Mary Shelley

by Catherine Reef

  Listening, Victor hears of a being who began his unnatural life with a giving heart and intelligent brain. Unseen, the creature performed kind acts for a country family. By watching the family and listening as they spoke, he learned to read and speak. Yet his grotesque form frightened them when he approached. “Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded,” the monster says. “I was benevolent and good; misery has made me a fiend.” Killing William was a way to lash out, to strike back at his creator, whom he blames for all his pain.

  The monster offers Frankenstein a deal. “Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous.” The thing that would bring him joy, he explains, is for Frankenstein to create a female companion for him. With a wife, he would go away to the jungles of South America and never set foot in Europe again. Frankenstein hates the thought of building a second hideous creature, and at first he resists. Then, recalling the monster’s ability to commit evil, he consents to do it.

  When he made his first monster, Victor focused on the scientific challenge he faced. This time he thinks only about the possible result: suppose the two creatures produced offspring? “A race of devils would be propagated upon the earth,” Frankenstein fears. When the female creature is nearly complete, he can no longer force himself to go on, and he tears it to pieces. The monster, who has been watching him, is enraged. He vows revenge and warns that he will be present on Frankenstein’s wedding night.

  The monster keeps his ghoulish pledge, and it is Victor who becomes the pursuer. The once-promising student is now a driven man, obsessed with following his monster to far-flung parts of the world—into the forbidding Arctic, if necessary—in the hope of seeing him destroyed.

  The novel succeeded because it was “a source of powerful and profound emotion,” Percy Shelley believed. “There is perhaps no reader,” he stated, “who will not feel a responsive string touched in his inmost soul.” Shelley also found a moral truth in Frankenstein: “Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked.”

  Shelley had not always treated others well, but he had been kind to Claire. When August came and it was time for Claire to visit Allegra in Venice, he went along with her and paid the expenses. Venice, in northeastern Italy, was two hundred miles away. The trip would be long and costly, but Shelley believed he was doing the right thing for Claire and Allegra.

  Claire and Shelley left early on the hot morning of Monday, August 17. Six days later, they were in Venice, the city of canals. They went at once to the Hoppners’ home, where Claire was reunited with her child. Allegra was pale and lacked her usual spirit, but she seemed not to be ill. Shelley went alone to call on Byron, who was happy to see him. Byron was in a giving mood. He offered Shelley, Mary, Claire, and their children the use of a villa in the town of Este, not far away. Byron had rented the villa to use during the warm months but had remained in Venice instead. Shelley and the others were all welcome to stay there, Byron said. What unexpected luck! Claire would spend weeks with Allegra instead of hours or days.

  Wasting no time, Shelley sent Mary a letter and fifty pounds to pay for her travel. “Pray come instantly to Este, where I shall be waiting with Claire & Elise in the utmost anxiety for your arrival,” he wrote. He threw in some coaxing verses:

  O Mary dear, that you were here!

  With your brown eyes bright and clear . . .

  It took a few days for the letter to reach Bagni di Lucca, where Mary had little patience for poetry. She was too worried about Clara. The little girl had lost her appetite and was running a fever. Still, Mary chose to make the difficult trip. She spent August 30, her twenty-first birthday, hurriedly packing and arranging travel for herself, her children, Milly Shields, and an Italian servant, a man named Paolo Foggi.

  Villa Capuccini, in Este, was a bright, airy house with a garden of ripening fruit. Beyond stood the Euganean Hills, where farmers raised olives and grapes. An ivy-covered trellis shaded a stone path that led from the villa to a smaller summerhouse, where Shelley did his writing. He had begun a long poem based on the story of Prometheus, the myth that Mary had called to mind in Frankenstein.

  According to myth, Zeus punished Prometheus for stealing fire by chaining him to a rock and having an eagle eat his liver. The liver regrew at night, and the eagle returned each day to feast on it again.

  Mary arrived in Este too distracted to take pleasure in the beautiful setting. Clara now had diarrhea, and Mary worried about dysentery. This severe intestinal illness has several causes, but in nineteenth-century Europe, contaminated water was the most common one. At the time, there was no reliable treatment; many young children with dysentery grew dehydrated and died.

  Shelley thought something as simple as teething might have been making Clara sick. He and Mary watched over their daughter for the next couple of weeks, but they saw no improvement. There was little a doctor could do in Clara’s case, but Mary and Shelley decided to consult one anyway. Byron told them that his own physician in Venice, Dr. Aglietti, was the best.

  They left for Venice on September 24, hours before the sun was up, to avoid traveling during the hottest part of the day. Nonetheless, the journey was hard on one-year-old Clara, who grew weaker before her parents’ eyes and began to have seizures. Shock and dread filled Mary’s being. She became acutely aware of everything around her. Every detail of the passing scene, every palace and every tree, imprinted itself on her memory. Years later she would be able to close her eyes and see them all.

  After what felt like forever, they were in Venice. Mary waited with Clara at an inn while Percy took off in a gondola to fetch the doctor. But Dr. Aglietti was out, so Shelley came back alone. “I found Mary in the hall of the Inn in the most dreadful distress,” he informed Claire. “Worse symptoms had appeared. Another physician had arrived. He told me there was no hope.” An hour later, Clara’s seizures stopped. She died quietly in Mary’s arms. “This unexpected stroke reduced Mary to a kind of despair,” Shelley wrote. Clara was buried on a deserted beach in an unmarked grave.

  Percy hired a gondola, or narrow rowboat, and vanished in the traffic on Venice’s busy canals. He went to fetch a doctor while Mary waited in an inn with their dangerously ill daughter.

  Young children were more likely to die in the nineteenth century than they are today. Of every thousand babies born in Europe and North America, roughly two hundred died before their first birthday. In England and Wales, as many as fifteen of every hundred children age five and younger died. They lost their lives most often to diarrhea, respiratory infections, other diseases, and accidents. But knowing that so many children died did not make the loss of a beloved daughter or son any easier for parents to bear.

  “This is the Journal book of misfortunes,” Mary wrote in her diary. In it she had recorded the suicides of Fanny and Harriet; the death of her first daughter, the one born prematurely; and now the loss of the second one. She mourned Clara profoundly, but she wept inwardly, deep in a secret part of herself, while putting on a brave, stoic face for the world to see. Her family understood Mary’s tendency to hide her feelings. When William Godwin reminded her that only the timid “sink long under a calamity of this nature,” Mary understood. She willed herself to go on.

  Percy’s sorrow emerged in his poetry. In one poem he described a mariner sailing on a sea called Misery,

  Day and night, and night and day,

  Drifting on his dreary way,

  With the solid darkness black

  Closing round his vessel’s track . . .

  Knowing it would help Mary to have something to do, Byron asked her to copy some of his poems. This was a necessary task at a time when writers did all their work with pen and paper. A newly finished poem or story could be full of lines that had been crossed out and words that had been squeezed between others. The author needed a neatly written “fair copy” to send to a publisher. Mary gratefully took on the task.

  November came, and it was time to leave Este. The family at Villa Capuccini said goodbye to Allegra, who
was returned to Byron’s care, and headed south. Three servants—Elise Duvillard, Milly Shields, and Paolo Foggi—went with them. The group traveled toward Rome and stopped to see the famous sights along the way. They visited the great library at Ferrara, home to rare books and medieval manuscripts. At Terni, Mary again thrilled to the power of moving water. The Marmore Waterfalls, cascading in steps down a tree-covered hillside, were “more beautiful than any painting,” she noted. “The thunder, the abyss, the spray, the graceful dash of water lost in the mist below” all inspired wonder in her.

  The travelers stayed in wretched inns along the road, including one so dirty they dared not take off their clothes and get in bed. In Rome they felt relieved to find a clean, comfortable hotel. The clear Roman sky, so unlike the misty gray of London in November, soothed their bruised souls. Everywhere Mary looked, it seemed that life flourished amid ancient ruins. Livestock grazed among the marble columns of fallen temples. Grass grew around broken statues that had fallen to the ground. Olive and fig trees had sprouted from ledges in the decaying Colosseum, where long-ago gladiators battled before crowds. In the morning, Mary joined the outdoor artists who sketched the famous structure while William ran and played nearby.

  A week’s rest in Rome left Mary and the others refreshed and ready to move on to Naples, where they would stay through February. Shelley rented a house on a fashionable street. From its tall windows they watched people strolling in the royal gardens and the white sails of boats dotting the blue Gulf of Naples. Shelley organized outings to the theater and opera, boat excursions, and a day trip to Pompeii, the ancient city buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79.

  In Rome, the ancient world and the nineteenth century coexisted.

  Shelley wanted Mary to be happy, but she needed time to mourn Clara’s death, and so did he. His fears about his health returned; he complained of aches and fatigue. He spent hours dwelling on gloomy thoughts, and he wrote sad verses:

  I could lie down like a tired child,

  And weep away the life of care

  Which I have borne and yet must bear . . .

  We know today how the Shelleys felt, what they did, and even what they sometimes thought and said from written accounts that have survived the passing years. Studying letters, journals, and other documents is how historians delve into the past. Occasionally, though, there are intriguing gaps in the historical record. Perhaps people failed to make note of what happened. It is even possible that they burned letters or tore pages from diaries to cover up something they wished to hide. There is one such missing piece in the story of the Shelleys at Naples. The few facts that are known about this strange occurrence come from official papers.

  On February 27, 1819, Percy Shelley registered the birth, two months earlier, of a baby girl named Elena Adelaide Shelley. He listed himself and Mary as her parents, yet none of their letters or diaries from the previous year mentions anything about Mary being pregnant. So whose child was Elena? Some scholars have speculated that she was Claire’s daughter, and that Shelley was her father. Claire complained off and on about illness through the summer and fall of 1818; on the date of Elena’s birth, December 27, Mary wrote in her journal that Claire was unwell. According to another theory, Elena was Elise Duvillard’s baby. Elise recently had hastily married the servant Paolo Foggi and moved with him to Florence. Either theory could be correct, or the truth about baby Elena could lie elsewhere. The puzzle might be solved if more facts ever come to light, but for now, Elena remains a mystery. The record shows that she was placed with foster parents and that she died in Naples in June 1820.

  Days after giving up Elena, the Shelleys and Claire returned to Rome. They rented a house on the via del Corso, a street running through the city’s historic center, expecting to stay awhile. Mary liked being back in Rome. “It has such an effect on me that my past life before I saw it appears a blank & now I begin to live,” she told Marianne Hunt. She suffered bouts of grief, but not as intensely as before. “Evil thoughts will hang about me—but this is only now and then,” she wrote. Mary and Claire took drawing classes. They practiced their Italian, and Claire had singing lessons. Percy found a perch in the Baths of Caracalla, the ruins of one of ancient Rome’s largest public baths. There, as he wrote, he felt close to the people who had gathered there many centuries before and the gods they worshiped. He was finishing his poem Prometheus Unbound.

  Mary began a story, “Valerius, the Reanimated Roman,” about a senator from ancient Rome who returns to life in the 1700s and sees the imperial city that had been his home lying in ruins. Human greatness fades, Mary Shelley’s story implies. In time, nature reclaims it all. The “vast heaps of shattered walls and towers, clothed with ivy and the loveliest weeds, appear more like the natural scenery of a mountain than any thing formed of human hands,” she wrote. As Valerius observes, “such is the immortality of Rome.”

  Nature performed its steady work, and modern Rome bustled around it. One day, Mary and Claire took a carriage ride through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, an oasis of trees and flowers within the busy city, where they spotted a woman they had known long ago. She was Amelia Curran, who used to visit the Godwins with her father when Mary and Claire were growing up. Unmarried and in her forties, Curran had moved to Italy. She was earning her living as a painter, although she showed little talent for art. She painted portraits of the Shelleys and Claire. Mary disliked the one Curran did of her, saying privately, “She has made a great dowdy of me.” Mary later gave the painting away. Curran’s picture of Claire is the only image of Mary’s stepsister known to exist. And her portrait of William, whom she painted holding a rose, is the only known picture of him. Three-year-old William delighted Curran by chatting with her in Italian.

  By May, the air was giving hints of the summer heat that was to come. Malaria would soon descend on Rome, as it did every year. Mary and Percy talked about taking their son away to someplace cleaner and cooler. William “is so very delicate,” Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne, “and we must take the greatest possible care of him this summer.”

  Just one picture of William Shelley is known to exist: the painting by Amelia Curran.

  But before they could move, William got sick. His fever rose dangerously high, and he passed in and out of consciousness. His frightened parents sat at his bedside. Percy stayed awake for sixty hours at a stretch. “The misery of these hours is beyond calculation. The hopes of my life are bound up in him,” Mary wrote to Maria Gisborne. “We do not quite despair, yet we have the least possible reason to hope.” A doctor came and went. He was John Bell, a Scotsman who was spending time in Italy. The hoping, watching, and nineteenth-century medical care were no match for malaria, though. On June 7, 1819, William Shelley died. He was buried in Rome’s Protestant cemetery.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sorrow’s Abode

  My heart was all thine own,—but yet a shell Closed in its core, which seemed impenetrable . . .

  Clara had died, and now so had William. It was impossible for her sadness any longer. Her despair sank her so low, and lasted so many days, that it frightened Percy and Claire. At times Mary asked herself if life with Shelley had been one terrible mistake. “We have now lived five years together,” she wrote in her journal, “and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy.” She felt a heavy weight of guilt, believing her children might yet be alive if she and Shelley had not taken them to Italy. The thought even crossed Mary’s mind that she was being punished for starting the chain of events that led to Harriet’s death. Mary was pregnant again, but the stirrings of new life brought her no happiness. She looked forward only to further anguish.

  Mary was in such a bad state that Claire gave up her summer visit with Allegra, not daring to leave her stepsister’s side. Shelley reached out to Mary, but she had closed her heart to his comfort. In a poem, he asked her why she had gone . . .

  And left me in this dreary world alone?

  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 . . .

  He was suffering too. He wrote to Thomas Peacock, “It seems to me as if, hunted by calamity as I have been, that I should never recover any cheerfulness again.”

  Percy and Mary Shelley each grieved alone. Tragedy formed a rift between them, like a crack in the earth’s surface that deepens and widens. Mary also felt cut off from the other important man in her life, her father. Letters came from William Godwin, but his own troubles occupied his mind. He was facing eviction and wanted Mary to send money. She reminded him that she had always thought the bookstore was a bad idea. “How happy we should all be, if you had given it up, & were living without that load of evils!” she wrote. Godwin refused to admit that he had made a mistake, however. “I consider the day on which I entered on this business as one of the fortunate days of my life,” he responded. For a while, Percy had letters from Godwin intercepted, to spare Mary that cause of distress.

  In her low state of mind, Mary wrote Mathilda, a short novel about a young woman’s troubled relationship with her father. After Mathilda’s mother dies in childbirth, her father leaves her in the care of an aunt while he travels to distant places. He returns sixteen years later for a joyous reunion with his child, and for a time, the two are happy together. Then Mathilda’s father draws away from her. When pressed, he tells Mathilda that she has grown to resemble her mother, whom he adored, and that he now loves his daughter too ardently. Confessing to a “guilty love more unnatural than hate,” he commits suicide, leaving Mathilda shattered and unable to recover.