Midnight by Victoria Shorr

Author:Victoria Shorr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Oh! lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!

I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!

This was what Shelley wrote then, but did he bleed? Her father, hearing that she had fallen into “a kind of despair,” wrote her that only “persons of a very ordinary sort and pusillanimous disposition sink long under a calamity of this nature.” But then what sort of calamity did brave and extraordinary people sink under? she wondered. Or do they never sink, just plow forward, writing poetry, marveling at sunsets, and the rest of it?

But she still had Will then, so she did try. That winter, they moved to Rome, where Shelley found inspiration again. And she picked herself up instead of sinking—even got back into bed with Shelley, and by spring she was reading the Decameron and expecting another child.

But then, in Rome that June, 1819, Will, her Willmouse, four years old and “all the hopes of my life,” as she wrote to Maria Gisborne, got very sick.

“Roman fever,” people called it. They had been warned to leave Rome, were planning to leave Rome—why had they lingered? Was it for Shelley to finish his epic Prometheus? Or just the fact that they were foreigners and didn’t quite understand? That the Roman swamps were malarial at that time of year, you leave Rome in May or your children will die.

Mary is “cold, chaste,” Shelley wrote in one of his poems soon after. And in another, unfinished, on a scrap of paper:

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