Jtlary Yvollstonecrajt Shelley

(1797-1851)

Author of Frankenstein, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley seemed des­ tined from birth for distinction in the world ofletters. Her mother was Mary Wollstonecraft, pioneering feminist author of The Vindication ef the Rights ef Woman (1792), and her father was William Godwin, whose treatise An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793) made him the leading British philosopher of his time. Both wrote novels and were part of a circle of radical London intel­ lectuals who espoused egalitarian principles inspired by the American and French revolutions. Although both Wollstonecraft and Godwin were op­ posed to the institution of marriage, for the sake of their unborn child they wed five months before her birth in London on 30 August 1797· Wollstone­ craft died from complications of childbirth, and Mary spent her earliest years in the care of relatives and friends. When Mary was four Godwin married Mary Jane Clairmont; finally Mary had a stable home, if not an altogether happy one. She and her stepmother never got along, and her father, whom she adored, was a remote parent. Mary could often be found sitting in nearby St. Pancras churchyard by the grave of her mother, whom she idolized but had never known, reading and rereading Wollstonecraft's and Godwin's works. Mary had no formal schooling, but being part of the Godwin household was an excellent education in itself. Her father knew all of the leading writers and intellectuals, and Mary grew up surrounded by books and enlightened discussion. One night she heard Samuel Taylor Coleridge recite "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." In 1812 Percy Bysshe Shelley, an aristocratic disciple of both Wollstone­ craft and Godwin, came to Skinner Street to sit at the feet of the author of Political Justice. At the time he took little notice of fourteen-year-old Mary, who shortly thereafter went for the sake of her health to Scotland. How­ ever, in the spring of 1814, when Mary next encountered the twenty-one­ year-old Shelley, she had blossomed into an engaging and attractive young woman of sixteen. Before long, over Mary Wollstonecraft's grave, they de-

662 Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley dared their love for one another. Ignoring the conventions of the world and her father's wishes, on 28 July r8r4 Mary eloped with Shelley, begin­ ning the nomadic existence she would know for the whole of her life with him. Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, joined them. The threesome trav­ eled across France, among the first English tourists to witness firsthand the devastation and human misery left by the ravages of the Napoleonic Wars, and Switzerland. They returned to London in mid-September to suffer the severe social consequences of their action. William Godwin refused to see Mary or to communicate with her in any way. Former friends, scandalized by her behavior, would have nothing to do with her. Harriet Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley's wife, hired a lawyer. For a time Shelley was in danger of being imprisoned for debt. In February r8r5 Mary gave birth to a premature infant, whom the doctor said could not live. But Mary read Germaine de Stael's Corrine and nursed the baby. Two weeks later she found the infant dead. Soon afterwards she recorded in her jour­ nal, "Dream that my little baby came to life again - that it had only been cold & that we rubbed it by the fire & it lived- ." 1 That August, a year after their first elopement, with financial matters settled for the time being, the lovers set up their first household in Bishopsgate, near Windsor. There Mary gave birth to their son William in January r8r6. Thomas Love Peacock was a frequent visitor, but Mary Godwin's family still refused to see her. Neverthe­ less, William Godwin demanded that Shelley continue to provide him with financial support. The couple left for Switzerland in May 1816. From the beginning their life together had included a rigorous program of reading, both to each other and alone, in poetry, fiction, drama, history, travel writing, biography, philoso­ phy, and classical literature, which they pursued during an unusually cold and rainy summer near Lake Geneva. They met Lord Byron at Secheron at the end of May and soon saw him almost daily at his Villa Diodati; Mary, Shelley, and Byron himself were all to be deeply affected, both from a personal and a literary standpoint, by the close relationship that developed between them. -In June Byron proposed a contest for writing the best ghost story, and the next day he and Shelley each began one. Eighteen-year-old Mary, feeling the pressure of her distinguished literary parentage and intimidated by the fame of Byron and the literary talent of her partner, could not think of a story for a week. However, a discussion of the possibility of reanimating corpses through galvanism, along with Mary Godwin's own sublimated longing for

r. Entry for 19 March 1815, The journals of Mary Shelley, ed. Paula R. Feldman and Dina Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1987), l :70. Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley her dead mother and infant as well as anxiety about her literary abilities, came together to inspire a horrific "waking dream." She later recalled, "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs oflife, and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion.... His success would terrify the artist." 2 Mary Shelley knew she had found the germ of her story, and after Byron and Shelley set off for a trip around Lake Geneva she sat down and began, "It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils." When Shelley returned, Mary showed him her short prose tale, and he urged her to expand it. The mythic novel she crafted over the next nine months, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, expresses in the veiled and transmuted manner of a nightmarish dream its author's own fears, anxieties, and emotional response to her excommunication from her family. It is the story of failed parent­ hood, artistic inadequacy, and knowledge misused, which produce a creature shunned by humanity, an outcast longing for love and acceptance but experi­ encing only the cruelest rejection. The book implicitly calls attention to the shortcomings of Godwin's philosophy. The psychological landscape of the novel was also shaped by traumatic events that took place during its compo­ sition, the suicides of her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, and Harriet Shelley. Victor Frankenstein, the "creator," the solitary artist, and the creature's double, ne­ glects his family as he pursues his Promethean ambition and is responsible for the deaths of those close to him, inspiring the guilt and despair Mary Shelley herself knew all too well. Though some commentators have tried to argue that the success of the novel owes much to Percy Bysshe Shelley's editorial suggestions, in fact his contribution was no greater than that of many editors, and Mary Shelley did not always adopt his suggestions.3 Despite its awkwardnesses, the power of Frankenstein owes much to its having ful­ filled its author's wish to "speak to the mysterious fears of our nature." 4 The publishing firms of John Murray and Charles Oilier rejected the novel, but Lackington published it in ISIS. Although some denounced it for impiety, Walter Scott gave it high praise in Blackwood's Edinburgh Review, unaware, like others, that the anonymous novel had been authored by a young woman. When Mary Shelley revealed her authorship to Scott, the news enhanced the

2. From Mary Shelley's introduction to Frankenstein, Standard Novels (London, 1831), x. 3. For a discussion of this issue, see Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Boston, 1989), 127, 430-3r. 4. Introduction to Frankenstein, ix. Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley 665 book's sensation. The first science-fiction novel, it was a popular success from the beginning. In August 1816 the couple returned to England and settled in Bath. They married on 30 December 1816. In March the Shelleys moved to Marlow, and in September Mary gave birth to a daughter, Clara Everina. At the end of the year Mary published anonymously with Thomas Hookham a travel book, History of a Six Weeks' Tour, drawn from the journal the couple had kept dur­ ing their elopement, with extracts from the letters written on their journey. Shortly thereafter the family moved to London, but by mid-March they were off to Italy. They migrated from Milan to Pisa to Leghorn to Bagni di Lucca. In September 1818 one-year-old Clara Everina died from dysentery. Mary, grief-stricken, remained depressed and withdrawn for months. All her ma­ ternal affections were now focused on three-year-old William. The family traveled to Rome, then to Venice, then back to Rome again. In early June 1819 William contracted a serious fever and died on 7 June. Having lost her two children within a year, Mary, who was pregnant, sank into a severe, suicidal depression and withdrew from all those around her, including her husband. He wrote:

My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou 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; Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair, where For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.5 It was in this context that in August 1819 Mary Shelley began drafting "The Fields of Fancy," later retitled Matilda, a tragic tale of incestuous love between a father and his daughter. In November she gave birth to a son, Percy Florence, but her depression did not lift until the end of the following summer. Nursing her child, she revised her novella, hoping to raise funds through its sale to relieve her father's financial difficulties. In the spring of 1820 she sent the manuscript to Godwin. Aghast, he would not submit it to a publisher, and he refused to return the manuscript; as a result, Matilda was not published until 1959.6 In early 1820, soon after Mary moved with her family to Pisa, she began composing a historical novel based upon the life of the fourteenth-century

5. "To Mary Shelley." 6. Mathilda, ed. Elizabeth Nitchie (Chapel Hill, r959). 666 Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley

Castruccio Castracani, duke of Lucca. One of the fictional heroines is the republican countess of Valperga, after whom Mary entitled the novel. The Shelleys moved to Leghorn in June 1820 and during the next year migrated back and forth from Bagni San Giuliano to Pisa. By the end ofJuly 1821 Mary had finished a draft of Valperga, and six months later she sent a corrected copy to England. At the end of April 1822 the Shelleys moved to a place just outside Lerici, where Mary suffered a near-fatal miscarriage in mid-June. On 8 July Shelley, who could not swim, sailed from Leghorn harbor with two others into an approaching storm. It was ten agonizing days before his body was found washed up on shore at Viareggio, where he was cremated. Mary, now twenty­ four years old, found herself widowed with no financial resources. Shelley's family, blaming her for their son's alienation from his first wife, refused her any support. During a prolonged period of severe, suicidal depression Mary began her next diary notebook with the lines, "The Journal of Sorrow-Begun 1822 / 7 But for my Child it could not/ End too soon." In July 1823 in Genoa, where she had moved in mid-September to live with Leigh Hunt and his family, she composed a long poem addressed to her late husband entitled "The Choice," expressing not only her grief but her guilt and remorse at having become emotionally withdrawn from him during their last years together. She ac­ knowledged

... 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! let thy love descend in dew Of soft repentance and regret most true;- 8 Her goal became to make the world aware of Shelley's literary worth by editing and publishing his works. In the process, she collected and preserved holograph copies of his poems and, with the peculiar skill of one intimately familiar with his habits of composition and accustomed to reading his diffi­ cult handwriting, she sometimes painstakingly reconstructed drafts of poems where no fair copy existed. Often the work was emotionally trying, for Shelley had written not only about his pain at finding Mary remote and un-

7.journals of Mary Shelley, 2:428. 8. "The Choice," lines 33-40, ibid., 49i. Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley responsive but also about his love for other women. Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley appeared in mid-June 1824 and included sixty-five works never before published. It was an important step in the process of inspiring public respect for a man condemned during his lifetime as an immoral author of obscure works. Valperga, sold to Whittaker for four hundred pounds, had been published in February 1823. Despite some positive critical response, it enjoyed only a modest sale. Mary returned to London in late August 1823 to discover that Frankenstein had made her famous. A dramatic adaptation was enjoying suc­ cess at the English Opera House, and within four days of her arrival she attended a performance. Her most serious concern, however, and her rea­ son for returning to England, was financial: how to provide for herself and her son. She reapplied for support to Sir Timothy Shelley, her late husband's father, and was told she could expect one hundred pounds a year for Percy Florence but nothing for herself. Still, this was enough to relieve her im­ mediate needs and to provide a foundation to be supplemented by literary earnings. She began writing professionally in earnest, contributing fiction to the London Magazine. Soon she began publishing stories and then poems in such well-paying literary annuals as the Forget-Me-Not, the Keepsake, and Heath's Book of Beauty. Flora Tristan, the French feminist, described Mary Shelley's verse as "pleins de melodie et de sentiment;' but most of it is fairly undistinguished compared with her fiction.9 In the 1830s Mary would also write biographical sketches for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia. Mary's roman aclef, The Last Man, imaginatively projects the psychic land­ scape of her personal past into a futuristic, twenty-first-century science­ fiction plot. The story is narrated by Lionel Verney, the last man alive after a plague has decimated the human race, and features a hot-air balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean as well as idealized portraits of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Adrian) and Lord Byron (Lord Raymond), whose recent death in Greece had shaken Mary and reinforced her conviction that she, like Lionel Verney, was the last survivor of a race. In January 1826 Henry Colburn published The Last Man, for which Mary earned three hundred pounds, less than Valperga had brought. Despite initial demand and some positive reviews, most critics and readers panned the novel for the grimness of its subject. Demoralized, Mary Shelley wrote articles for the Westminster Review and the London Magazine. Mary's next novel, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, published in May 1830, was a historical romance set in medieval times about a pretender to the English throne and his wife, Katherine Gordon. Criticized by reviewers for

9. Quoted in Sunstein, Mary Shelley, 340. 668 Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley its pessimism, the book was a commercial failure. The Athenaeum named Mary Shelley the most distinguished living British woman author, but such praise did not pay the bills. Richard Bentley published her substantially re­ vised text of Frankenstein in his Standard Novels series in November 1831, for which Mary wrote an introduction recalling the circumstances of the novel's composition. Lodore, published by Bentley in April 1835, contains three heroines, in­ cluding Fanny Derham, an intellectual who fights for the oppressed using the power of language but who lacks the financial resources to be indepen­ dent. Critics praised the novel for its originality, style, and energy and liked it better than anything she had written since Frankenstein. Mary Shelley's last novel, Falkner, published by Saunders and Otley in February 1837, features the heroine Elizabeth Raby, adopted daughter of Falkner, a man haunted by a secret crime. Raby defies conventional notions of female conduct and, unlike Mary Shelley's other heroines, finds happiness in the end in a loving family circle that includes both husband and father. Some criticized the book for defending criminal behavior or for moralizing, but most reviewers liked it. Now that conditions were right, she turned to the difficult task of editing The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in four volumes with biographical and critical notes on the poems, seeing as her goal "to lay the first stone of a monument due to Shelley's genius, his sufferings, and his virtues." 10 Edward Moxon paid her five hundred pounds for the copyright. After the first volume appeared in January 1839, she was criticized for omissions she believed Shelley himself would have wanted and for others demanded by the publisher. Moreover, writing the notes unearthed painful memories, as did love poems such as Epipsychidion, inspired by other women, and she suffered another severe and extended period of depression. Still, she completed all four volumes of The Poetical Works as well as two volumes of Shelley's prose, Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, for publication in 1839. These editions played a crucial role in establishing Percy Bysshe Shelley as a major English poet. Mary Shelley's last book, Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844), dedicated to Samuel Rogers, describes two tours of the Continent she made with her son and others. The critics were favorable, and though he dis­ liked it, Robert Browning sent a copy to Elizabeth Barrett. Richard Hengist Horne devoted an appreciative chapter to Mary Shelley in The New Spirit of the Age, and Balzac in La Muse du Departement (1843) pointed to her and to

ro. Mary Shelley, preface to The Poetical Works if Percy Bysshe Shelley, 4 vols. (London, 1839), I:xvi. Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley

Ann Radcliffe as proof that women surpass men in the realm of imaginative creation. In April 1844 Sir Timothy Shelley died, and Percy Florence inherited the title and estate. However, Mary Shelley's years of financial security were brief. She died of a brain tumor on r February 1851, at the age of fifty-three, and was buried in Bournemouth in a common grave with William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

MAJOR WORKS: Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus, 3 vols. (London, 1818); Vril­ perga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca, 3 vols. (London, 1823); The Last Man, 3 vols. (London, 1826); The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, A Romance, 3 vols. (London, 1830); Lodore, 3 vols. (London, 1835); Falkner. A Novel, 3 vols. (London, 1837); Rambles in Germany and Italy, in 1840, 1842, and 1843, 2 vols. (London, 1844).

WITH PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY: History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland: with Letters Descriptive of a Sail round the Lake of Geneva, and of the Glaciers of Chamouni (London, 1817).

EDITED WORKS: Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 4 vols. (London, 1839) and Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments, 2 vols. (Lon­ don, 1840).

TEXT USED: "Stanzas" from the Keepsake for 1839.

Stanzas

0, come to me in dreams, my love! I will not ask a dearer bliss; Come with the starry beams, my love, And press mine eyelids with thy kiss.

'Twas thus, as ancient fables tell, Love visited a Grecian maid, Till she disturbed the sacred spell, And woke to find her hopes betrayed.

But gentle sleep shall veil my sight, And Psyche's lamp shall darkling be, IO Mary Wollstonecreft Shelley

When, in the visions of the night, Thou dost renew thy vows to me.

Then come to me in dreams, my love, I will not ask a dearer bliss; Come with the starry beams, my love, And press mine eyelids with thy kiss. (1839)