by Mary Shelley
Portrait of Lady Caroline Lamb, by Elizabeth H. Trotter (1811–14).
Miniature of Augusta Leigh, by James Holmes (nineteenth century).
Steel engraving of Anne Isabella Milbanke, Lady Byron, from an original drawing by Freeman (1833).
The marriage was doomed from the beginning, according to Lady Byron. He wanted to lead a profligate life, and she declined to permit him to do so.50 They had a daughter, Ada, in December 1815,51 even as Byron continued his close relationship with Augusta and indulged openly in sexual adventures with other women. Convinced that Byron was insane, Annabella left him in January 1816, taking their one-month-old daughter with her, and began proceedings for a legal separation. In debt and the object of widespread opprobrium, Byron fled England for Switzerland in April 1816, never to return to the country of his birth.
Much of this strange saga must have been known to the Shelleys before they met Byron; tales of Byron were the stuff of everyday gossip. Despite these lurid stories, or perhaps because Byron seemed to care so little about his reputation, Percy and Mary were anxious to spend time with the exiled poet. Accompanied by baby William, along with Claire, they rented a villa, the Maison Chapuis, in Montalègre, Cologny, quite near to Byron, who occupied a villa, the Diodati, with his physician-companion John Polidori.52 The parties soon began exchanging visits, spending many days and evenings together. Percy and Byron admired each other’s work and became close friends. Byron must have been interested, too, in learning more of the daughter of the celebrated Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Polidori was impressed by Mary (whom he identified as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin but referred to in his journal as “Mrs. Shelley”) but was a bit confused by her irregular company, including—as he perceived—her married lover Percy as well as her sister Claire, “kept” by Percy but also Byron’s lover. Rumors soon spread that the Villa Diodati was a hotbed of sexual adventure, with both Godwin daughters sleeping with both men, and the owner of a nearby villa rented primitive telescopes to voyeur-guests, who mistook the villa’s tablecloths drying on the line as the women’s petticoats.53
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron, by Henry Meyer, after George Henry Harlow stipple engraving (1816).
Portrait of Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, by Alfred Edward Chalon (1840).
Miniature of Ada Byron Lovelace.
Ada Byron Lovelace at age seventeen.
The Villa Diodati, from Finden’s Landscape and Portrait Illustrations to the Life and Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 2 (London: John Murray, 1832).
The seed of Frankenstein germinated in this company—the specifics are discussed below—with Mary Shelley beginning work on it sometime in June. There are no materials extant from this period,54 though she records sharing the “story” with Percy in late June, and with his encouragement, she developed the core of it. In July, Mary and Percy visited the Mer de Glace in Chamonix, the stunning glacier that later became an important setting for Frankenstein. They returned to England in September, and Mary began to write what she had now decided would be a novel, only to be faced, in quick succession, by the suicides of her half-sister Fanny Imlay and Percy’s wife, Harriet.
Allegra Byron, artist unknown.
Harriet, heavily pregnant with the child that was not Percy’s, had drowned herself. Percy took no personal blame for this: He had not abandoned Harriet, she had refused to adapt to his changes. He determined to seek custody of their children contrary to her stated wishes. To improve his case, and despite their principles, he asked Mary to consent to marry him, but they decided that custody was assured without the marriage and put it off. However, Godwin at last relented on his banishment of the lovers and appealed to them to marry; Mary was softened by her father’s entreaties, and she and Percy were married on December 30, 1816.
She continued to work on Frankenstein, with frequent interruptions, including an interlude to care for Claire, who delivered Byron’s baby, a daughter named Allegra. A battle for the custody of Percy’s children developed, and Mary alternated working on his case and being immersed in Frankenstein. She and Percy left the Villa Diodati and moved to Marlow, a town in south Buckinghamshire, thirty-three miles west of central London, where she continued to work on the manuscript daily for long hours. It was completed on May 14, 1817, eleven months after its conception.
Pregnant again, Mary traveled to London with Percy, where he tried to sell Frankenstein to John Murray, Byron’s venerable publisher. Percy and Mary agreed that it should be published anonymously, in the tradition of Werther and other important books, both to avoid the attacks that her name, youth, and sex would bring and to allow the book to be judged on its merits, rather than on her heritage and gender. After turndowns from Murray and another publisher, the book was accepted by Percy’s booksellers, Lackington, though they requested alterations that she refused to make.
Percy Bysshe Shelley, by William Holl Sr., or by William Holl Jr., after Amelia Curran (1819).
In September 1817, Mary gave birth to a daughter, Clara, and the following weeks were divided between care of the infant and correction of proofs of the novel. Exhausted, she and Percy began planning a trip to Italy, and as 1817 came to a close, she held in her hands the first bound copy of Frankenstein, along with a check for £28. There is no record of her emotions on this occasion, and she could have known little of how publication of Frankenstein would change her life. Every subsequent book of hers was initially published without her name as author, bearing only the identification “By the author of Frankenstein.”
Shortly thereafter, the Shelleys (including William and Clara), with Claire accompanying, left for Italy. While there, they visited Byron, whom Percy entreated to care for Claire’s daughter, Allegra. Tragically, in September 1818, Clara, just past her first birthday, died in Venice, and nine months later, William, not yet three and a half years old, died in Rome. Remaining in Italy, in 1819 Percy and Mary had a fourth child, Percy Florence, less than half a year after her first son’s death. After several relocations in Italy, they settled, with their friends Edward and Jane Williams, near Lerici, in the Bay of Spezia, sixty-five miles from Genoa.
Mary began to write a historical novel, Valperga, about a fourteenth-century Italian despot.55 Her relationship with Percy had by now evolved. Mary’s love for him, he felt, had cooled to companionship, as so often happens. In 1820, Percy and Claire had probably become lovers, an intensification of an intimacy that had existed for years. Percy felt that Mary idolized him, but he congratulated himself (to Claire, in a letter) that he had achieved “seclusion” when he and Mary established separate sleeping arrangements. There were other women for Percy, who always seemed to be able to find someone who would understand him and listen to Mary’s shortcomings. By 1822, he complained to a friend that he missed “those who can feel, and understand me. Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not.” A “cloud” hung over their union, he believed. Yet Mary conceived another child, and Percy began work on a major poem.
Title page of Mary Shelley’s Valperga (1823).
What had largely been a salacious melodrama, though played out on the highest stage of literary society, soon became a tragedy. The spring of 1822 began badly, again clouded by the catastrophes of infants: Allegra, sent by Byron, without Claire’s consent, to be raised in an Italian convent, died suddenly of typhus. Mary’s pregnancy was troubled, and on June 16, she had a miscarriage, hemorrhaging so heavily that she was bedridden for two weeks, overcome with weakness and evil premonitions.56
The Allegra Byron memorial stone in Harrow, England (photo by Bob Jones, used with permission).
Then, on July 8, 1822, Percy and Edward Williams, sailing in a small, newly commissioned boat to Leghorn, were lost at sea in a storm. On hearing the news, Mary and Jane, together with their friend Edward Trelawny, a brawny Cornish writer and former midshipman who was to make his mark as a brilliant chronicler of the Romantics, rushed to Leghorn, where they spent fruitless days searching for confirmation of
the disaster. Finally, after eleven days of terror alternating with hope, Trelawny—who had helped to design the Don Juan, the boat they went down in—reported that he had seen the men’s bodies near Viareggio. Italian sanitary laws dictated that the corpses be buried in the sand where they were found. A month later, on August 16, Percy’s body was exhumed and burned on a pyre on the beach;57 his ashes, difficult to transport due to quarantine restrictions, were buried in Rome once a chargé d’affaires had signed off on the journey. Percy’s death galvanized his critics and admirers alike. While he was not yet well known, his death gave critics the opportunity to score moral points. For example, one newspaper crowed, “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned: now he knows whether there is a God or no.”58
The Funeral of Percy Shelley, by Louis Edward Fournier (1889).
Portrait of Edward John Trelawny, by W. E. West (date unknown).
Trelawny’s subsequent account of the seaside cremation, particularly the disposition of Shelley’s heart, has given rise to two centuries of debate and speculation: Said to resist incineration, the heart was taken from the flames by the future memoirist himself, fought over, and ultimately claimed by Mary Shelley, who is said to have kept it wrapped in a page from Adonais, her husband’s elegy to the poet John Keats, a copy of whose Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems had been found in Percy’s jacket pocket when his body was exhumed, thus identifying him. Merging literary license and medicine, Arthur M. Z. Norman advanced the theory that “[i]t is not to be doubted that Shelley’s heart was actually impregnable to fire. … It seems very probable that Shelley suffered from a progressively calcifying heart, which might well have caused diffuse symptoms with its increasing weight of calcium and which indeed would have resisted cremation as readily as a skull, a jaw, or fragments of bone. Shelley’s heart, epitome of Romantiism, may well have been a heart of stone” (114).59
“I have no friend,” Mary recorded in her journal on October 2, 1822, breaking a near-silence of three months, during which she had found herself virtually unable to speak of her loss. “For eight years I communicated, with unlimited freedom, with one whose genius, far transcending mine, awakened and guided my thoughts. I conversed with him; rectified my errors of judgment; obtained new lights from him; and my mind was satisfied. Now I am alone—oh, how alone! … I am left to fulfil my task. So be it.”60 The phrase “I have no friend” hauntingly echoes a line written by Robert Walton to his sister, Margaret, in Letter II of Frankenstein: “I have no friend, Margaret …”
A month following the cremation, Mary left Lerici and settled in Genoa, first taking rooms for herself and Percy Florence, now three years old, at the Croce di Malta inn, and then sharing a house outside the city, in the suburb of Albaro, with Leigh Hunt and his family (he and his wife then had six children, all in residence).61 Byron, who was at the height of his fame, arrived shortly after, and Mary began working with him to transcribe his poetry, also tutoring a few of the Hunt children. Both occupations were sources of either income or rent abatement.
Lord Byron in 1822 (portrait by William West).
Before Mary returned from Italy, Valperga was published, in February 1823. Later that year, a second edition of Frankenstein appeared. By now, she was a celebrity in her own right, in no small part because of the success of Frankenstein in print and on stage. (See Appendix 4, below.) This 1823 republication, arranged by her father, bore her name at last; although it does not appear that Godwin asked her permission to publish, Mary expressed delight on learning of the event on her return to London. She managed to wrest a small allowance from Percy’s father that permitted her to find lodgings near her father.
Lord Byron on His Death-Bed, by Joseph Denis Odevaere, ca. 1826.
Sadly, Mary soon lost her friend Lord Byron, who had comforted and supported her in her grief and provided her work. He had traveled to Greece in 1823 to take up the cause of Greek independence. He became quite ill, and on April 19, 1824, at age thirty-six, the most famous poet of the age died in Missolonghi, before the third and final siege of the city.62 He had been helping to train rebel troops. His death was a great shock, likened by some to an “earthquake.” The poet Tennyson remembered the day he heard the news as “a day when the whole world seemed to be in darkness for me.” Deeply mourned in England, widely praised by many of his loudest critics, and lionized in Greece, when his body was returned home, he was refused burial at Westminster Abbey alongside other greats of literature. Instead, he was interred in the family vault near Newstead. Not until 1969 was a memorial to Byron finally placed in Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. Shunned by the upper classes, he was embraced by the masses.
It was at this critical moment that Mary began her life’s work to erect a literary monument to Percy Bysshe Shelley. As early as 1822, she had declared, in her journal for November 11, seven months after Percy’s death: “I shall write his life—& thus occupy myself in the only manner from which I can derive consolation.” While she often received attention from other men, including several proposals of marriage, she demurred, saying that having been married to one genius, she could only marry another.63 She began editing her late husband’s poetry and essays, publishing his Posthumous Poems in 1824, a collection that included a short (unsigned) personal introduction, her first public statements on Percy’s character. Those who knew the Shelleys understood that the biographical material had been written by her, but, in withholding her name, she sought to conceal her hand in the book from Sir Timothy Shelley, who, the previous year, had grudgingly extended an allowance to her and Percy Florence. The stipend came with strict provisions, one of which was that she refrain from publishing Percy’s work or writing about him publicly.
Title page of Percy Shelley’s Posthumous Poems (1824).
Her effort to remain anonymous failed. After publication of Posthumous Poems, Sir Timothy succeeded in having 191 copies of the total print run withdrawn and destroyed. Whether he withdrew her and Percy Florence’s stipend in this instance is unclear—there are conflicting accounts—but he was to do so more than once in the coming years, always capriciously. In all, 250 copies of Posthumous Poems had been printed—and that only after four writers in their twenties who revered the Shelleys, and who are largely unremembered today, had agreed to stand guarantors.
Mary worked on her novel The Last Man (1826), a story of a distant future—a portion of the second of three volumes is set in the year 2092—wherein the inhabitants of England, Europe, and the Americas are devastated by plague. The book includes thinly veiled portraits of Percy and Byron: The principal character, Adrian, leads his followers in a search for a utopian paradise but drowns when his boat is lost at sea in a storm, and Lord Raymond, another key figure in the tale, leaves England to fight for the Greeks, dying in Constantinople. Predictably, Sir Timothy withheld her allowance temporarily upon publication. The very act of her writing and publishing was anathema to him. In the aggregate, however, the allowance from Sir Timothy increased modestly in 1826, when Percy Florence became his legal heir as a result of the death of Shelley’s son Charles (by Harriet).
Title page of Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826).
Mary supplemented her income by writing dozens of articles and stories for a variety of magazines and journals, as well as another historical novel (The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, 1830, about a pretender to the throne of King Henry VII), and she contributed approximately 1,300 of the 1,757 pages of biographical essays to her father’s friend Dionysus Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopædia.64 She continued to see her father and his friends regularly, and they often found writing work for each other. Godwin was the beneficiary of Mary’s extraordinary work ethic. As she wrote steadily (if not lucratively) and Sir Timothy Shelley had agreed to pay her (and her son) an allowance of £200 per year so long as she refrained from writing Percy’s biography, she was able to support Godwin financially to the end, as Percy had done in his lifetime.
