks and remembering only that she felt ill whenever she went to sea, was not in love with the project. She was, however, instantly entranced by the man who was being invited to help in their yacht’s design. She admired Trelawny’s height and handsome Moorish looks; she liked his easy manner and good-natured smile; she thought, after listening to his stories, that he was one of the most interesting men she had ever met. Nobody could spin tales like Trelawny. ‘He tells strange stories of himself,’ she noted on 19 January:

  Horrific ones – so that they harrow one up, with his emphatic but unmodulated Voice – his simple yet strong language – he Portrays the most frightful situations – then all these adventures took place between the ages of 13 and 20 – I believe them now I see the man – & tired with the everyday sleepiness of human intercourse I am glad to meet with one who among other valuable qualities has the rare merit of interesting my imagination.8

  Mary had been deep in Scott’s novels again that winter. Trelawny’s tales introduced her to another world, one she had supposed only to exist in the dark, dramatic poems such as Byron had produced a few years earlier, Lara, The Corsair, Mazeppa.

  Trelawny shared Mary’s taste for these works. He kept a copy of The Corsair under his pillow, or so he claimed. By the time he arrived in Pisa, he had already persuaded himself that he was the living original on whom Byron had drawn for inspiration. Even the Williamses had only known their Cornish friend – he was actually born in London – since meeting him in Geneva in 1820 at the home of the Cornish baronet, John St Aubyn. They knew nothing of Trelawny’s domestic history, of the humiliation of a well-publicized divorce case, or of parents who had no high opinion of a feckless, troublesome, scantily educated third son who was now struggling to survive on £300 a year. (The naval war had ended when Trelawny was too young to be made a lieutenant, and thus to benefit from a pension.) In Pisa, Trelawny had a captive audience of innocents for whom he could recreate himself as the hero he longed to be. Surrounded by admiring listeners and with only Byron’s cynical grin to warn him against going too far (Byron alone seems to have had Trelawny’s measure) the newcomer joyfully converted a pedestrian naval career into that of a swashbuckling privateer.*

  Writing his recollections of three months at Pisa almost forty years later, Trelawny embellished the truth again, with the kindly intention of adding lustre to Shelley’s name. Less laudable was the viciousness with which he punished Byron for having failed to be the brooding, melancholy hero he had expected to meet. Trelawny was, above all, horrified by Byron’s refusal to take his own romantic heroes seriously. To jeer at The Corsair was, in a sense, to jeer at Trelawny himself, and Trelawny was not a man who took kindly to being ridiculed. Shelley, a poet whom he imagined sitting in a woodland glade and gazing into a pool for inspiration, was the real thing; Byron, who shut himself up in a gloomy little parlour behind a billiard room, and produced poetry as methodically as a dairymaid churning butter, was clearly a fraud. It did not take Trelawny long to convince himself that anything good Byron wrote must have been under Shelley’s influence, a view which Edward Williams readily supported. Williams, ironically enough, had been led to this view during his long conversations with Mary about her husband’s work. It is ironic because Mary, the supporter of Shelley’s superior claims, was the woman whom Trelawny would one day accuse of never having appreciated either Shelley or his poetry.

  At the time, however, Trelawny was much taken by Mary. His later description of her as ‘rather under the English standard of woman’s height, very fair and light-haired, witty, social, and animated in the society of friends’,9 is only a glancing recollection of a young woman who was as strong-willed, as imaginative and – which rather amused him at the time – as hot-tempered as himself. If Mary did, as he later remembered, start their friendship off with a string of girlish questions about ‘operas, and bonnets, marriages, murders and other marvels’, it had been no hardship to provide answers.

  Trelawny and Mary, as her journal entries and letters make plain, were quick to make friends. She listened to his romantic tales; he heard, we must imagine, with fascination her first-hand report of the escalating war in Greece. (She was still in close touch with Mavrocordato and receiving his long, detailed accounts of the situation.) When plans were made to put on a private performance of Othello at Byron’s palace, with Byron as Iago, Mary volunteered to play Desdemona to Trelawny’s Moor. He knew the part well enough to misquote Othello’s lines in letters whenever he wanted to dramatize himself. He looked, Mary observed to Mrs Gisborne on 9 February, very Moorish, ‘a kind of half arab Englishman’. She must have been quite excited by the prospect of acting with him; Teresa, unfortunately, decided to prohibit a drama which she could neither take part in nor follow.

  Trelawny arrived in Pisa at a time when Mary, her health somewhat improved, was ready to enjoy herself. January and February were the months of the Carnival, of the opera and an endless round of balls. ‘I had thought of being presented,’ she confessed to Mrs Gisborne on 18 January, but Shelley had been against it and now the grand-duke and his court had returned to Florence.

  A modest form of snobbery of this kind may explain why Mary had since mid-December been paying occasional attendance at the Sunday services held privately downstairs by another inhabitant of the Tre Palazzi di Chiesa.10 Dr John Nott, Anthony Trollope’s model for Dr Vesey Stanhope in Barchester Towers, was a worldly old gentleman with grand connections – he had been sub-preceptor to Princess Charlotte – and with a fashionable following among Pisa’s Protestant community. He had obligingly christened the unmarried Williamses’ second child, Rosalind, on 30 December with Mary standing as godmother. Expecting to be welcomed after this and perhaps to meet some of Nott’s smart little coterie, Mary was dismayed when the clergyman used his sermon to launch a vehement attack on atheists, taking Shelley for his target. An apology was made, but the damage was done. Everybody had heard Nott’s views and that Mary had written an angry letter. It had all, as she told Mrs Gisborne some weeks later, made ‘a great noise’ among the English;11 the ladies in Nott’s circle promptly let it be known that they wished to have nothing to do with her.

  Mary’s exclusion was made harder to bear by the fact that Mrs Beauclerk, one of the liveliest hostesses in Pisa, had known Shelley as a Sussex neighbour and was expressing a wish to see him. He, perhaps somewhat disgusted by Mrs Beauclerk’s readiness to leave her husband Charles at home in England while she set off for Italy with seven daughters up for offer, refused to follow up the invitation. Medwin went to Mimi Beauclerk’s gatherings as often as he was asked, but Medwin was unthinkable as an escort. He had not, besides, suggested that he wanted a companion. (Medwin, it later transpired, had been pursuing his hostess, a handsome woman of good background with enough money to give excellent parties.)

  On 23 January, Trelawny decided to undertake the introduction himself: ‘go with him to Mrs Beauclercs in the evening,’ Mary noted. They were graciously received, more on account of Trelawny’s splendid moustaches and caressing stares than of Mary’s subdued politeness. A couple of weeks later, while Williams and Shelley went off again to look for summer houses at La Spezia, Trelawny escorted both Mary and Jane Williams to a ball at Mrs Beauclerk’s. It was the first such occasion Mary had attended
since Mrs de Boinville’s ball for her daughter’s wedding in 1812.

  Waltzes were all the rage; dancing with Trelawny, Mary was caught up in the swirl of movement and laughter and candlelit heat; Shelley was away; she was shaken by the violence of her feelings. Among what remains of the long journal-entry she made after the ball (a page was removed), she wrote of being roused from ‘my ordinary monotony’ into a state of feverish excitement: ‘I would tear the veil from this strange world & pierce with eagle eyes beyond the sun – when every idea strange & changeful is another step in the ladder by which I would climb the –’12 Trelawny’s attentions appear to have been quite a stimulant. ‘His company is delightful,’ she told Mrs Gisborne the following day, ‘for he excites me to think[,] and if any evil shade the intercourse[,] that time will unveil.’13

  Shelley and Williams returned two days later on 11 February, in time to be coaxed into attending the veglioni, the public masked balls which were the highlight of the carnival season. Mary, competing against Jane Williams in Indian costume, borrowed a dress from her friend to appear as a Turkish lady. They danced until three in the morning. But by 25 February, the day after a dinner visit to Mrs Beauclerk, Mary’s taste for social life had evaporated. It was all so shallow. Certainly, Mrs Beauclerk and her friends were very amusing and hospitable, but what did they really care about? What were their interests, beyond love-affairs and gossip and dressing themselves up? ‘The most contemptible of all lives is where you live in the world & none of your passions or affections are called into action – I am convinced I could not live thus,’ she confided to her journal that evening. She had just been rereading A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark; her mother, she was sure, would never have kept company with a woman like Mimi Beauclerk.