Mary Shelley

by Miranda Seymour

  The Villa Magni, rented in desperation by Mary because nothing else was available, was as solitary as a house could be. Five white arches held its broad terrace above the surge of the sea. Behind the terrace, from the beginning of May, the Williamses and the Shelleys lived in inescapable intimacy, eating in the hall which held their bedrooms narrowly apart. (Meals were a daily headache; the nearest supplier of provisions lived more than three miles away, across a river which the summer storms often turned into an impassable torrent.) Walking on the terrace in the evening, they could see the lights of Lerici glimmering to the south under the craggy silhouette of its castle; their nearer neighbours at San Terenzo, the hamlet which has now spread round the bay to enclose the Villa Magni, were a few fishing families. There was no sign here of the picturesque costumes beloved of tourists; the women of San Terenzo went barefoot and kept their hair from their faces with squares of rough cloth. Their language was incomprehensible; their songs and dances struck Mary as being entertainment fit only for savages, and not very friendly ones. ‘Had we been wrecked on an island of the South Seas, we could scarcely have felt ourselves further from civilization and comfort,’ she wrote.3

  The land offered no escape, beyond the rocky coastal path to Lerici and the tangled paths of the woods which climbed the hill behind the villa’s neglected garden. Sick and fretful in the early months of pregnancy, Mary could not rid herself of nervousness. Her only hours of peace came when they were gliding across the bay, when she leant against Shelley’s knees and gave herself up to the blue of the sky, the soft rush of wind against her face. On land again, she was overpowered by the terror of some impending horror. She could neither describe it nor explain it; all she knew was that she wanted, desperately, to get her last remaining child away from this desolate place.4 It was Percy, not Shelley, for whom she feared. Apprehensive, she became hysterical. Frustration emerged in shrill, white-faced rage or unyielding silence. Too late, she reproached herself in a long and anguished poem, ‘The Choice’, written the following year.

  Now fierce remorse and unreplying death

  Waken a chord within my heart, whose breath,

  Thrilling and keen, in accents audible,

  A tale of unrequited love doth tell.

  It was not anger – while thy earthly dress

  Encompassed still thy soul’s rare loveliness,

  All anger was attoned by many a kind

  Caress or tear that spoke the softened mind: –

  It speaks of cold neglect, averted eyes

  That blindly crushed thy heart’s fond sacrifice: –

  My heart was all thine own – but yet a shell

  Closed in its core, which seemed impenetrable,

  Till sharp:toothed Misery tore the husk in twain

  Which gaping lies nor may unite again –

  Forgive me!5

  By the time Mary wrote the work from which these lines come, she was painfully aware of the impression her outbursts at the Villa Magni had made on their friends. The Williamses, drawing complacent comparisons with their own sunny relationship and full of sympathy for a saintly, put-upon husband, were shocked and disapproving. The tearful apologies alluded to in the poem took place in private; Mary’s public image, not helped by Shelley’s readiness to discuss the unhappiness she was causing him, had become that of a nagging, undisciplined neurotic.

  Looking back, as she was driven to do over and over again, Mary readily acknowledged the conflict between her own misery and Shelley’s love-affair with the bay. Guilt, the feeling that she had been scolding, cold, unloving, drove her to intensify the contrast in their response to life at the Villa Magni. But had it been so absolute as she punished herself by supposing?

  ‘I still inhabit this divine bay, reading Spanish dramas & sailing & listening to the most enchanting music … my only regret is that the summer must ever pass,’ Shelley wrote to his financial adviser and occasional creditor Horace Smith on 29 June, while admitting that ‘Mary has not the same predilection for this place that I have.’ But there are many indications that Shelley, as much as his wife, was going through a period of crisis. His health had never been better, but he wrote to Trelawny to get prussic acid for him, as ‘a golden key to that perpetual chamber of rest’.* His old habit of sleepwalking returned. So did the hallucinations which had, in the past, often been vivid enough for Shelley to mistake them for real events. One, towards the end of their first week at the villa, was of a naked child (Allegra? Elena Adelaide?) who rose out of the sea, smiling at him and clapping her hands. Others, to be described later, were more sinister.

  Shelley’s work also suggests that his accounts to friends of a summer of exquisite happiness reflected passing moods rather than a settled state of mind. The beautiful ‘Lines in the Bay of Lerici’ beginning ‘She left me at the silent time’ are full of sadness. The Triumph of Life, the ambitious poem on which he was working in the last weeks at the villa, has been well described by Claire Tomalin as suggesting ‘a deep and terrible disillusionment with the world. Its image of the huge chariot of death travelling on like a juggernaut, surrounded by a boiling, insect-like crowd of humanity feverishly pursuing pleasure and ambition before being extinguished, is the most hideous he imagined.’6 Its influences, Andrea Orcagna’s sombre frescoes of The Triumph of Death for Pisa’s Campo Santo and, perhaps, local stories of Lerici’s ancient cult of Diana, help to identify the poem’s images of life’s transience, of youth plunging towards the grave. The disillusion can only be explained as Shelley’s own.

  ‘… thus on the way

  Mask after mask fell from the countenance

  And form of all; and long before the day

  ‘Was old, the joy which waked like heaven’s glance

  The sleepers in the oblivious valley, died;

  And some grew weary of the ghastly dance,

  ‘And fell, as I have fallen, by the wayside; –

  Those soonest from whose forms most shadows passed,

  And least of strength and beauty did abide.

  ‘Then, what is life? I cried.’ –

  These are the last lines of the poem as Mary edited it, since she omitted the fragmentary four lines which follow, but which do not complete the work. Shelley’s nightmarish visions and dreams, when put together with his final lines, suggest that he was, in the summer of 1822, in a state of intense emotional turmoil for which Mary had little or no responsibility.

  *

  Shelley had rushed them into isolation in the days following Allegra’s death, ‘like a torrent, hurrying every thing in it’s course’, Mary told Maria Gisborne.7 The news had reached them on 23 April; a week later, they, Claire and the Williamses, together with three small children, were squeezed into the Villa Magni. And here, on 2 May according to Edward Williams’s journal, Claire walked into Jane’s room and found them all discussing how best to break the news to her.

  Perhaps she had already guessed the truth; her resilience amazed them. One savage letter slipped through the net by which Shelley tried to protect Byron from her fury; unexpected meekness followed. Claire asked for – and was sent — Allegra’s miniature and a lock of her hair. She did not go to Livorno to see the small coffin dispatched to England, on Byron’s instructions, for burial in the nave of Harrow church.† She did, to ease their limited accommodation, return to Florence for two weeks. ‘She is vivacious and talkative, and though she teases [vexes] me sometimes, I like her,’ Shelley wrote to John Gisborne on 18 June, shortly after her return. Mary, he added, was ‘not much discontented with her visit’.

  Relations between Shelley and Mary had become so bad by 18 June, following Mary’s miscarriage, that she may for once have welcomed Claire’s company as relief. She was also anxious to know if Claire had gathered anything while staying with Mrs Mason about William Godwin’s affairs.

  Mrs Mason had been appointed by Shelley as reader and censor of all Godwin correspondence; this had had the inevitable effect of increasing Mary’s worries. She knew that Godw
in’s final lawsuit in April had been lost. This, she told Mrs Gisborne on 2 June, had put the crown on a season of misfortunes; but what of her novel, and where was her father living, now that he had lost his home? She begged for news: ‘any information I could get, through anyone, would be a great benefit to me.’ Mrs Gisborne did not dare flout Shelley’s orders to keep his wife in the dark about all financial matters concerning Godwin. Mary welcomed Claire back to the Villa Magni because she came directly from the house in Pisa where Godwin’s letters were received, examined and edited. Claire could understand how powerless Mary felt; she could even disclose that Mrs Mason strongly disapproved of Shelley’s policy and disliked the role he had imposed on her.‡

  *

  Meanwhile, the boat designed by Trelawny and Captain Daniel Roberts had arrived on 12 May with a crew of three. Two were sent back; the third, an eighteen-year-old boy called Charles Vivian, was kept on.

  For Williams and for Shelley, it was like embarking on a love-affair. Trim, light, shallow-bottomed enough to be dragged on shore, their pretty little craft ‘sailed like a witch’;9 she was ‘a perfect plaything for the summer’.10 Her name was her only flaw; Shelley, who had decided to call her ‘Ariel’, was outraged that Trelawny’s first name for her, the Don Juan, had been painted, on Byron’s instructions, in vast letters on the mainsail. Perhaps it was one of Byron’s jokes, with Shelley as the butt; Shelley had, after all, begged him not to tell Mary all that he had confided about his relationship with Emilia. Byron already believed Shelley had slept with Claire; he had seen the way he behaved with Jane Williams at Pisa. But ‘Lord and poet as he is he could not be allowed to make a coal-barge of our boat,’ Mary told Mrs Gisborne.11 After rubbing and scrubbing proved ineffectual, the offending patch of material was cut out and replaced.

  Shelley and Williams’s delight in their elegant new toy was crushed a month later when Trelawny and Roberts arrived on Byron’s own boat. Handsomely equipped with two cannons and with the Countess Guiccioli’s pink silk flag fluttering from the mast, the Bolivar sailed into view on 13 June. She saluted; they thought she must be a man-of-war brig. Byron’s boat was, Williams noted enviously, ‘the most beautiful craft I ever saw’.12 Full of rivalry, they set Roberts to work adding top-masts and sails – notoriously the hardest to lower – to their own boat in order to make it faster. There was talk of making an extended false stem and stern.13 Williams, bursting with nautical pride, made scornful references in his journal to the ignorance of ‘weatherwise landsmen’ while revealing his own inexperience as he noted that there was usually an afternoon breeze offshore on a fine day.14 The sailors who took feluccas up and down the Lerici coast would have smiled at the idea that this was a discovery worth noting.

  Mary had been suffering acutely from her pregnancy throughout May, during which month she kept no journal and wrote no letters. On 9 June, she collapsed. Edward Williams, who was becoming steadily less sympathetic to her as the source of his friend Shelley’s unhappiness, thought she was faking her symptoms. She had been ‘perfectly well’ at breakfast, ‘alarmingly unwell’ during the day and then ‘strangely better’. The ‘strangely’ is the clue to his thoughts: he did not believe in her illness.

  A week later, although Williams omitted to record it, Mary almost died of a haemorrhage, and lost her fifth child. For seven hours, Claire, Jane and Shelley struggled to keep her awake with brandy, vinegar, eau de Cologne and, when the doctor was held up, ice, to staunch the haemorrhaging. ‘Claire & Jane were afraid of using it,’ Mary remembered two months later, ‘but Shelley overruled them  by an unsparing application of it I was restored. They all thought & so did I at one time that I was about to die.’15 Her husband’s practicality had saved her life; still, it is hard not to wince at the word ‘unsparing’.§

  The miscarriage occurred on 16 June; two days later, Shelley wrote to the Gisbornes in England. He gave a good report of his own initiative and, after acknowledging that Mary was still weak, put his faith in sea-baths to restore her to health. It was hardly the moment at which to air his dissatisfaction with Mary as a wife, but the habit had become strong; he could not resist telling the Gisbornes how he longed for the friendship of ‘those who can feel, and understand me.

  Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not. The necessity of concealing from her thoughts that would pain her, necessitates this, perhaps. It is the curse of Tantalus, that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind as hers, should not excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life.

  The Williamses, he added, were ‘very pleasing … But words are not the instrument of our intercourse.’16

  *

  A drawing has survived from this period which has been conjectured to be of Mary Shelley. She had trained with artists and was thought to have some talent; it is, just conceivably, a self-portrait.17 The woman it shows looks both haunted and drained; her huge eyes and gaunt cheeks suggest someone who might feel that her life had become unbearable. It might very well represent Mary as she looked in the weeks following her miscarriage. ‘I am ill most of this time. Ill & then convalescent,’ was all she would say of herself in her journal.18 It was during this period that Shelley’s feelings towards her showed themselves most clearly, in the form of dreams. Recalling them for Mrs Gisborne in August, Mary thought that six days had passed between the miscarriage and the night when Shelley, asleep but screaming, burst into her bedroom: ‘he continued to scream which inspired me with such a panic that I jumped out of bed & ran across the hall to Mrs W’s room where I fell through weakness, though I was so frightened that I got up again immediately.’19

  Shelley, when woken, told them that his nightmare had begun with an image of the Williamses, bloodstained and with their bones starting through their skins, coming to warn him that the sea was flooding into the house. Shelley had seemed to wake up and to see that this was so when his dream changed: ‘he saw the figure of himself strangling me’. It was this that had brought him running into her room, Mary explained, and yet, ‘fearful of frightening me he dared not approach the bed’. To her, it must have seemed as though she was hideously reliving her own vision of Frankenstein as he wakes to see his newly animated creature standing beside him, ready, as he fearfully supposes, to do him harm. All this, she told Mrs Gisborne, had been ‘frightful enough, & talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions lately – he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him – “How long do you mean to be content?”’ To her correspondent, Mary dismissed these words as lacking any great significance: ‘certainly not prophetic of what has occurred’. At the time, surely, she must have understood their import clearly enough; what could they have meant to her other than that Shelley’s dream-double was expressing his weariness, his disillusion?

  On 20 June, the Hunts and their six children finally stepped on to Italian soil at the port of Genoa. Exhausted after the voyage, they were in no mood for news from Shelley of his wife’s ailments; Marianne Hunt was ‘Very ill herself – much more so than you imagine …’ Hunt wrote reproachfully; ‘and as to myself, I have become, since you saw me, an elderly gentleman, with sunken cheeks …’20 Shelley, overjoyed by the arrival of his friend in whatever condition of antiquity, was impatient for their reunion; so for different reasons, was Hunt. ‘I have been so hard run that I was obliged to spend it in housekeeping,’ Shelley shamefacedly admitted when asked about £30 which Byron had promised to provide to the Hunts as a loan.21 On 24 June, Shelley and Williams rigged the sails of the Don Juan, stocked the cupboards with provisions and were about to set off for Genoa when Mary had a relapse. Her state of mind was probably a contributing factor; Shelley’s nightmarish visions, her own weakness and the stupefying heat combined to create a state of feverish apprehension. The voyage was put off.

  Hunt sent word that he was going to make his way down to Livorno on 28 June. He wanted to make himself known to
Byron, in whose home at Pisa he had been promised rooms. Shelley decided to waste no more time. On 1 July, he set sail for Livorno himself, together with Williams, Captain Roberts and their boy-crew of one, Charles Vivian. ‘I could not endure that he should go,’ Mary wrote later to Mrs Gisborne, ‘ – I called him back two or three times, I told him that if I did not see him soon I would go to Pisa with the child – I cried bitterly when he went away.’22 Her only comfort was that he had promised to look for a house at Pugnano where they could spend the rest of the summer.

  She wrote to him twice. One letter, according to Edward Williams, was ‘of the most gloomy kind’;23 its tone can be guessed from the near-hysterical letter which she sent via Shelley to Hunt, begging him to stay away from the Villa Magni (‘it would be complete madness to come’) and describing herself as a prisoner: ‘I wish I cd break my chains & leave this dungeon.’24

  On 4 July, a loving note to Jane (‘my dearest friend’) arrived at the villa from Shelley, together with a brisk and businesslike letter for Mary. She must have felt ready to weep when she read it. He had not looked for houses at Pugnano. He could not say when he would return. The rest of the letter was taken up with news of their friends. Dr Vaccà had pronounced Marianne Hunt’s illness to be grave (she lived until 1857); Hunt himself was cheerful but penniless. Byron, while willing to make a handsome gift of the copyright of his latest poem, The Vision of Judgment, for the first number of their new magazine, was unlikely to be able to offer further support since he was preparing to follow Teresa’s family into a second exile. (The Gambas had been ordered to leave Tuscany after the fracas with Sergeant-Major Masi.) Shelley ended by expressing his wish for the thing his wife most dreaded, a continued residence at the Villa Magni.25