Mary Shelley

by Catherine Reef

The boat was twenty-four feet long, narrow, and swift on the water. Byron had named it the Don Juan, after a lengthy poem he was writing. The boat’s delivery boy, an English teenager named Charles Vivian, stayed on as its crew. Shelley was thrilled. “She is a most beautiful boat, and so far surpasses both mine and Williams’s expectations,” he said. Shelley and Williams took the Don Juan out on the bay. Even Mary, who had seen the boat as a harbinger of bad things to come, felt joy when sailing. She leaned against Shelley’s knee, as she had done in the past, breathing the salt air and feeling the sun on her face. Once, after a warm current flowed in on the tail of a storm, they glided on water that shone purple from the floating forms of Portuguese men-of-war.

  On July 1, with an experienced captain named Daniel Roberts, and the boy, Charles Vivian, Shelley and Williams set forth on their longest excursion yet. They sailed all the way to Livorno, to see Byron and Trelawny. The Shelleys’ friends Leigh and Marianne Hunt and their children were also at Livorno, having just come from England. The Don Juan made the trip easily, docking after seven hours. A week later, Shelley and Williams were eager to get home. They embarked with Charles Vivian at two p.m. on July 8, as clouds gathered over the water. Captain Roberts felt uneasy about the weather and stayed ashore. He climbed to the top of a lighthouse and watched through a telescope until the boat disappeared into far-off mist. Sure enough, within hours, a summer squall blew in. An Italian boatman who sailed into Livorno’s harbor to wait it out reported seeing the Don Juan struggling against high waves.

  With boating on his mind, Shelley drew these sketches.

  Four days later, a letter reached Villa Magni from Leigh Hunt, asking for word of Shelley’s safe arrival. This was how Mary and Jane learned that their husbands had set sail on the eighth and should have been home. There was only one way to explain their absence. The Don Juan and those aboard it had gone down in the storm.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “And I Live!”

  The ungrateful world did not feel his loss, and the gap it made seemed to close as quickly over his memory as the murderous sea above his living frame

  It was midnight when Mary and Jane reached Pisa, having left their children with Claire. Immediately they went to the palazzo where Byron, Teresa Guiccioli, and the Hunts were staying. Mary’s appearance shocked her friends—she could tell by the alarmed express ions on their faces. “I looked more like a ghost than a woman,” Mary knew. Full recovery from her miscarriage and great loss of blood was still a long way off.

  For days there was no sign of the Don Juan or its crew. As Edward Trelawny and others searched the coastline, Mary held on to a thread of hope: maybe they had taken a different course; possibly they had docked at another port and were alive and well. Then, on the evening of July 19, Trelawny brought the news that no one wanted to hear: three corpses had washed ashore. Two were easily identified as the bodies of Charles Vivian and Edward Williams. The third was unrecognizable—too much flesh had been eaten away—but there was a book of poems in its jacket pocket that Trelawny had seen before. The body had to be Shelley’s. He was dead at age twenty-nine.

  Trelawny spoke to Mary of his admiration for Shelley, and his words helped her through this terrible time. “I have some of his friends about me who worship him,” she wrote to William Godwin; she was not “so desolate as you might think.” In truth, for the time being, the enormity of Shelley’s death had left her numb to sorrow.

  Italian laws required that the bodies be disposed of quickly. Taking charge, Trelawny had them covered with quicklime, a caustic substance, and buried in shallow graves on a beach. It was a temporary solution at best; no one felt right about leaving the men in this anonymous resting place. Jane wished for Edward to be buried in England, and Mary wanted Percy laid to rest in Rome’s Protestant cemetery, near their son William. So Trelawny came up with an alternative that the women and their friends could accept. He procured an iron rack and had the bodies exhumed for cremation on the beach. The ashes could later be buried where the survivors saw fit. Edward Williams was cremated on August 15, and Percy Shelley on the following day. Trelawny, Byron, and Leigh Hunt were present, but Mary stayed away. “They are now about this fearful office,” she wrote to Maria Gisborne while it was taking place, “and I live!”

  Amelia Curran’s portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley is the best-known image of the poet.

  Shelley’s friends had loved him. They saw him as a great poet and felt honored to have known him. It seemed right that the flames from his funeral pyre glowed with supernatural whiteness—even if this was only the effect of setting fire to quicklime. Wanting a relic, as if Shelley had been a saint, Trelawny reached in and broke off a piece of the poet’s jawbone, burning his hands in the process. Leigh Hunt seized another piece of bone, which he would keep on his desk for the rest of his life. In time the blaze died down, leaving ash and a single organ that somehow had stayed intact. Hunt took it; the friends thought it must be Shelley’s heart.

  Sixty-seven years after it happened, a painter imagined the scene at Percy Shelley’s funeral. The poet’s friends Trelawny, Hunt, and Byron stand watch over his funeral pyre. Artist Louis Edouard Fournier placed Mary Shelley behind the men, on her knees, although she was not actually present. Observing from a distance are Italian fishermen and their families.

  Later, Mary asked Hunt for the heart. As Shelley’s wife, she deserved to have it, she said, but Hunt refused to give it up. He was keeping it out of love for his friend. “For this to make way for the claims of any other love,” he declared, “I must have great reasons indeed brought me.” Like some of Mary’s other friends, Hunt believed she had stopped loving her husband.

  Lord Byron took Mary’s side, but Hunt resented this interference. “He has no right to bestow the heart,” he said. After Hunt calmed down, he saw that it was only right to give the organ to Mary. She wrapped it in a piece of silk and some pages of Shelley’s poetry and locked it away in the portable writing desk that she took with her when traveling.

  Percy was gone; Mary would never see him again. She would never hear his voice or hold him in her arms. As this awareness sank in, Mary regained the ability to feel. She had loved Percy through years of happiness and days of sorrow. Now she regretted every unkind word she had ever said to him and every time she had pushed him away. It was too late to make things right; death was final. She would have to live with the pain of remorse. Because of her stoical nature, she would also do without sympathy from her friends. “Those about me have no idea of what I suffer,” she said, “for I talk, aye and smile as usual.” No one bothered to notice the blankness in her eyes.

  Hunt sent word of Shelley’s death to London, where his paper, the Examiner, was the first to print an obituary. Other newspapers commented sarcastically on the poet who was renowned more for his atheism than for his verses. “Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned,” reported the Courier. “Now he knows whether there is a God or no.”

  A letter came from William Godwin, whose thoughts were with his daughter. “My poor girl, what do you mean to do with yourself? You surely do not mean to stay in Italy?” he asked. “Now that you have lost your closest friend, your mind would naturally turn homeward, and to your earliest friend,” he wrote, referring to himself. “Surely we might be a great support to each other under the trials to which we are reserved.”

  Mary’s trials were emotional and, like Godwin’s, financial. She had two hundred twenty pounds, what was left of Shelley’s allowance for the quarter year in which he died. The wrecked boat was salvaged and its contents sold. Sharing the proceeds with Jane Williams, Mary received a little more than fifty pounds. Byron paid her to make fair copies of his poem Don Juan. Sir Timothy Shelley sent Mary no money but offered to support Percy Florence—if he was removed from Mary’s care. She turned Sir Timothy down without thinking twice. “I should not live ten days separated from him,” she said.

  She read old letters from Percy, finding both solace and anguish
. “My William, Clara, Allegra, are all talked of. They lived then, they breathed this air, and their voices struck on my sense,” she reflected. “Their feet trod the earth beside me, and their hands were warm with blood and life when clasped in mine, where are they all?” Shelley, too, was gone, and Mary thought only of his beauty, genius, and generosity. She doubted that she would marry again, saying, “After loving him I could only love an angel like him.” Byron seconded Mary’s high opinion. Shelley had been “the best and least selfish man I ever knew,” he said.

  People scattered, as if Shelley had been a magnet drawing them together. Jane Williams took her two children to England. Trelawny brought Shelley’s ashes to Rome and had them buried in the Protestant cemetery. Byron left Teresa Guiccioli and sailed for Greece. He joined the Greek fight for independence from Turkey’s Ottoman Empire. Claire returned to Florence long enough to gather her things. She then moved to Vienna, where her brother Charles was living, to find employment there. Mary and Percy Florence went to Genoa with the Hunts.

  What was Mary to do? She was twenty-five years old and had experienced more of life than many people twice her age. She had fallen in love and been married and widowed; she had borne four children and lost three; she had traveled in France, Switzerland, and Italy; and she had published a novel. She had trusted in love, only to have it end bleakly. Yet she held on to hope, because she still had a son who thrived. “I shall live to improve myself, to take care of my child,” she vowed. She would also work to make people understand that Percy Bysshe Shelley had been a great poet.

  On July 25, 1823, Mary and three-year-old Percy left for England. They stayed with the Godwins in their new London home, a small group of upstairs rooms on the rundown thoroughfare known as the Strand. M. J. Godwin and Company had moved too, and occupied the same building on the street level. Mary reconnected with her half brother, William, who was twenty years old and reporting on Parliament for London’s Morning Chronicle. She welcomed his company on walks around the city. It amused her to hear him call their father “the old gentleman.”

  After five years in Italy, Mary saw for herself the great sensation Frankenstein had caused. “Lo and behold! I found myself famous,” she exclaimed. Her father had arranged for a second printing of the novel, edition that identified “Mary W. Shelley” as its author. One night she went to the theater to see a new play, Presumption: or, the Fate of Frankenstein. A popular playwright had adapted her book for the stage. “I was much amused, and it appeared to excite a breathless eagerness in the audience,” she noted. Viewers thrilled to see a tall, hulking actor in the role of the creature, his face covered in blue makeup.

  Mary earned nothing from this or other staged versions of her tale. She also received no profit from the 1823 publication of Valperga, her novel about the fourteenth-century fighting man. This was because she gave the proceeds to her father, who was desperately in need of them. The book sold well, but it never matched Frankenstein in popularity.

  English actor Thomas Potter Cooke terrified audiences in Britain and France with his portrayal of Frankenstein’s monster.

  Helping her father was only right, but Mary had money worries of her own. She heard from Sir Timothy Shelley through his lawyer, and what he said discouraged her. Sir Timothy was advancing her a mere two hundred pounds a year—a hundred for her own expenses, and another hundred for little Percy’s. This money was a loan; at the time of Sir Timothy’s death, Mary would have to repay it to his estate. Anything that Percy Bysshe Shelley was to inherit would go to his older son, Charles. (Percy’s daughter with Harriet, Ianthe, was his oldest child, but wealthy families followed rules of inheritance that favored males. As the older of Percy’s two sons, Charles had become his heir.)

  Sir Timothy Shelley grudgingly supported his daughter-in-law Mary and grandson Percy Florence. He threatened withdrawal of funds to control Mary’s behavior.

  In return, Mary had to promise not to take her child out of England. She was not to draw attention to her late husband, either by publishing his poems or by including the Shelley name in her own work. She was not to meet with the Shelley family and was to communicate with them strictly through Sir Timothy’s lawyer. These were harsh terms, but Mary had been “the intimate friend of my son in the lifetime of his first wife,” Sir Timothy knew. He blamed her for the misfortune of the past several years. He was sure that she had distracted Percy “from his family, and all his first duties in life.” Mary’s conduct, he thought, “was the very reverse of what it ought to have been.” Sir Timothy slept well at night, telling himself he had been more than fair.

  To bring in some money, Mary took out her pen and wrote short stories and articles for London magazines. In the essay “On Ghosts,” she laments the passing of a world where people believed in fairies, witches, and specters. Much of the earth had been explored, and humanity had entered a wiser age. “Yet,” Shelley asks, “is it true that we do not believe in ghosts?” She then tells of two ghostly encounters that had been described to her. A friend had told of a deceased loved one gliding into his bedchamber and stroking his cheek. Another friend insisted he had seen the mangled soul of a youth whose death had been a violent suicide. Readers were left to ponder whether the supernatural had a place in the modern world after all.

  Percy’s writings also deserved a place in the world, then and for years to come. Mary wanted readers to love her husband’s beautiful poetry as much as she did. She sifted through the pages that remained and assembled a collection of long poems, shorter ones, and unfinished fragments. She published these as a book, Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley. She included his “Ode to Naples,” in which he compared the soft sound of falling leaves to “light footfalls / Of spirits passing through the streets.” She chose the heartbreaking unfinished poem “To William Shelley,” in which he insisted that the essence of his son could not be entombed in the earth:

  . . . if a thing divine

  Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine

  Is thy mother’s grief and mine.

  Shelley had begun the last poem he wrote, “The Triumph of Life,” with a dynamic description of sunrise:

  Swift as a spirit hastening to his task

  Of glory and of good, the Sun sprang forth

  Rejoicing in his splendour . . .

  In the preface that she wrote, Mary Shelley sought to change the public’s mind about her husband. “No man was ever more devoted than he, to the endeavour of making those around him happy; no man ever possessed friends more unfeignedly attached to him,” she informed readers. Through his writing, he had pursued the cause that to him was “the most sacred upon earth, the improvement of the moral and physical state of mankind.” The proud widow defiantly signed her piece “Mary W. Shelley.”

  Two months after the book came out, Sir Timothy sent a warning. By releasing this book, Mary had broken the terms of their agreement. He was giving her one more chance, but if she tried again to publicize Percy’s writing, he would stop all payments to her. He also demanded that any remaining copies of the book be withdrawn from sale. They were, but three hundred had been sold and would remain in their owners’ libraries.

  A small number of people had a new opinion of Percy Bysshe Shelley. The moral character of his poetry was “to be judged of from the writings themselves,” and not from gossip about his private life, wrote one reviewer. Shelley’s lofty images and ardent language taught readers “to rise above petty interests, envy, vanity, and low enjoyments; to investigate and follow out the boundless capabilities of our being.”

  The editors of one magazine, The Keepsake, chose illustrations and then asked authors to write stories matching them. To accompany this picture, Mary Shelley wrote “The Trial of Love,” in which a woman’s letter to the man she loves falls into the hands of her friend, who misunderstands its meaning.

  Other Britons were still dwelling on the whispered stories of Shelley’s elopement with Mary Godwin, his desertion of his first wife, and his atheism. In their
eyes, Mary Shelley was guilty too. One English lady stated that, years earlier, the women in her family had been “too correct in their conduct” to visit Mary Wollstonecraft, “and the same objection was felt to Mrs. Shelley.” Even Maria Gisborne, while visiting London, kept quiet about knowing the Shelleys.

  Mary felt lucky to have a small group of open-minded friends like Jane Williams, who accepted her as she was. Mary, Jane, and young William Godwin spent many evenings with a family they had met: a church organist named Vincent Novello, his wife, and their many children. Friends of the Hunts’, the Novellos were a musical tribe who liked to gather around the piano and sing.

  One of the Novellos’ daughters recalled how her parents “made welcome Mrs. Shelley and Mrs. Williams on their return from Italy, two young and beautiful widows, wooing them by gentle degrees into peacefuller and hopefuller mood of mind after their storm of bereavement abroad.” The Novellos did this “by quiet meetings for home-music; by calmly cheerful and gradually sprightlier converse; by affectionate familiarity and reception into their own family circle.” The daughter remembered Mary Shelley “with her wellshaped, golden-haired head, almost always a little bent and drooping; her marble-white shoulders and arms statuesquely visible in the perfectly plain black velvet dress.” (Mary wore black to show that she was in mourning.) This daughter remarked on the flexibility of Mary’s hands, and how she amused the children by bending back her fingers until they nearly touched her wrist. The girl treasured her gifts from Mrs. Shelley: a signed copy of Frankenstein and a coral necklace from Italy. “Very sweet and very encouraging was Mary Shelley,” she later wrote.