Mary Shelley Read online

  Illness had forced Mary to stay away longer than the promised three weeks, and she was relieved that Sir Timothy was not angry. She was also surprised to learn from his lawyer that during her absence, Sir Timothy had visited Percy Florence at school, bringing his wife and two daughters. Mary was pleased to see the Shelley family taking an interest in her son. She only wished they would give him more money! As she watched Percy at his studies and at play, she could see his character taking shape. He was a typical eight-year-old, sometimes easygoing and at other times quarrelsome; if he insisted on having his way one day, he would give in to his mother’s wishes the next; he might be stubbornly silent in the morning but eager to share his thoughts by afternoon.

  In summer 1828, Charles Clairmont returned from Europe for a visit. Charles was working as an English tutor in Vienna. He came with his Austrian wife and their two small daughters. Within weeks, Claire arrived on the scene. Her Russian employer had given her a year’s leave of absence, and she was spending the time in London. Grief and hard years as a governess had altered Claire. Once impulsive and full of life, she had grown prudish and set in her ways. Watching her dote on Percy Florence and Charles’s girls, Edward Trelawny, the dark-haired adventurer, affectionately called her “old Aunt.”

  Trelawny, who had been such a kind friend after Percy Shelley’s death, was back in England too. After burying Shelley’s ashes, he had gone to fight in Greece with Byron. He had married a Greek woman, with whom he had a daughter, but by 1828 he was living on his own. For a while he avoided Mary, afraid to see her changed face. Feeling the same fear, Claire steeled herself for “a monster to look at,” but was relieved to see Mary appearing healthier and less transformed than she had imagined. She noticed too “the surpassing beauty” of Mary’s mind. “Every sentiment of hers is so glowing and beautiful,” Claire jotted in her journal.

  Mary helped Trelawny, who was writing a book about his early life. Just like the stories he told, Adventures of a Younger Son was largely fiction. Trelawny also wanted to see another book written: Percy Shelley’s biography. “I always wished you to do this, Mary,” he said. If she would not, then maybe he would write it himself. “Will you aid in it?” he asked. “Will you give documents? Will you write anecdotes?”

  In truth, Mary had often thought about writing such a book, but Sir Timothy held power over her, and she dared not. “There is nothing I shrink from more fearfully than publicity,” she explained. “I have too much of it, and, what is worse, I am forced by my hard situation to meet it in a thousand ways.” Unwilling to see things from Mary’s point of view, Trelawny accused her of cowardice. He went away disappointed.

  When autumn came and Percy returned to school, Mary worked on a book of her own, a novel based on the life of Perkin Warbeck, a real man who lived in the fifteenth century. Warbeck had claimed to be Richard of Shrewsbury, Duke of York. Richard was a child of King Edward IV, who died in 1483. Lacking their father’s protection, Richard and his brother were imprisoned in the Tower of London and soon disappeared. What happened to the two young boys is one of the world’s great historical mysteries. Many people assumed they were dead, victims of murder, but this was never proved. Warbeck could therefore have been telling the truth, that he was the real Richard and had escaped death, or he may well have been an impostor. In the 1490s, he tried to overthrow King Henry VII and claim the throne of England for himself, but he failed and was executed.

  In Mary Shelley’s novel, Warbeck is the real lost duke. While researching his life, “I became aware of the romance which his story contains,” she explained. “I felt that it would be impossible for any narration, that should be confined to the incorporation of facts related by our old Chroniclers, to do it justice.” Shelley used the word “romance” to describe a tale relating the adventures of a hero who displays courage and chivalry as he does his duty.

  Perkin Warbeck was paraded through the streets on horseback on his way to imprisonment in the Tower of London.

  Mary Shelley gave Perkin Warbeck the finest qualities of her late husband, namely his generosity and love for the good and noble in the human spirit. Both men inspired the people around them to strive to be better. When Warbeck’s widow speaks at the close of the novel, readers hear Mary Shelley’s voice: “I feel my many weaknesses, and know that some of these form a part of my strength. . . . I am content to be an imperfect creature, so that I never lose the ennobling attribute of my species, the constant endeavour to be more perfect.”

  Published in 1830, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck was “full of strange incident and mysterious interest,” one reviewer wrote. Not only would it engage readers as a novel, commented another, but “it may impart useful instruction as a history.” There was just one problem: too few customers bought the book. Historical novels had been popular fifteen or twenty years before, but the reading public had grown weary of them. Perkin Warbeck earned its author less money than she had hoped for and counted on.

  In 1831, a new edition of Frankenstein appeared in bookshops. It contained a long introduction by the author in which she reflected on her early life. She wrote about her literary parents, her childhood imaginings, and her time in Scotland. Without mentioning Percy Bysshe Shelley by name, she described the summer of 1816, which she spent with him on Lake Geneva in the company of Lord Byron. Hoping to appear acceptable to conventional readers, she made it sound as though she was already married at that time. She also detailed how her most famous novel came to be written. “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper,” she wrote. “I have an affection for it, for it was the offspring of happy days, when death and grief were but words.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Memory

  Peace! was I ever at peace?

  Was this unquiet heart ever still . . . ?

  How quickly children grow! By spring 1833, Percy Florence was thirteen years old and enrolled at Harrow, an old, esteemed boys’ school in northwest London. Mary rented a house nearby so he could live at home and save the cost of a dormitory room. His grandfather had raised Percy’s allowance again, to three hundred pounds, but tuition and bills for his clothing and supplies ate up half that amount. Even so, Mary paid for Percy to have dancing lessons. Knowing how to dance would help a young man succeed socially, and Mary wanted him to have every opportunity.

  Percy Florence was an average student who showed no special talents. He was a chubby, blue-eyed, rosy-faced boy who meant everything to his mother. “My heart & soul are bound up in Percy,” Mary wrote in her journal. Percy loved boating, which caused her hours of worry.

  Boys play cricket on the grounds of Harrow, the school Mary Shelley chose for her son. Lord Byron had also been a student there.

  So much can happen in a mere couple of years. In September 1832, Mary’s half brother, William Godwin, Jr., died of cholera. This deadly contagious disease had traveled through London’s water supply to infect people in crowded parts of the city. William was active and healthy on a Tuesday, but he awakened Wednesday feeling ill. He rapidly worsened, and by Friday his consciousness was fading. He died on Saturday morning and was buried on Sunday afternoon.

  “He was a being of the warmest affections and the most entire generosity of temper,” reflected his devastated father, William Godwin, Sr. “All his chosen associates felt a very earnest attachment to him, and a strong sense of his extraordinary gifts.” Mary commented simply in her journal, “This is a sad blow to us all.”

  Word came from France that Walter Sholto Douglas had died as well. Isabel Robinson then proved herself to be one of the world’s clever survivors. Claiming to be the widow of a military man, she married an older English minister who had retired to Italy. She and young Adeline went to live with him in his villa.

  The Hunts, the Shelleys’ friends from their Marlow days, were back in England and had fallen on hard times. With high hopes, Leigh Hunt had launched a new magazine, only to see it fail. Marianne Hunt was drinking heavily and asking friends for handou
ts, without her husband’s knowledge. The two had grown apart. “Lengthening years only made them, in the longer portion of their faithful and unsevered union, strangers,” said their oldest son.

  Restless and needing new adventures, Edward Trelawny sailed for America in January 1833. He claimed he would never be back, but Mary expected to see him again. She predicted—correctly—that he would return in a few years “with a whole life of new experiences—the tale of a thousand loves.” He would be the same as ever, full of tall stories, “yet ever new.”

  As always, Mary worked hard at her writing. She earned a small, steady income composing brief biographies of important writers for a series of reference books. The publisher planned volumes on eminent men of Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal, but Mary Shelley made sure they included noteworthy women, too. She wrote, for example:

  It would be giving a very faint idea of the state of Italian literature, or even of the lives led by the learned men of those times, if all mention were omitted of the women who distinguished themselves in literature. No slur was cast by the Italians on feminine accomplishments.

  After listing some of those women, she presented the life of poet Vittoria Colonna (1492–1547). In the volume on French authors, she profiled the politically active Madame Roland (1754–1793), who authored her memoir in prison while awaiting death on the guillotine, and Madame de Staël (1766–1817), a literary critic and bestselling novelist who fled France at the time of the Revolution.

  Mary Shelley also wrote a novel, Lodore, set neither in the future nor in the past, but in her own time. In Lodore, Shelley looks at relations between parents and children. She pays special attention to the education of girls, especially one character, Ethel Fitzhenry. Ethel is the daughter of an English gentleman, Lord Lodore. Hoping to guard her from the corrupting influence of society, Lodore brings Ethel to America and raises her in the Illinois wilderness. There, he thinks, he can preserve her innocence. Like too many girls of her time, however, Ethel is “taught to know herself dependent.” As a result, she “seldom thought, and never acted, for herself.” In time, the outside world intrudes, in the form of an artist who takes a romantic interest in Ethel. Mistrusting this suitor, Lodore whisks his daughter away. But in New York, as they are about to sail for England, Lord Lodore dies.

  In England, Ethel will find love and make a happy marriage, but she will also receive guidance from independent-minded women. How much different the world would be, Shelley suggests in Lodore, if women and men were allowed to be equal. Patience would put an end to gossip and slander, and mistakes would be made right through kindness. Rash emotions would be kept in check through a true understanding of right and wrong, “a love of truth in ourselves, and a sincere sympathy with our fellow-creatures.”

  Mary Shelley labored long hours writing Lodore. When the printer lost thirty-six pages of her manuscript, she worked furiously to rewrite them. She pushed herself so hard that her nerves were on edge and her health broke down. Desperate for help, she sent word to Jane Hogg: “Come—My only Friend Come—to the deserted one—I am too ill to write more.” Jane had betrayed her, but Mary knew this old companion could be counted on when someone was in need. Sure enough, Jane came with her new little daughter, Prudentia. She stayed for several weeks as Mary regained her strength and good spirits.

  This scene is of a pioneer settlement in Missouri, but life in the newly settled Illinois country, the setting for Lodore, was just as rustic in 1820.

  Lodore garnered praise for its author. Mary Shelley was “one of the most original of our modern writers,” a reviewer wrote. Another called Lodore “one of the best novels it has been of late years our fortune to read.” The book sold well, but it earned Mary just a hundred and fifty pounds.

  At least, her father had found financial relief. Some men who had known William Godwin fifty years before, when they were all young and starting out in life, had since been elected to Parliament. Seeing the well-known author in such dire straits, they kindly arranged for him to get a government job. As “Office Keeper and Yeoman Usher of the Receipt of the Exchequer,” Godwin had few duties to perform. In exchange, he received a small salary and a place to live. Godwin, the writer who had famously spoken out against government, now had no problem accepting public funds. All wealth was meant to be shared, he had said, including Britain’s. Wasn’t he only getting his portion?

  In March 1836, when he was eighty years old, Godwin started jotting down changes in his health. His digestion was giving him trouble, and he had a chronic cough. Before long, he took to his bed with a respiratory infection that only worsened. As he fought for each breath, Mary Jane Godwin summoned Mary. For several nights, the two women took turns sitting at his bedside as his thoughts drifted to the past. “He knew himself to be dangerously ill—but did not consider his recovery impossible,” Mary observed. She and her stepmother were with him on the evening of April 7, when his heart stopped beating.

  With no thought for his second wife’s feelings, William Godwin had asked to be buried with his first one, Mary Wollstonecraft. This was why, on the day of the funeral, Mary and Percy Florence stood with the other mourners in the St. Pancras churchyard and looked into Wollstonecraft’s opened grave. “At the depth of twelve feet her coffin was found uninjured—the cloth still over it—& the plate tarnished but legible,” Mary wrote. This was the closest she had been to her mother since her first days of life.

  The government informed Mary Jane Godwin that she had to move out of the home it had provided. Needing funds, she sold her late husband’s many books, including handwritten manuscripts of his best-known works. The sale brought in two hundred sixty pounds. The prime minister granted her another three hundred pounds, making her able to afford a new place to live. The family employing Claire came to England, which meant that Claire was on hand to help look after her mother, who was close to seventy years old.

  This nineteenth-century pictorial graph charts the decades of a woman’s life. She begins at an early age to be prepared for her roles as wife and mother. Once she has fulfilled these duties, she declines into old age. It was understood that throughout her life’s journey, she would look for support and guidance from her father, husband, and other male relatives.

  William Godwin had left mountains of paper: letters, memoirs, diaries, and more. Among them was his last, unpublished book. Titled The Genius of Christianity Unveiled, it was an argument against religious belief. “What is there behind the curtain?” Godwin asked in its pages, imagining a screen separating the known world from the realm of faith. “Probably nothing: neither ‘work, nor device, nor knowledge.’” As death approached, Godwin tasked his daughter with finding this book a publisher. “It has been the main object of my life,” he said, “to free the human mind from slavery.” He implored Mary not to let these pages “be consigned to oblivion.”

  She never published his book. Perhaps she was a coward, as Edward Trelawny claimed, but Mary thought no good would come from it. Reminding people that Percy Florence’s grandfather had held unpopular, radical ideas might only hurt the young man’s chances of success. She also chose not to publish her novel Mathilda, although her manuscript was among her father’s papers too. A book about incestuous love would make its author the subject of gossip, Mary knew, and she had had enough of whispering and public scorn.

  Instead she wrote another novel about a father and daughter. The reader meets Elizabeth Raby when she is a six-year-old orphan playing on her mother’s grave, just as Mary Shelley had done so many years before. Elizabeth is a beautiful child, “a garden rose, that accident has thrown amidst briers and weeds.” A man, Rupert Falkner, has come to the lonely cemetery to kill himself, but Elizabeth’s presence prevents him from acting. Learning that the child is alone in the world, Falkner adopts her, and they pursue a wandering life. Elizabeth grows up feeling a saint-like devotion toward her adoptive father, “a sort of rapturous, thrilling adoration.” He, meanwhile, feels “a half remorse at the too great pleasure
he derived from her society.” Elizabeth’s loyalty, he thinks, is more than he deserves.

  Falkner is a complex character. He is outwardly tranquil but inwardly guilt-ridden, “torn by throes of the most tempestuous and agonizing feelings.” It seems that Falkner holds a terrible secret: not long before he encountered Elizabeth, he caused the accidental death of the woman he loved, named Alithea Neville, who had a husband and son. Time and again, remorse draws Falkner toward death, but Elizabeth’s steady love keeps him alive. For a long time, Elizabeth knows nothing about Falkner’s past. She reaches her teens and, as can happen only in a novel, falls in love with Alithea Neville’s wondrously handsome son. Falkner must stand trial for his role in Alithea’s death before the reader can learn whether the young couple will marry, and whether they and Falkner will live happily ever after.

  “Energy and highly wrought passion” were Shelley’s “most characteristic features” as a writer, commented one reviewer. He also stated that “Mrs. Shelley wields a powerful pen for a female hand.” Like many readers of his time, this critic placed women writers in a separate category, inferior to men. Falkner was published in 1837 and sold so slowly that Shelley decided to write no more novels. They took too much energy and hard work and brought too little reward.