Authors: Dorothy Hoobler
The creator of Frankenstein, of course, had a different view, which she expressed in her journal.
O my God—what a lot is mine—marked by tragedy & death—tracked by disappointment & unutterable wretchedness—blow after blow—my
heart dies within me. I say “would I might die.” that is wicked—but life is a struggle & a burthen beyond my strength. . .
.
I have lost my dear darling Father—What I then went through—watching alone his dying hours! . . .
Thus is it—we struggle & storm but return to our task Master full soon.
Two years later, she had indeed returned to her task: “The great work of life goes on,” she wrote. Pirated editions of Shelley’s
work had appeared, sometimes including poems that Shelley had not written, or corrupt versions of those he had. When trying
to gain Sir Timothy’s permission, Mary pointed to this as a reason to bring out an authorized edition. At long last, Sir Timothy
consented, but only with the qualification that no biography of his son appear. Mary would get around this prohibition by
attaching to each poem her own prefaces, which gave details of what was happening in Shelley’s life at the time he wrote it.
At the time, this was a new way to look at poetry, but it later became a standard critical method.
She also had to decide what precisely Percy had intended to be the final form of his poems. This was difficult, for his handwriting
was notoriously illegible. Trelawny recalled, “It was a frightful scrawl; words smeared out with his finger, and one upon
the other, over and over in tiers, and all run together in most ‘admired disorder’; it might have been taken for a sketch
of a marsh overgrown with bulrushes, and the blots for wild ducks.” It was also painful work. Mary noted in her journal for
February 12, 1839, “I almost think that my present occupation will end in a fit of illness. I am editing Shelley’s poems &
writing notes for them. . . . I am torn to pieces by Memory.” Byron had trusted Mary to choose between alternate verses he
had written; now she became a major force in shaping Shelley’s work.
It was an auspicious time for all this, since Shelley’s poetry had been taken up by the Chartists, a radical group that called
for changes in Britain’s electoral process that seem mild today, such as universal male suffrage, and vote by secret ballot.
Mary herself resisted calls that she endorse the People’s Charter, a petition asking Parliament to bring about these changes.
She also turned down Trelawny when he asked her to write a pamphlet supporting women’s rights, the cause that had been closest
to her mother’s heart. Mary felt her primary task now was to bring her husband’s work into print; to do that she had to steer
clear of any actions that would offend Sir Timothy. She also wanted to shelter her son from the storms of public abuse that
had engulfed her parents and her husband. In her search for respectability, it was not just herself she was thinking of.
In any case, Mary’s own views had changed; they were not the same as those of Wollstonecraft, Godwin, or Percy. She wrote
in her journal in 1838 a defense of her refusal to speak out for liberal causes. For her it was a declaration of independence:
In the first place, with regard to the “good Cause”— the cause of the advancement of freedom & knowledge—of the Rights of
Women, &c.— I am not a person of Opinions. I have said elsewhere that human beings differ greatly in this—some have a passion
for reforming the world; others do not cling to particular opinions. That my Parents and Shelley were of the former class,
makes me respect it. . . . For myself, I earnestly desire the good & enlightenment of my fellow-creatures . . . but I am not
for violent extremes which only bring on an injurious reaction. . . . Besides, I feel the counter arguments too strongly .
. . on some topics (especially with regard to my own sex), I am far from making up my mind . . . and though many things need
great amendment, I can by no means go so far as my friends would have me. When I feel that I can say what will benefit my
fellow-creatures, I will speak,— not before. . . .
Mary’s dilemma was that she craved the benefits of conventional ideas of womanhood, yet also wanted to fulfill the hopes of
her unconventional parents and husband. She was always drawn in opposite directions, and she realized it.
In the suppressed 1824 edition of Percy’s posthumous poems, Mary had written an introduction that gave a sanitized version
of their marriage. She continued the process of making Shelley respectable in the prefaces she wrote for the publication of
his collected poems in 1839. With Shelley no longer living, Mary could make him in death what he had not been in life. She
had the opportunity to reverse roles with him as well. In their relationship, Shelley had been very much a mentor to her,
but now she could act as the critic of
his
work. She wrote, for example, that he was often indiscriminate in his literary exploration. “His reading was not always well
chosen; among them were the works of the French philosophers. . . . He was a lover of the wonderful and wild in literature,
but had not fostered these tastes at their genuine sources—the romances and chivalry of the middle ages—but in the perusal
of such German works as were current in those days.”
The condemnation that critics had showered on Wollstonecraft’s memory, once her unconventional life was revealed in Godwin’s
Memoirs,
had obscured the messages of her writing. Mary did not want to be responsible for that happening to Shelley’s work, so she
never mentioned his atheism and ignored the fact that she and Percy were living together while he was still married to Harriet.
Mary wrote out of Percy’s (and her) life the marital crises, the revolutionary beliefs—and even Claire Clairmont. She gave
her husband an honored poetic place in Victorian England. Most drastically, she dropped the parts of the notes to
Queen Mab
that made its irreligious subtext clear. She was in fact the real author of what Matthew Arnold would call “the beautiful
and ineffectual angel” Shelley.
The four-volume edition of
The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley
was published in the first months of 1839. Trelawny and Hogg, who fancied themselves custodians of Shelley’s memory, promptly
attacked Mary because of the cuts she had made to
Queen Mab
. A second edition of the
Poetical Works
appeared; it restored the cuts to
Queen Mab
and contained other new material. Shelley’s reputation did in fact benefit from the publication of this authoritative collection;
in time he would rival Byron in both popularity and critical esteem.
In 1840, Mary and her son, then twenty-one, took a summer trip to Switzerland and Italy. They visited the place where Percy
had died, and the Villa Diodati, where Byron’s challenge had sparked Mary to bring forth her monster twenty-four years earlier.
Mary was touched by the sight of those familiar surroundings:
The far Alps were hid; the wide lake looked drear. At length, I caught a glimpse of the scenes among which I had lived, when
first I stepped out from childhood into life. . . . I could mark and recognise a thousand slight peculiarities, familiar objects
then—forgotten since—now replete with recollections and associations. Was I the same person who had lived there, the companion
of the dead? For all were gone; even my young child, whom I had looked upon as the joy of future years, had died in infancy—not
one hope, then in fair bud, had opened into maturity; storm, and blight, and death, had passed over, and destroyed all.
Only the novel remained. Was it worth all the deaths, all the pain that had followed?
In April 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died. Percy Florence inherited the fortune and the title of baronet that had been
withheld from his father. Mary now had no constraints on her writing, but it had been seven years since she had written a
novel,
Falkner,
and she no longer felt healthy enough to begin another one. For the first time she visited Field Place, the estate where
her husband had grown up, and found it too dull to live in. Her son, now comparatively wealthy, purchased a boat, something
that understandably made Mary uneasy.
In October, she made a last entry in her journal: “Preserve always a habit of giving (but still with discretion), however
little, as a habit not to be lost. The first thing is justice. Whatever one gives ought to be from what one would otherwise
spend, not from what one would otherwise pay. To spend little & give much, is the highest glory a man can aspire to.” This
was in fact a passage of advice from a letter Edmund Burke wrote to his son. Mary’s mother had gained her first fame by replying
to Burke’s
Reflections on the Revolution in France
fifty-three years before. Mary had completed the circle.
Despite Mary’s intention, expressed several times, to write the biographies of her father and her husband, she never did.
Perhaps her creative energies were just no longer up to the task of doing any sustained work. It would have been emotionally
wrenching to relive the past one more time. Most likely Mary could simply not deal directly with her feelings about the men
who had been her mentors and shaped so much of her intellect and personality. In life they had both caused her great pain,
yet she maintained a public devotion to them. Her true literary portrait of them was Victor Frankenstein. Perhaps that was
enough.
Ever since her sojourn in Scotland during her early teens, Mary had yearned for a stable family life, as happy as the ones
she portrayed in some of her books. Late in her life, like a heroine in a fairy tale, she got her wish. Mary did not wait
passively for it: she seems to have arranged it herself. Living in London in 1847, she learned that a pretty young woman who
admired Percy Shelley’s poetry was visiting a relative nearby. Jane St. John had been widowed three years earlier at the age
of twenty-four, the same age Mary had been when Shelley drowned. Fate was clearly knocking, and since Jane was too shy to
approach Mary, Mary paid a call on her. As Jane recalled the scene a half century later:
I had been resting one afternoon in my bedroom after having suffered from one of my bad headaches. Feeling better towards
the late afternoon, I wandered down to the drawing-room to find my book, not knowing that the maids had let in a visitor.
As I opened the door I started back in surprise, for some one was sitting on the sofa, and I said to myself, “Who are are
you—you lovely being?” She must have seen my start of surprise, for, rising gently from the sofa, she came towards me and
said very softly, “I am Mary Shelley.” You ask what she was like. Well, she was tall and slim, and had the most beautiful
deep-set eyes I have ever seen. They seemed to change in colour when she was animated and keen. She dressed as a rule in long
soft grey material, simply and beautifully made. A more unselfish creature never lived.
Jane came from an unusual background that fit right in with the Godwin/Shelley tradition. She was one of nine illegitimate
children of the banker Thomas Gibson. When she was twenty-one, she made a good marriage for herself: to Charles Robert St.
John, the son of a viscount. Even Charles’s titled family was checkered with illegitimacy, however. His father had fifteen
children in all—only four legitimate, including Charles—by several women including his half-sister. (Shades of Byron.) Charles
himself had earlier fathered an illegitimate son, who became Jane’s ward when her husband died in 1844. (Mary Shelley called
the young man a “relative” of Jane’s former husband.) This irregular background made Jane, like Mary, yearn for respectability.
As it happened, Jane liked boating, as did Percy Florence. One thing led to another and they were married in June 1848, making
Jane “Lady Shelley,” a title she wore with pride until her death in 1899. The marriage was childless and yet happy—an oddly
appropriate counterpoint to the link between creation and danger that existed in Mary’s life and work. The association was
in many ways another threesome, but one in which Mary was the centerpiece. They moved into Field Place, and Mary chose as
her bedroom the very one her husband Percy had as a boy. Percy Florence was elected to Parliament and received a knighthood—respectability
at last. As far as anybody knows, this son and grandson of four radical and creative individuals never had an original thought
in his life.
Jane gave her mother-in-law the unconditional love Mary had yearned for but had failed to find as daughter, lover, and wife.
Now Mary had a confidante and assistant in the work of reassembling a new, perfect creature from the parts of Percy Shelley.
In service to this goal, there would be a few casualties. In the official version of Shelley and Mary’s life together—issued
by Jane in 1882—poor first wife Harriet was defamed as unfaithful and crazy. Mary, it was alleged, had only agreed to run
off with him (a tale too well known to be denied)
after
Percy and Harriet had agreed to a formal separation. Percy was turned into a kind of saint, with a room at Field Place furnished
as a shrine devoted to him. It was a far cry from when Sir Timothy was alive and had forbidden Percy’s name to be spoken in
the house.
Documents that could reflect poorly on the family were hunted down, removed from archives, and destroyed. Mary’s journal was
combed through and the past revised. After a biographer of Henry Fuseli used the letters Mary Wollstonecraft had written her
lover years before—the letters that Godwin had seen but not been allowed to read—Percy Florence Shelley purchased them; they
are nowhere to be found today. Claire Clairmont’s letters to Mary often refer to those Mary wrote in return, all now missing.
The Shelleys initially cooperated with Hogg, who wanted to write a biography of his old friend, but when they saw how candid
he planned to be, they withdrew their support. They also refused to cooperate with Trelawny, though he produced his book anyway;
lack of facts was never a deterrent to his telling a good story.
Mary’s happy life with her loving son and daughter-in-law lasted less than three years. She had long suffered from psychosomatic
illnesses—headaches, nervous stomach, and depression. In December 1850 she began to experience a mysterious paralysis. The
younger Shelleys wanted Mary to leave Field Place and move to Boscombe by the sea with them. However, she preferred to take
up her old residence in London, where a doctor diagnosed a tumor of the brain. She died, her son and daughter-in-law at her
bedside, on February 1, 1851, at the age of fifty-three. Years earlier Mary had written Maria Gisborne about Shelley, “Goodnight—I
will go look at the stars, they are eternal; so is he—so am I.” Now that was true.