The Lady and Her Monsters

by Roseanne Montillo

  Trelawny had a funeral pyre built in Leghorn, where the boats had departed. He, Lord Byron, and Leigh Hunt, friend of Byron, were greeted there by a group of soldiers, who were holding iron instruments and shovels, already awaiting him and ready to begin the ordeal. Several feet away a crowd of onlookers had gathered.

  The diggers began to shovel away the sand, until “a shapeless mass of bones and flesh” appeared. Byron was seized by the dreadful finality of the scene. “Don’t repeat this with me,” he was said to have muttered. “Let my carcass rot where it falls.”

  A funeral pyre made of pines had been set up. Given the dryness of the wood, it caught fire soon after it was lit, the bright heat sending the crowd backward. The flames rose high, then slowly dwindled. As they did, the friends approached Williams’s remains and sprinkled them with oil, wine, and frankincense.

  Unable to watch this for long, Byron stripped off his clothes and plunged into the cool waters. Trelawny and Hunt followed, and they stayed in until Byron, assaulted by cramps, had to return to shore.

  Wooden sticks marked the place where Shelley was temporarily buried. As they approached, they could not help but take note of the desolate beauty of the place, the quiet seashore and endless waters stretching ahead, the pure, blistering whiteness of the sands. It was the kind of solitude Shelley had always desired, the kind he valued. The area possessed such harmony it seemed almost sacrilegious to remove his flesh from beneath the sands, as if they were “vultures.” Unlike the previous cremation, when they reached Shelley’s corpse no one seemed willing to offer a word, or even capable of doing so.

  The diggers began their dreary work until they heard the sound of metal hitting bone and knew they had found Shelley. They removed the body from the sand, the bones not breaking as they had in Williams’s case, and placed him on the pyre. They lit the fire and sprinkled wine over it, more “than he had consumed during his life,” Trelawny said. As they watched Shelley’s body burn, the heat seemed to make their eyes water and waver, the wood snapping and crackling, breaking heartlessly to their ears. Again, the scene was too much for Byron to bear. He returned to his boat. As he swam out, behind him the heat quickly reduced Shelley’s body to ashes. But something unusual happened: as Trelawny and Hunt stared into the flames, they noticed that Shelley’s heart had not incinerated. Fittingly enough, it remained intact, a complete organ, as if still alive. Trelawny dashed toward the pyre and with his bare hands removed Shelley’s heart. His own limbs were singed. In time, Shelley’s heart would cause conflict between Edward John Trelawny and Mary Shelley. But for now it was a final remnant of what had been Percy Shelley.

  Shelley’s ashes were collected and placed in a simple box to be buried in Rome. Not long after they had all left La Spezia and returned to Pisa, the Don Juan was found. Captain Daniel Roberts informed Trelawny in a letter dated September 1822: “We have got fast hold of Shelley’s boat, and she is now safe at anchor off Via Reggio. Everything is in her, and clearly proves that she was not capsized. I think she must have been swamped by a heavy sea. We have found in her two trunks, that of Williams, containing money and clothes; and of Shelley’s, filled with books and clothes.”

  But as the boat was further inspected, Captain Roberts became suspicious about what had happened. He noticed that many of the timbers were broken, as if another vessel had rammed into it. He shared his views with Trelawny in a letter he dispatched shortly after the first one: “On a close examination of Shelley’s boat, we find many of the timbers on the stairboard quarter broken, which makes me think for certain that she must have been run down by some of the feluccas in the squall.” A felucca was a large sailing boat constructed of wood that often traveled the waters of the Mediterranean during the summer months. No one could be certain if one had slammed into the Don Juan, but Trelawny recalled that his many inquiries had gone unanswered on the day of the storm, and many of the sailors had been reluctant to talk to him about what they had seen, if anything, along their journey. They had adamantly refused to admit they had noticed the boat or Trelawny’s friends, which made him think something more might have occurred. Mary Shelley, in time, also came to believe that there had been more to the accident than was discovered.

  The group that gathered on the shores of the Gulf of La Spezia disbanded after Shelley’s death. Trelawny, who in a certain way had instigated the direction their summer would take, left the area. If he ever thought himself guilty for what had occurred, he never said so. On the contrary, he felt that part of Shelley’s demise and unhappiness fell squarely on Mary. Trelawny had come to believe that she had drained him. In a letter he wrote to Claire on December 28, he made his feelings, perhaps unjustly, known, with the same acidity with which William Godwin had shared his: “As to Mary Shelley, you are welcome to her. She was the Poet’s wife as bad a one as he c’d have found . . . She was conventional in everything.”

  Not ready to return to England yet, Mary moved to the outskirts of Genoa, where she rented a house called Casa Negrata. Those who had become close to her also began to disperse. She had come to believe she and Jane Williams might forge a strong friendship to bridge the gap of widowhood. But Jane would have none of that: she returned to England right away. Soon thereafter, Jane began a relationship with Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Percy Shelley’s Oxford classmate and Mary Shelley’s ambivalent friend and possible lover during her early years with Percy. By the time of Shelley’s death and Jane’s involvement with Hogg, Mary’s own feelings for Hogg had changed. She no longer felt the kinship that had prompted her to write to him about the death of her first child. Instead, she now truly disliked him, considered him a selfish individual for wanting to capitalize on his friendship with her husband. That Jane became his lover disturbed her, though the affection she felt for the other widow overruled those feelings she had for the man. But that affection didn’t last long.

  Soon after Jane Williams’s affair came to light, Mary also learned that Jane was badmouthing her to her closest friends and acquaintances. Along with Hogg, they were revealing secrets and details of her marriage with Shelley, of the supposed pain Mary had caused her husband, of how depressed he had been prior to his death. Mary became aware of this and felt that an irreparable break in their friendship had occurred. In the years to follow, Jane Williams asked for Mary’s forgiveness, which she granted, but the warmth of their earlier relationship was gone.

  William Godwin learned of his son-in-law’s death not from his daughter but from a family friend, Leigh Hunt. He was irked that Mary had not written to him right away, as he suggested in the letter he quickly dispatched. But perhaps now her suffering, he said, which he learned she was taking “better than could have been imagined,” might bridge the gap that had formed between them. Godwin had also been aware of Shelley’s odd feelings toward death, or, as he put it, that he had always been “in constant anticipation of the uncertainty of his life, though not in this way.”

  Mary was not the only one who felt Shelley’s loss; Lord Byron did as well. He removed himself to the village of Albaro, a small collection of houses not far from where the Shelleys had lived. Casa Saluzzi was actually a voluptuous palace overlooking the Ligurian coast. As he stood on his balcony, Byron could watch the myriad of changing hues in the waters below him, hear the screeching of the seagulls as they flew above him, and stare at the boats undulating near and far. If he dared to look to his right, he could see the Don Juan, anchored to its post. The sight made him nauseous.

  He often thought of his friend, and of Mary, of the night of Shelley’s disappearance, when she had pounded on his Pisan door, “pale as marble,” looking for answers. The fear he had seen in her eyes, the horror she had displayed, was something he had not witnessed before. Nor could he forget it now. He thought about the lost persons, about Mary, and about his own end, which he believed was not that far in coming.

  Like Mary’s, Lord Byron’s natural demeanor tended to darken to melancholy. And in a world that was out of control, he took charge
of what he knew best: his regimen of eating. He returned to a strict method of dieting: few vegetables and water, cookies, no meat, and a heavy course of purgatives. In no time he lost the luster he had regained, his clothes began to hang from his bony frame, and the pallor returned to his gaunt features. He also decided he would go to Greece. London had decided to aid the Greeks in their war of independence, and Byron was to become one of their supporters. This new course of action gave him a certain amount of motivation, and preparations were soon made for the voyage.

  The only cloud hovering on the horizon was that Byron, like Mary in the days leading to Shelley’s death, began to experience premonitions, which caused him to believe he would not be returning from the islands. To combat that outlook, he engaged Trelawny to assist him, tempting him with the revelation of a new boat he had engaged, the Hercules. The name was appropriate given the Greek adventures, but quite ironic considering that Byron neither looked nor felt Herculean.

  Trelawny always maintained that “it would have been difficult to find a man more unfit for such an enterprise” than Byron. Aside from having a great name and money to spare, Byron’s poor health and lack of stamina made him an unlikely candidate to spend a season in the harsh mountainous regions of Greece.

  After traveling through the islands, Byron settled in the small village of Missolonghi. A collection of houses “situated . . . on the verge of the most dismal swamp,” it was not a pleasant place to be, and with winter at its doorstep, the dismal rain that drenched the area and the fog that rolled in from the ocean and settled upon the rooftops and steeples only made it worse. Byron quickly fell into a state of despondency and loneliness. He restricted his diet even more, becoming thinner and thinner, waking up only to write letters, quickly losing the enthusiasm he had had for the journey.

  Trelawny left after a time, and Byron remained at the mercy of the few servants and several doctors in the area, none of whom seemed to recognize that Byron’s eating habits were becoming dangerously unhealthy.

  By April, the weather had changed little, but Byron’s mood had worsened. Having spent a winter housebound, he yearned to relieve the tension in his limbs and his mind. When the weather cleared, accompanied by his servant Pietro, he rode into the wild country for a few hours of unbridled pleasure. On their return gallop, thunder broke out and the sky opened up, soaking Byron and Pietro. On reaching Missolonghi, Byron began to complain that his body felt odd.

  Before long Byron took to his bed with a fever. Soon his body began to tremble and his tongue moved incongruously. He no longer made sense. With doctors by his side, delirium took over, and on April 18, he became unconscious.

  The next evening an incredible storm settled over the village. The ebony night came alive with yellow streaks, and booms echoed across the mountains, frightening the young and the old alike. In a home nearby, on hearing a particularly loud crack of thunder, Byron opened his eyes and stared at those surrounding him. For a moment it was believed he had come to, thanks to the noise and harsh pummeling of the rains, his wild fit punctuated by a period of lucidity. But then his lids faltered, he closed his eyes, and he never reawakened.

  Trelawny learned about Byron’s death a few days later as he made his way to Missolonghi. He had been surprised that Byron had chosen to settle in such a horrendous place. This “mud-bank” was desolate, its location too dismal and wet for someone of a delicate disposition. Byron had been lionized during his lifetime, which made it all the more odd that he would die on this disagreeable spot.

  He found the house entirely empty and was told that people had been traipsing to and fro in the rooms looking for money Byron might have left. The coffin was in an upstairs room, and Trelawny later remembered that the poet was “more beautiful in death than in life.” He learned that immediately following Byron’s death, chaos had ensued as the doctors feared they had been somewhat responsible for his demise. During Byron’s delirium, they had subjected him to bloodletting, which was not a smart thing considering that Byron was already weak and malnourished. Bloodletting might have hastened his death. The doctors had also decided to perform a crude autopsy to see if they were to blame. They cut the body to pieces in an attempt to figure out the true cause of death, but in the end, they didn’t learn anything.

  Trelawny also added to Byron’s final indignities by nearly plundering his body. When he was left alone in the room, he removed the sheet covering the corpse and took a peek at his feet and legs, those limbs that had always given the poet such sorrow. “Both his feet were clubbed, and his legs withered to the knees,” Trelawny later wrote. “The form and features of an Apollo, with the feet and legs of a sylvan Satyr.”

  Byron’s body was placed in a wooden coffin, which was put into a larger receptacle for its transport back to England. The trip took nearly three months, and when it arrived at the home Byron had left in 1816, the inner casket was taken out and the lid lifted for those few friends and family members who wished to say a final good-bye.

  Those who were there, including Mary Shelley, were surprised, because the beauty that had caused such a fuss in life no longer existed. In its place lay a hacked and embalmed body that had been patched together by eager Greek doctors and then further damaged by three months at sea. When the funeral procession made its way by Highgate Hill toward Nottingham, Mary peeked behind the curtains so she could watch its progress. She did not want to attend the funeral, though she did stand by to see it go. As it passed, she realized that Byron’s death brought an era to a close. Only she and Claire remained, and she felt her days were also numbered.

  Percy’s death had brought her grief, but it was combined with a crushing sense of guilt. In the months prior to the accident, Mary had directed a lot of rancor and unspoken hostility at Percy, her anger stemming from her children’s deaths, the responsibility for which she directed squarely at Percy. He had suffered greatly from his childrens’ deaths, but equally as bad was the distance that had grown between him and Mary. His death evoked in Mary a sense of atonement or punishment. She vowed that from that day forward her job would be to bring all of Percy Shelley’s works to publication.

  She had wanted to stay in Italy, but finances had prevented that. On returning to England, she discovered something peculiar: her book, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, had enjoyed a life of its own, had thrived, and as a consequence she was now quite well known. Following Frankenstein’s publication, many people tried to figure out who had written the book. A writer from the British Critic finally determined that the author was a woman. But it was an anonymous writer in the Literary Panorama who first pointed to Mary Shelley: “We have some idea that it is the production of a daughter of a celebrated living novelist,” he wrote. The book had also been made into a successful stage play that was running at the English Opera House. She had gone to see it in September 1823 and had been given a warm reception. It must have seemed odd to her, as she sat in the theater and watched her characters—who, she had adamantly convinced herself and others, had come to her fully formed in a waking dream on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816—come to life. She and the others watched as Victor Frankenstein fiddled with his instruments, as he tried to impart life to his creature, and then, among the screeching, thrashing, booming sequence of theatrical flashes and pounding, as the creature awakened.

  Her goal on returning to England was to use her writing to achieve financial independence for her and her son, and she set out to do that. In 1824, she began her second-most acclaimed novel, The Last Man, which was published in 1826. A deeply depressing book, the novel takes place at the end of the twenty-first century during a time when a great and deadly plague has overtaken the world. Only one man survives, the last man of the human race. In her journal of May 1824, Mary Shelley wrote, “The Last Man. Yes, I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.” Mary had no idea what plagues were, where they came from, how they were spread, what the
ir symptoms were. The book is a work of the imagination. Still, the deadly consequences depicted in it are uncomfortably similar to those of real-life plagues studied today.

  But another and far stronger theme in The Last Man is the role of the imagination, or rather, the failure and collapse of the imagination. In the book, the imagination works not as a gift, but as a detractor, a corruptor. It was not by coincidence that she intertwined these two themes: feeling alone and abandoned, the life she had imagined with Shelley had not come to fruition and now a starkly different reality had set in.

  She also reworked and annotated Frankenstein several times. In 1821 she made several corrections to the text. A copy of the book in which she marked her corrections is housed in the Morgan Library in New York, and Mary’s notes and additions are there in the margins in her neat and legible handwriting. But those changes were not incorporated in any future editions. The most famous new edition, and the most controversial one, was published in 1831.

  By 1831, her life had changed dramatically. Three of her children had died, and so had her husband, Lord Byron, and Polidori. She was no longer a teenager following a lover across Europe and toting a small child with her, telling stories amidst friends and poets, but a mother to a growing son, a woman in her thirties, a widow, a writer trying to make a living. The idealism of youth had passed and the realities of impending middle age were setting in. She was given the opportunity to revise Frankenstein for the New Standard Novels Editions, and to add an introduction. As expected, given that her life had morphed, those of her characters followed suit.