Mary Shelley by Miranda Seymour

Author:Miranda Seymour [Seymour, Miranda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK

Godwin, however short of money, had refused to waste time on writing articles and reviews since his early years as a hard-working journalist. Mary could see no alternative, although she longed to unrein her imagination on a novel and – Shelley’s wish – a tragic drama. Godwin threw cold water on this second plan; shown the play she had written or sketched out in the months after her return to London, he was lethally candid. ‘Your personages are mere abstractions, the lines & points of a mathematical diagram, & not men and women,’ he told her. ‘. . . It is laziness, my dear Mary, that makes you wish to be a dramatist.’11 She did not make a second attempt, nor did she forget Godwin’s brutal words.

In October 1823, she had begun work on a piece about ghosts for the prestigious London Magazine, one of the few journals which had not published disparaging reviews of her husband’s work. She drew on the spectral tales she had read at Geneva in 1816, and on others which she had heard from the Chevalier Mengaldo at Venice and which she had recorded in her journal during the terrible days following Clara Shelley’s death there. On 13 December, Godwin wrote a discreet letter to the resourceful young publisher and magazine proprietor Henry Colburn, for whom he was writing his enormous History of the Commonwealth. Would Mr Colburn be interested in letting Mary ‘try her powers’ for him in the New Monthly Magazine, and at what rate? Did Mr Colburn have any particular subjects to suit her interests?12 His approach was successful; Mary’s submission of a piece on ancient and modern Rome the following month began a relationship which would eventually lead to Colburn’s publication of The Last Man in 1826.13

Properly supported by the Shelleys, it is unlikely that Mary would ever have undertaken the short stories for ladies’ annuals which she dutifully produced over the next sixteen years. Valuable to biographers and critics for their personal content, her contributions are for the most part wordy and pedestrian. Occasionally, like sun on steel, Mary’s wit glints through. ‘The Bride of Modern Italy’, a story anonymously published in the London Magazine the year after her return, has the brio of a Peacock novella; here, tongue firmly in her cheek, Mary parodied her husband’s predilection for rescuing pretty girls from their boarding-schools. Emilia Viviani, thinly disguised as ‘Clorinda’, is portrayed as a giddy flirt who teaches her suitors how to bribe her keeper with rum bottles and boasts of drugging the Mother Superior with opium cakes. Shelley, represented as an impressionable young English artist, is contriving a daring rescue mission to save his heroine from a planned marriage when a rival discloses that the wedding has already taken place, with no noticeable resistance from the bride.14

Here, and in a travel sketch, ‘A Visit to Brighton’, published two years later after a disappointing month in George IV’s favourite resort, Mary demonstrated a gift for humorous writing which shrewder editors would have encouraged her to develop.

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