A00021 - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft 

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Mary Shelley
Richard Rothwell's portrait of Shelley was shown at the Royal Academy in 1840, accompanied by lines from Percy Shelley's poem The Revolt of Islam calling her a "child of love and light".[1]
Born	Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin 30 August 1797 London, England
Died	1 February 1851 (aged 53) London, England
Occupation	Writer
Notable works	Frankenstein (1818), see more...
Spouse	Percy Bysshe Shelley ​ ​ (m. 1816; died 1822)​
Children	4, including Percy Florence
Parents	William Godwin Mary Wollstonecraft
Relatives	Fanny Imlay (half-sister) William Godwin the Younger (half-brother) Claire Clairmont (stepsister)
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"Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose -- a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye."  (04/21/2022)

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (born August 30, 1797, London, England—died February 1, 1851, London) was an English Romantic novelist best known as the author of Frankenstein (1818), a seminal work of Romanticism and a Gothic horror classic that is also considered to be one of the first science-fiction novels.

Early life and intellectual upbringing

She was the only daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, who died from puerperal fever 11 days after her daughter’s birth. In 1801, when Mary Godwin was four, her father married Mary Jane Clairmont, who brought into the household her own two children, Charles and Jane (later “Claire”). (Mary Godwin also had a half sister, Fanny Imlay, who was born to Wollstonecraft in 1794.) Young Mary did not get along with her stepmother, who was jealous of her stepdaughter. Increasingly, Mary was displaced in the family, especially after the birth of her father and stepmother’s son, William, in 1803.

Although Mary Godwin did not receive a formal education, she grew up in an intellectual atmosphere surrounded by many leading writers and thinkers who admired her father and visited him at home. At age 11 she published a children’s tale, Mounseer Nongtongpaw; or, The Discoveries of John Bull in a Trip to Paris, through her father’s publishing house. In the summer of 1812 she was sent to Dundee, Scotland, to live with an acquaintance of her father, purportedly for her health but more likely because of disagreements between Mary and her stepmother. Ultimately, she spent two happy years in Scotland. She later wrote of these years and of her home there,

They were the eyry of freedom.…It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered.

Relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the Birth of FrankensteinOn January 1, 1818, a small London publisher printed 500 copies of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus on the cheapest paper available. That was only the beginning.

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Most scholars think the first meeting between Mary Godwin and the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley took place in November 1812, during one of her visits home. Others think she did not meet him until 1814. Regardless of the year, Shelley had not yet composed the poems that would make him one of the most renowned figures of the second generation of English Romantics. But he had already established himself as a rebel, having been expelled from the University of Oxford in 1811 for refusing to admit his authorship of a pamphlet endorsing atheism. Later that year he had eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook (Shelley was 19), a tavern owner’s daughter, which incensed his aristocratic father and grandfather.

Indeed, Shelley was married when he met Godwin. Moreover, he and Harriet became the parents of a daughter born in 1813, and they were expecting their second child in late 1814. Nonetheless, Godwin eloped with him to France in July 1814, and she quickly became pregnant. Their child, a daughter named Clara, died within days of her birth in February 1815. Godwin’s elopement caused a rift with her father, and two years passed before she saw him again.

The “haunted summer” of 1816 and the seeds of Frankenstein

Where Mary Shelley started FrankensteinVilla Diodati, a mansion in Cologny, Switzerland. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley began the first outline for her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus while vacationing here during the summer of 1816.

In January 1816 Mary Godwin gave birth to a son, William. In May she, Percy Shelley, their son, and Claire Clairmont went to Switzerland to meet with the poet Lord Byron, who was engaged in an extramarital affair with Clairmont. That summer, which was unusually cold and stormy, perhaps as a result of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia, came to be known as the “year without a summer” or, in English literature and popular culture, the “haunted summer.” It was especially fruitful for the writers who were frequent guests at Villa Diodati, a mansion in Cologny (near Geneva) that Byron had leased. There Byron challenged his guests to a ghost story contest, which proved to be the genesis for Mary Godwin’s soon-to-be masterpiece, Frankenstein. Primarily inspired by an 1812 French translation of the German ghost story collection Fantasmagoriana, a waking nightmare Godwin had experienced that conjured a student horrified by his vivification of assembled human body parts, and an earlier dream in which she coaxed her daughter Clara back to life, Godwin began crafting a tale about a scientist named Victor Frankenstein who artificially creates a human being that ultimately brings tragedy to his life. Meanwhile, her husband wrote the poems “Mont Blanc” and “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” and Byron and fellow guest John Polidori produced works that would be important to their careers.

(Read Britannica’s article about the “haunted summer of 1816.”)

In September 1816 Godwin and Shelley returned to England, and the couple were married on December 30, 1816, not long after Godwin’s half sister, Fanny Imlay, and Shelley’s first wife, Harriet Shelley, had died by suicide, in October and December, respectively.

Meanwhile, Mary Shelley continued to work on her novel, adding material written after a visit to the Swiss Alps in July 1816. In September 1817 she gave birth to another daughter, Clara Everina, who soon died of dysentery. Later that year she coauthored a travel book, History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, which recounts the continental tour she and Shelley took in 1814 following their elopement and then recounts their summer near Geneva in 1816.

Publishing Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

In January 1818 Mary Shelley published Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, a text that is part Gothic novel and part philosophical novel. Five hundred copies of the work were printed anonymously on the cheapest paper available by a largely unknown London publisher. Only 20 years old, Mary Shelley did not immediately claim authorship because of the novel’s controversial contents. However, the work quickly exploded in popularity, and by August a family friend of the Shelleys was telling them that Frankenstein “seems to be universally read.”

The original edition included a preface written by Percy Shelley and a dedication to William Godwin, which led many to believe that one of those men was the author. Although Percy Shelley did have some influence on the novel—notably, he altered some of his wife’s word choices, swapping her more accessible language for ornate, Latinate words and sentence structures—Mary Shelley’s manuscripts definitively prove that she was the novel’s creator.

In 1831 she published a third edition of Frankenstein, which included extensive edits to the original edition and an introduction describing her inspirations.

Later life and other works

However, Mary Shelley continued to suffer tragedy. In June 1819 her three-year-old son, William, died from malaria while the Shelleys were living in Italy. Several months later she gave birth to another son, Percy Florence, who would be her only child to survive into adulthood.

Yet she continued to follow her own muse, writing several other novels, including Valperga (1823), The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). The Last Man (1826), an account of the future destruction of the human race by a plague, is often ranked as her best work.

After her husband’s death at age 29 in 1822, she returned to England and devoted herself to publicizing his writings and to educating their son. She published her late husband’s Posthumous Poems (1824). She also edited his Poetical Works (1839), with long and invaluable notes, and his prose works. Her Journal is a rich source of Shelley biography, and her letters are an indispensable adjunct.

(What piece of her husband’s body did Mary Shelley keep after he died?)

Death and legacy

Mary Shelley died at age 53 from what is believed to have been a belatedly diagnosed brain tumor. Frankenstein’s subsequent influence on literature and popular culture cannot be overstated. In 2016 alone nearly 50,000 copies of the novel were sold—100 times the number of copies produced in its first printing. One of the original copies sold at auction in 2021 for $1.17 million, breaking the record for a printed work by a woman. And of course, Frankenstein’s man-made monster inspired a similar creature in numerous American horror films; the work continued to be revisited in film, theater, television, and literary adaptations into the 21st century.

Quick Facts

Née:

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, also called Mary Shelley

Born:

August 30, 1797, London, England

Died:

February 1, 1851, London (aged 53)

Notable Works:

“Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus”

“The Last Man”

Movement / Style:

Romanticism

Posthumous publications of her casual writings include The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844 (1987), edited by Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, and Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1995), edited by Betty T. Bennett. Among the many tributes to her is the Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley scholarship, an annual award given to horror writers who identify as women.

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Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction.^[2] She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin and her mother was the philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft.

Mary's mother died 11 days after giving birth to her. She was raised by her father, who provided her with a rich informal education, encouraging her to adhere to his own anarchist political theories. When she was four, her father married a neighbour, Mary Jane Clairmont, with whom Mary had a troubled relationship.^[3][4]

In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father's political followers, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was already married. Together with her stepsister, Claire Clairmont, she and Percy left for France and travelled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet.^[5]

In 1816, the couple and Mary's stepsister famously spent a summer with Lord Byron and John William Polidori near Geneva, Switzerland, where Shelley conceived the idea for her novel Frankenstein. The Shelleys left Britain in 1818 for Italy, where their second and third children died before Shelley gave birth to her last and only surviving child, Percy Florence Shelley. In 1822, her husband drowned when his sailing boat sank during a storm near Viareggio. A year later, Shelley returned to England and from then on devoted herself to raising her son and to her career as a professional author. The last decade of her life was dogged by illness, most likely caused by the brain tumour which killed her at the age of 53.

Until the 1970s, Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novel Frankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Recent scholarship has yielded a more comprehensive view of Shelley's achievements. Scholars have shown increasing interest in her literary output, particularly in her novels, which include the historical novels Valperga (1823) and Perkin Warbeck (1830), the apocalyptic novel The Last Man (1826) and her final two novels, Lodore (1835) and Falkner (1837). Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles for Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–1846), support the growing view that Shelley remained a political radical throughout her life. Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romantic ethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.

Life and career

Early life

Page from William Godwin's journal recording "Birth of Mary, 20 minutes after 11 at night" (left column, fourth row)

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in Somers Town, London, in 1797. She was the second child of the feminist philosopher, educator, and writer Mary Wollstonecraft and the first child of the philosopher, novelist, and journalist William Godwin. Wollstonecraft died of puerperal fever shortly after Mary was born. Godwin was left to bring up Mary, along with her older half-sister, Fanny Imlay, Wollstonecraft's child by the American speculator Gilbert Imlay.^[6] A year after Wollstonecraft's death, Godwin published his Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), which he intended as a sincere and compassionate tribute. However, because the Memoirs revealed Wollstonecraft's affairs and her illegitimate child, they were seen as shocking. Mary Godwin read these memoirs and her mother's books, and was brought up to cherish her mother's memory.^[7]

Mary's earliest years were happy, judging from the letters of William Godwin's housekeeper and nurse, Louisa Jones.^[8] But Godwin was often deeply in debt; feeling that he could not raise the children by himself, he cast about for a second wife.^[9] In December 1801, he married Mary Jane Clairmont, a well-educated woman with two young children of her own – Charles and Claire.^{[note 1]} Most of Godwin's friends disliked his new wife, describing her as quick-tempered and quarrelsome;^{[10][note 2]} but Godwin was devoted to her, and the marriage was a success.^[11] Mary Godwin, in contrast, came to detest her stepmother.^[3] William Godwin's 19th-century biographer Charles Kegan Paul later suggested that Mrs Godwin had favoured her own children over those of Mary Wollstonecraft.^[4]

Together, the Godwins started a publishing firm called M. J. Godwin, which sold children's books as well as stationery, maps, and games. However, the business did not turn a profit, and Godwin was forced to borrow substantial sums to keep it going.^[12] He continued to borrow to pay off earlier loans, compounding his difficulties. By 1809, Godwin's business was close to failure, and he was "near to despair".^[13] Godwin was saved from debtor's prison by philosophical devotees such as Francis Place, who lent him further money.^[14]

The Polygon (at left) in Somers Town, London, between Camden Town and St Pancras, where Mary Godwin was born and spent her earliest years

Though Mary Godwin received little formal education, her father tutored her in a broad range of subjects. He often took the children on educational outings, and they had access to his library and to the many intellectuals who visited him, including the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the former vice-president of the United States Aaron Burr.^[15] Godwin admitted he was not educating the children according to Mary Wollstonecraft's philosophy as outlined in works such as A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), but Mary Godwin nonetheless received an unusual and advanced education for a girl of the time. She had a governess and a daily tutor and read many of her father's children's books on Roman and Greek history in manuscript.^[16] For six months in 1811, she also attended a boarding school in Ramsgate.^[17] Her father described her at age 15 as "singularly bold, somewhat imperious, and active of mind. Her desire of knowledge is great, and her perseverance in everything she undertakes almost invincible."^[18]

In June 1812, Mary's father sent her to stay with the dissenting family of the radical William Baxter, near Dundee, Scotland.^[19] To Baxter, he wrote, "I am anxious that she should be brought up ... like a philosopher, even like a cynic."^[20] Scholars have speculated that she was sent away for her health, to remove her from the seamy side of the business, or to introduce her to radical politics.^[21] Mary Godwin revelled in the spacious surroundings of Baxter's house and in the companionship of his four daughters, and she returned north in the summer of 1813 for a further stay of 10 months.^[22] In the 1831 introduction to Frankenstein, she recalled: "I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered."^[23]

Percy Bysshe Shelley

On 26 June 1814, Mary Godwin declared her love for Percy Shelley at Mary Wollstonecraft's graveside in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church (shown here in 1815).^[24]

Mary Godwin may have first met the radical poet-philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley in the interval between her two stays in Scotland.^[25] By the time she returned home for a second time on 30 March 1814, Percy Shelley had become estranged from his wife and was regularly visiting William Godwin, whom he had agreed to bail out of debt.^[26] Percy Shelley's radicalism, particularly his economic views, which he had imbibed from William Godwin's Political Justice (1793), had alienated him from his wealthy aristocratic family: they wanted him to follow traditional models of the landed aristocracy, and he wanted to donate large amounts of the family's money to schemes intended to help the disadvantaged. Percy Shelley, therefore, had difficulty gaining access to money until he inherited his estate because his family did not want him wasting it on projects of "political justice". After several months of promises, Shelley announced that he either could not or would not pay off all of Godwin's debts. Godwin was angry and felt betrayed.^[27]

Mary and Percy began meeting each other secretly at her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's grave in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church, and they fell in love—she was 16, and he was 21.^[28] On 26 June 1814, Shelley and Godwin declared their love for each other as Shelley announced he could not hide his "ardent passion", leading her in a "sublime and rapturous moment" to say she felt the same way; on either that day or the next, Godwin lost her virginity to Shelley, which tradition claims happened in the churchyard.^[29] Godwin described herself as attracted to Shelley's "wild, intellectual, unearthly looks".^[30] To Mary's dismay, her father disapproved, and tried to thwart the relationship and salvage the "spotless fame" of his daughter. At about the same time, Mary's father learned of Shelley's inability to pay off the father's debts.^[31] Mary, who later wrote of "my excessive and romantic attachment to my father",^[32] was confused. She saw Percy Shelley as an embodiment of her parents' liberal and reformist ideas of the 1790s, particularly Godwin's view that marriage was a repressive monopoly, which he had argued in his 1793 edition of Political Justice but later retracted.^[33] On 28 July 1814, the couple eloped and secretly left for France, taking Mary's stepsister, Claire Clairmont, with them.^[34]

After convincing Mary Jane Godwin, who had pursued them to Calais, that they did not wish to return, the trio travelled to Paris, and then, by donkey, mule, carriage, and foot, through a France recently ravaged by war, to Switzerland. "It was acting in a novel, being an incarnate romance," Mary Shelley recalled in 1826.^[35] Godwin wrote about France in 1814: "The distress of the inhabitants, whose houses had been burned, their cattle killed and all their wealth destroyed, has given a sting to my detestation of war...".^[36] As they travelled, Mary and Percy read works by Mary Wollstonecraft and others, kept a joint journal, and continued their own writing.^[37] At Lucerne, lack of money forced the three to turn back. They travelled down the Rhine and by land to the Dutch port of Maassluis, arriving at Gravesend, Kent, on 13 September 1814.^[38]

Percy Bysshe Shelley was inspired by the radicalism of Godwin's Political Justice (1793). When the poet Robert Southey met Shelley, he felt as if he were seeing himself from the 1790s.^[39] (Portrait by Amelia Curran, 1819.)

The situation awaiting Mary Godwin in England was fraught with complications, some of which she had not foreseen. Either before or during the journey, she had become pregnant. She and Percy now found themselves penniless, and, to Mary's genuine surprise, her father refused to have anything to do with her.^[40] The couple moved with Claire into lodgings at Somers Town, and later, Nelson Square. They maintained their intense programme of reading and writing, and entertained Percy Shelley's friends, such as Thomas Jefferson Hogg and the writer Thomas Love Peacock.^[41] Percy Shelley sometimes left home for short periods to dodge creditors.^[42] The couple's distraught letters reveal their pain at these separations.^[43]

Pregnant and often ill, Mary Godwin had to cope with Percy's joy at the birth of his son by Harriet Shelley in late 1814 and his constant outings with Claire Clairmont.^{[note 3]} Shelley and Clairmont were almost certainly lovers, which caused much jealousy on Godwin's part.^[44] Shelley greatly offended Godwin at one point when, during a walk in the French countryside, he suggested that they both take the plunge into a stream naked; this offended her principles.^[45] She was partly consoled by the visits of Hogg, whom she disliked at first but soon considered a close friend.^[46] Percy Shelley seems to have wanted Mary Godwin and Hogg to become lovers;^[47] Mary did not dismiss the idea, since in principle she believed in free love.^[48] In practice, however, she loved only Percy Shelley and seems to have ventured no further than flirting with Hogg.^{[49][note 4]} On 22 February 1815, she gave birth to a two-month premature baby girl, who was not expected to survive.^[50] On 6 March, she wrote to Hogg:

My dearest Hogg my baby is dead—will you come to see me as soon as you can. I wish to see you—It was perfectly well when I went to bed—I awoke in the night to give it suck it appeared to be sleeping so quietly that I would not awake it. It was dead then, but we did not find that out till morning—from its appearance it evidently died of convulsions—Will you come—you are so calm a creature & Shelley is afraid of a fever from the milk—for I am no longer a mother now.^[51]

The loss of her child induced acute depression in Mary Godwin, who was haunted by visions of the baby; but she conceived again and had recovered by the summer.^[52] With a revival in Percy Shelley's finances after the death of his grandfather, Sir Bysshe Shelley, the couple holidayed in Torquay and then rented a two-storey cottage at Bishopsgate, on the edge of Windsor Great Park.^[53] Little is known about this period in Mary Godwin's life, for her journal from May 1815 to July 1816 is lost. At Bishopsgate, Percy wrote his poem Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude; and on 24 January 1816, Mary gave birth to a second child, William, named after her father, and soon nicknamed "Willmouse". In her novel The Last Man, she later imagined Windsor as a Garden of Eden.^[54]

Lake Geneva and Frankenstein

Draft of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus ("It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld my man completed ...")

In May 1816, Mary Godwin, Percy Shelley, and their son travelled to Geneva with Claire Clairmont. They planned to spend the summer with the poet Lord Byron, whose recent affair with Claire had left her pregnant.^[55] In History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland (1817), she describes the particularly desolate landscape in crossing from France into Switzerland.^[56]

The party arrived in Geneva on 14 May 1816, where Mary called herself "Mrs Shelley". Byron joined them on 25 May, with his young physician, John William Polidori,^[57] and rented the Villa Diodati, close to Lake Geneva at the village of Cologny; Percy Shelley rented a smaller building called Maison Chapouis on the waterfront nearby.^[58] They spent their time writing, boating on the lake, and talking late into the night.^[59]

"It proved a wet, ungenial summer", Mary Shelley remembered in 1831, "and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house".^{[60][note 5]} Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company amused themselves with German ghost stories, which prompted Byron to propose that they "each write a ghost story".^[61][62] Unable to think of a story, young Mary Godwin became anxious: "Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative."^[63] During one mid-June evening, the discussions turned to the nature of the principle of life. "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated", Mary noted; "galvanism had given token of such things".^[64] It was after midnight before they retired, and unable to sleep, she became possessed by her imagination as she beheld the grim terrors of her "waking dream",^[65] her ghost story:^[66]

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 of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.^{[67][note 6]}

She began writing what she assumed would be a short story. With Percy Shelley's encouragement, she expanded this tale into her first novel, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, published on 1 January 1818.^[68][69] She later described that summer in Switzerland as the moment "when I first stepped out from childhood into life".^[57] The story of the writing of Frankenstein has been fictionalised several times and has formed the basis for a number of films.

In September 2011, the astronomer Donald Olson, after a visit to the Lake Geneva villa the previous year, and inspecting data about the motion of the moon and stars, concluded that her waking dream took place "between 2am and 3am" on 16 June 1816, several days after the initial idea by Lord Byron that they each write a ghost story.^[70]

Authorship of Frankenstein

While her husband Percy encouraged her writing, the extent of Percy's contribution to the novel is unknown and has been argued over by readers and critics.^[71] Mary Shelley wrote, "I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented to the world." She wrote that the preface to the first edition was Percy's work "as far as I can recollect". There are differences in the 1818, 1823 and 1831 editions, which have been attributed to Percy's editing. James Rieger concluded Percy's "assistance at every point in the book's manufacture was so extensive that one hardly knows whether to regard him as editor or minor collaborator", while Anne K. Mellor later argued Percy only "made many technical corrections and several times clarified the narrative and thematic continuity of the text."^[72] Charles E. Robinson, editor of a facsimile edition of the Frankenstein manuscripts, concluded that Percy's contributions to the book "were no more than what most publishers' editors have provided new (or old) authors or, in fact, what colleagues have provided to each other after reading each other's works in progress."^[73]

Writing on the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein, literary scholar and poet Fiona Sampson asked, "Why hasn't Mary Shelley gotten the respect she deserves?"^[74] She noted that "In recent years Percy's corrections, visible in the Frankenstein notebooks held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, have been seized on as evidence that he must have at least co-authored the novel. In fact, when I examined the notebooks myself, I realized that Percy did rather less than any line editor working in publishing today."^[75] Sampson published her findings in In Search of Mary Shelley (2018), one of many biographies written about Shelley.

Bath and Marlow

On their return to England in September 1816, Mary and Percy moved—with Claire Clairmont, who took lodgings nearby—to Bath, where they hoped to keep Claire's pregnancy secret.^[76] At Cologny, Mary Godwin had received two letters from her half-sister, Fanny Imlay, who alluded to her "unhappy life"; on 9 October, Fanny wrote an "alarming letter" from Bristol that sent Percy Shelley racing off to search for her, without success. On the morning of 10 October, Fanny Imlay was found dead in a room at a Swansea inn, along with a suicide note and a laudanum bottle. On 10 December, Percy Shelley's wife, Harriet, was discovered drowned in the Serpentine, a lake in Hyde Park, London.^[77] Both suicides were hushed up. Harriet's family obstructed Percy Shelley's efforts—fully supported by Mary Godwin—to assume custody of his two children by Harriet. His lawyers advised him to improve his case by marrying; so he and Mary, who was pregnant again, married on 30 December 1816 at St Mildred's Church, Bread Street, London.^[78] Her father gave consent to her marriage as required for a minor aged under twenty-one and Mr and Mrs Godwin were present as witnesses who signed the register, the marriage ending the family rift.^[79][80]

Claire Clairmont gave birth to a baby girl on 13 January, at first called Alba, later Allegra.^{[81][note 7]} In March of that year, the Chancery Court ruled Percy Shelley morally unfit to assume custody of his children and later placed them with a clergyman's family.^[82] Also in March, the Shelleys moved with Claire and Alba to Albion House at Marlow, Buckinghamshire, a large, damp building on the river Thames. There Mary Shelley gave birth to her third child, Clara, on 2 September. At Marlow, they entertained their new friends Marianne and Leigh Hunt, worked hard at their writing, and often discussed politics.^[71]

Early in the summer of 1817, Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein, which was published anonymously in January 1818. Reviewers and readers assumed that Percy Shelley was the author, since the book was published with his preface and dedicated to his political hero William Godwin.^[83] At Marlow, Mary edited the joint journal of the group's 1814 Continental journey, adding material written in Switzerland in 1816, along with Percy's poem "Mont Blanc". The result was the History of a Six Weeks' Tour, published in November 1817. That autumn, Percy Shelley often lived away from home in London to evade creditors. The threat of a debtor's prison, combined with their ill health and fears of losing custody of their children, contributed to the couple's decision to leave England for Italy on 12 March 1818, taking Claire Clairmont and Alba with them.^[84] They had no intention of returning.^[85]

Italy

William "Willmouse" Shelley, painted just before his death from malaria in 1819 (portrait by Amelia Curran, 1819)

One of the party's first tasks on arriving in Italy was to hand Alba over to Byron, who was living in Venice. He had agreed to raise her so long as Claire had nothing more to do with her.^[86] The Shelleys then embarked on a roving existence, never settling in any one place for long.^{[87][note 8]} Along the way, they accumulated a circle of friends and acquaintances who often moved with them. The couple devoted their time to writing, reading, learning, sightseeing, and socialising. The Italian adventure was, however, blighted for Mary Shelley by the deaths of both her children—Clara, in September 1818 in Venice, and William, in June 1819 in Rome.^{[88][note 9]} These losses left her in a deep depression that isolated her from Percy Shelley,^[89] who wrote in his notebook:

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 a dreary road
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode.
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee
Do thou return for mine.^[90]

For a time, Mary Shelley found comfort only in her writing.^[91] The birth of her fourth child, Percy Florence, on 12 November 1819, finally lifted her spirits,^[92] though she nursed the memory of her lost children till the end of her life.^[93]

Italy provided the Shelleys, Byron, and other exiles with political freedom unattainable at home. Despite its associations with personal loss, Italy became for Mary Shelley "a country which memory painted as paradise".^[94] Their Italian years were a time of intense intellectual and creative activity for both Shelleys. While Percy composed a series of major poems, Mary wrote the novel Matilda,^[95] the historical novel Valperga, and the plays Proserpine and Midas. Mary wrote Valperga to help alleviate her father's financial difficulties, as Percy refused to assist him further.^[96] She was often physically ill, however, and prone to depressions. She also had to cope with Percy's interest in other women, such as Sophia Stacey, Emilia Viviani, and Jane Williams.^[97] Since Mary Shelley shared his belief in the non-exclusivity of marriage, she formed emotional ties of her own among the men and women of their circle. She became particularly fond of the Greek revolutionary Prince Alexandros Mavrokordatos and of Jane and Edward Williams.^{[98][note 10]}

In December 1818, the Shelleys travelled south with Claire Clairmont and their servants to Naples, where they stayed for three months, receiving only one visitor, a physician.^[99] In 1820, they found themselves plagued by accusations and threats from Paolo and Elise Foggi, former servants whom Percy Shelley had dismissed in Naples shortly after the Foggis had married.^[100] The pair revealed that on 27 February 1819 in Naples, Percy Shelley had registered as his child by Mary Shelley a two-month-old baby girl named Elena Adelaide Shelley.^[101] The Foggis also claimed that Claire Clairmont was the baby's mother.^[102] Biographers have offered various interpretations of these events: that Percy Shelley decided to adopt a local child; that the baby was his by Elise, Claire, or an unknown woman; or that she was Elise's by Byron.^{[103][note 11]} Mary Shelley insisted she would have known if Claire had been pregnant, but it is unclear how much she really knew.^[104] The events in Naples, a city Mary Shelley later called a paradise inhabited by devils,^[105] remain shrouded in mystery.^{[note 12]} The only certainty is that she herself was not the child's mother.^[105] Elena Adelaide Shelley died in Naples on 9 June 1820.^[106]

After leaving Naples, the Shelleys settled in Rome, the city where her husband wrote "the meanest streets were strewed with truncated columns, broken capitals...and sparkling fragments of granite or porphyry...The voice of dead time, in still vibrations, is breathed from these dumb things, animated and glorified as they were by man".^[107] Rome inspired her to begin writing the unfinished novel Valerius, the Reanimated Roman, where the eponymous hero resists the decay of Rome and the machinations of "superstitious" Catholicism.^[107] The writing of her novel was broken off when her son William died of malaria.^[107] Shelley bitterly commented that she had come to Italy to improve her husband's health, and instead the Italian climate had just killed her two children, leading her to write: "May you my dear Marianne never know what it is to lose two only and lovely children in one year—to watch their dying moments—and then at last to be left childless and forever miserable".^[108] To deal with her grief, Shelley wrote the novella The Fields of Fancy, which became Matilda, dealing with a young woman whose beauty inspired incestuous love in her father, who ultimately commits suicide to stop himself from acting on his passion for his daughter, while she spends the rest of her life full of despair about "the unnatural love I had inspired".^[109] The novella offered a feminist critique of a patriarchal society as Matilda is punished in the afterlife, though she did nothing to encourage her father's feelings.^[110]

Claire Clairmont, Mary's stepsister and mistress of Lord Byron (portrait by Amelia Curran, 1819)

In the summer of 1822, a pregnant Mary moved with Percy, Claire, and Edward and Jane Williams to the isolated Villa Magni, at the sea's edge near the hamlet of San Terenzo in the Bay of Lerici. Once they were settled in, Percy broke the "evil news" to Claire that her daughter Allegra had died of typhus in a convent at Bagnacavallo.^[111] Mary Shelley was distracted and unhappy in the cramped and remote Villa Magni, which she came to regard as a dungeon.^[112] On 16 June, she miscarried, losing so much blood that she nearly died. Rather than wait for a doctor, Percy sat her in a bath of ice to stanch the bleeding, an act the doctor later told him saved her life.^[113] All was not well between the couple that summer, however, and Percy spent more time with Jane Williams than with his depressed and debilitated wife.^[114] Much of the short poetry Shelley wrote at San Terenzo involved Jane rather than Mary.^[115]

The coast offered Percy Shelley and Edward Williams the chance to enjoy their "perfect plaything for the summer", a new sailing boat.^[116] The boat had been designed by Daniel Roberts and an admirer of Byron, Edward Trelawny, who had joined the party in January 1822.^[117] On 1 July 1822, Percy Shelley, Edward Ellerker Williams, and Captain Daniel Roberts sailed south down the coast to Livorno. There Percy Shelley discussed with Byron and Leigh Hunt the launch of a radical magazine called The Liberal.^[118] On 8 July, he and Edward Williams set out on the return journey to Lerici with their eighteen-year-old boat boy, Charles Vivian.^[119] They never reached their destination. A letter arrived at Villa Magni from Hunt to Percy Shelley, dated 8 July, saying, "pray write to tell us how you got home, for they say you had bad weather after you sailed Monday & we are anxious".^[120] "The paper fell from me," Mary told a friend later. "I trembled all over."^[120] She and Jane Williams rushed desperately to Livorno and then to Pisa in the fading hope that their husbands were still alive. Ten days after the storm, three bodies washed up on the coast near Viareggio, midway between Livorno and Lerici. Trelawny, Byron, and Hunt cremated Percy Shelley's corpse on the beach at Viareggio.^[121]

Return to England and writing career

"[Frankenstein] is the most wonderful work to have been written at twenty years of age that I ever heard of. You are now five and twenty. And, most fortunately, you have pursued a course of reading and cultivated your mind in a manner the most admirably adapted to make you a great and successful author. If you cannot be independent, who should be?"

— William Godwin to Mary Shelley^[122]

After her husband's death, Mary Shelley lived for a year with Leigh Hunt and his family in Genoa, where she often saw Byron and transcribed his poems. She resolved to live by her pen and for her son, but her financial situation was precarious. On 23 July 1823, she left Genoa for England and stayed with her father and stepmother in the Strand until a small advance from her father-in-law enabled her to lodge nearby.^[123] Sir Timothy Shelley had at first agreed to support his grandson, Percy Florence, only if he were handed over to an appointed guardian. Mary Shelley rejected this idea instantly.^[124] She managed instead to wring out of Sir Timothy a limited annual allowance (which she had to repay when Percy Florence inherited the estate), but to the end of his days, he refused to meet her in person and dealt with her only through lawyers. Mary Shelley busied herself with editing her husband's poems, among other literary endeavours, but concern for her son restricted her options. Sir Timothy threatened to stop the allowance if any biography of the poet were published.^[125] In 1826, Percy Florence became the legal heir of the Shelley estate after the death of his half-brother Charles Shelley, his father's son by Harriet Shelley. Sir Timothy raised Mary's allowance from £100 a year to £250 but remained as difficult as ever.^[126] Mary Shelley enjoyed the stimulating society of William Godwin's circle, but poverty prevented her from socialising as she wished. She also felt ostracised by those who, like Sir Timothy, still disapproved of her relationship with Percy Bysshe Shelley.^[127]

On 29 August 1823, she attended a performance of Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein, the first stage adaptation of her novel, at the English Opera House in the West End. The popularity of the play caused a second printing of Shelley's novel and a proliferation of other theatrical adaptations.^[128] In the summer of 1824, Mary Shelley moved to Kentish Town in north London to be near Jane Williams. She may have been, in the words of her biographer Muriel Spark, "a little in love" with Jane. Jane later disillusioned her by gossiping that Percy had preferred her to Mary, owing to Mary's inadequacy as a wife.^[129] At around this time, Mary Shelley was working on her novel, The Last Man (1826); and she assisted a series of friends who were writing memoirs of Byron and Percy Shelley—the beginnings of her attempts to immortalise her husband.^[130] She also met the American actor John Howard Payne and the American writer Washington Irving, who intrigued her. Payne fell in love with her and in 1826 asked her to marry him. She refused, saying that after being married to one genius, she could only marry another.^[131] Payne accepted the rejection, and tried – without success – to talk his friend Irving into proposing himself. Mary Shelley was aware of Payne's plan, but how seriously she took it is unclear.^[132]

Reginald Easton's miniature of Mary Shelley is allegedly drawn from her death mask (c. 1857).^[133]

In 1827, Mary Shelley was party to a scheme that enabled her friend Isabel Robinson and Isabel's lover, Mary Diana Dods, who wrote under the name David Lyndsay, to embark on a life together in France as husband and wife.^{[134][note 13]} With the help of Payne, whom she kept in the dark about the details, Mary Shelley obtained false passports for the couple.^[135] In 1828, she fell ill with smallpox while visiting them in Paris; weeks later she recovered, unscarred but without her youthful beauty.^[136]

During the period 1827–40, Mary Shelley was busy as an editor and writer. She wrote the novels The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), and Falkner (1837). She contributed five volumes of Lives of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French authors to Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia. She also wrote stories for ladies' magazines. She was still helping to support her father, and they looked out for publishers for each other.^[137] In 1830, she sold the copyright for a new edition of Frankenstein for £60 to Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley for their new Standard Novels series.^[138] After her father's death in 1836 at the age of eighty, she began assembling his letters and a memoir for publication, as he had requested in his will; but after two years of work, she abandoned the project.^[139] Throughout this period, she also championed Percy Shelley's poetry, promoting its publication and quoting it in her writing. By 1837, Percy's works were well-known and increasingly admired.^[140] In the summer of 1838 Edward Moxon, the publisher of Tennyson and the son-in-law of Charles Lamb, proposed publishing an edition of the collected works of Percy Shelley. Mary wanted to include in this collection an unexpurgated version of Percy Shelley's epic poem Queen Mab.  Moxon wanted to leave out the most radical passages as too shocking and atheistical, but Mary prevailed, thanks to Harriet de Boinville, who agreed to Mary's request to borrow her own original copy gifted by Percy Shelley.^[141] Mary was paid £500 to edit the Poetical Works (1838), which Sir Timothy insisted should not include a biography. Mary found a way to tell the story of Percy's life, nonetheless: she included extensive biographical notes about the poems.^[142]

Shelley continued to practise her mother's feminist principles by extending aid to women of whom society disapproved.^[143] For instance, Shelley extended financial aid to Mary Diana Dods, a single mother and illegitimate herself, who appears to have been a lesbian, and gave her the new identity of Walter Sholto Douglas, husband of her lover Isabel Robinson.^[143] Shelley also assisted Georgiana Paul, a woman disallowed for by her husband for alleged adultery.^[144] Shelley wrote in her diary about her assistance to the latter: "I do not make a boast-I do not say aloud-behold my generosity and greatness of mind-for in truth it is simple justice I perform-and so I am still reviled for being worldly".^[144]

Mary Shelley continued to treat potential romantic partners with caution. In 1828, she met and flirted with the French writer Prosper Mérimée, but her one surviving letter to him appears to be a deflection of his declaration of love.^[145] She was delighted when her old friend from Italy, Edward Trelawny, returned to England, and they joked about marriage in their letters.^[146] Their friendship had altered, however, following her refusal to cooperate with his proposed biography of Percy Shelley; and he later reacted angrily to her omission of the atheistic section of Queen Mab from Percy Shelley's poems.^[147] Oblique references in her journals, from the early 1830s until the early 1840s, suggest that Mary Shelley had feelings for the radical politician Aubrey Beauclerk, who may have disappointed her by twice marrying others.^{[148][note 14]}

Mary Shelley's first concern during these years was the welfare of Percy Florence. She honoured her late husband's wish that his son attend public school and, with Sir Timothy's grudging help, had him educated at Harrow. To avoid boarding fees, she moved to Harrow on the Hill herself so that Percy could attend as a day scholar.^[149] Though Percy went on to Trinity College, Cambridge, and dabbled in politics and the law, he showed no sign of his parents' gifts.^[150]

Final years and death

In 1840 and 1842, mother and son travelled together on the continent, journeys that Mary Shelley recorded in Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843 (1844).^[151] In 1844, Sir Timothy Shelley finally died at the age of ninety, "falling from the stalk like an overblown flower", as Mary put it.^[152] For the first time, she and her son were financially independent, though the estate proved less valuable than they had hoped.^[153]

English Heritage blue plaque in Chester Square, Belgravia, London, where Shelley lived in her final years

In the mid-1840s, Mary Shelley found herself the target of three separate blackmailers. In 1845, an Italian political exile called Gatteschi, whom she had met in Paris, threatened to publish letters she had sent him. A friend of her son bribed a police chief into seizing Gatteschi's papers, including the letters, which were then destroyed.^[154] Shortly afterwards, Mary Shelley bought some letters written by herself and Percy Bysshe Shelley from a man calling himself G. Byron and posing as the illegitimate son of the late Lord Byron.^[155] Also in 1845, Percy Bysshe Shelley's cousin Thomas Medwin approached her, claiming to have written a damaging biography of Percy Shelley. He said he would suppress it in return for £250, but Mary Shelley refused.^{[156][note 15]}

In order to fulfil Shelley's wishes, Percy Florence and his wife Jane had the coffins of her parents exhumed and buried with her in Bournemouth.^[157]

In 1848, Percy Florence married Jane Gibson St John. The marriage proved a happy one, and Mary Shelley and Jane were fond of each other.^[158] Mary lived with her son and daughter-in-law at Field Place, Sussex, the Shelleys' ancestral home, and at Chester Square, London, and accompanied them on travels abroad.^[159]

Mary Shelley's last years were blighted by illness. From 1839, she suffered from headaches and bouts of paralysis in parts of her body, which sometimes prevented her from reading and writing.^[160] On 1 February 1851, at Chester Square, she died at the age of fifty-three from what her physician suspected was a brain tumour. According to Jane Shelley, Mary Shelley had asked to be buried with her mother and father; but Percy and Jane, judging the graveyard at St Pancras to be "dreadful", chose to bury her instead at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, near their new home at Boscombe.^[161] On the first anniversary of Mary Shelley's death, the Shelleys opened her box-desk. Inside they found locks of her dead children's hair, a notebook she had shared with Percy Bysshe Shelley, and a copy of his poem Adonaïs with one page folded round a silk parcel containing some of his ashes and the remains of his heart.^[93]

Literary themes and styles

Mary Shelley lived a literary life. Her father encouraged her to learn to write by composing letters,^[162] and her favourite occupation as a child was writing stories.^[163] All of Mary's juvenilia were lost when she ran off with Percy in 1814, and none of her surviving manuscripts can be definitively dated before that year.^[164] Her first published work is often thought to have been Mounseer Nongtongpaw,^[165] comic verses written for Godwin's Juvenile Library when she was ten and a half; however, the poem is attributed to another writer in the most recent authoritative collection of her works.^[166] Percy Shelley enthusiastically encouraged Mary Shelley's writing: "My husband was, from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was forever inciting me to obtain literary reputation."^[167]

Novels

Autobiographical elements

Certain sections of Mary Shelley's novels are often interpreted as masked rewritings of her life. Critics have pointed to the recurrence of the father–daughter motif in particular as evidence of this autobiographical style.^[168] For example, commentators frequently read Mathilda (1820) autobiographically, identifying the three central characters as versions of Mary Shelley, William Godwin, and Percy Shelley.^[169] Mary Shelley herself confided that she modelled the central characters of The Last Man on her Italian circle. Lord Raymond, who leaves England to fight for the Greeks and dies in Constantinople, is based on Lord Byron; and the utopian Adrian, Earl of Windsor, who leads his followers in search of a natural paradise and dies when his boat sinks in a storm, is a fictional portrait of Percy Bysshe Shelley.^[170] However, as she wrote in her review of Godwin's novel Cloudesley (1830), she did not believe that authors "were merely copying from our own hearts".^[171] William Godwin regarded his daughter's characters as types rather than portraits from real life.^[172] Some modern critics, such as Patricia Clemit and Jane Blumberg, have taken the same view, resisting autobiographical readings of Mary Shelley's works.^[173]

Novelistic genres

"[Euthanasia] was never heard of more; even her name perished....The private chronicles, from which the foregoing relation has been collected, end with the death of Euthanasia. It is therefore in public histories alone that we find an account of the last years of the life of Castruccio."

— From Mary Shelley, Valperga^[174]

Mary Shelley employed the techniques of many different novelistic genres, most vividly the Godwinian novel, Walter Scott's new historical novel, and the Gothic novel. The Godwinian novel, made popular during the 1790s with works such as Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), "employed a Rousseauvian confessional form to explore the contradictory relations between the self and society",^[175] and Frankenstein exhibits many of the same themes and literary devices as Godwin's novel.^[176] However, Shelley critiques those Enlightenment ideals that Godwin promotes in his works.^[177] In The Last Man, she uses the philosophical form of the Godwinian novel to demonstrate the ultimate meaninglessness of the world.^[178] While earlier Godwinian novels had shown how rational individuals could slowly improve society, The Last Man and Frankenstein demonstrate the individual's lack of control over history.^[179]

Shelley uses the historical novel to comment on gender relations; for example, Valperga is a feminist version of Scott's masculinist genre.^[180] Introducing women into the story who are not part of the historical record, Shelley uses their narratives to question established theological and political institutions.^[181] Shelley sets the male protagonist's compulsive greed for conquest in opposition to a female alternative: reason and sensibility.^[182] In Perkin Warbeck, Shelley's other historical novel, Lady Gordon stands for the values of friendship, domesticity, and equality. Through her, Shelley offers a feminine alternative to the masculine power politics that destroy the male characters. The novel provides a more inclusive historical narrative to challenge the one which usually relates only masculine events.^[183]

Gender

With the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s, Mary Shelley's works, particularly Frankenstein, began to attract much more attention from scholars. Feminist and psychoanalytic critics were largely responsible for the recovery from neglect of Shelley as a writer.^[184] Ellen Moers was one of the first to claim that Shelley's loss of a baby was a crucial influence on the writing of Frankenstein.^[185] She argues that the novel is a "birth myth" in which Shelley comes to terms with her guilt for causing her mother's death as well as for failing as a parent.^[186] Shelley scholar Anne K. Mellor suggests that, from a feminist viewpoint, it is a story "about what happens when a man tries to have a baby without a woman ... [Frankenstein] is profoundly concerned with natural as opposed to unnatural modes of production and reproduction".^[187] Victor Frankenstein's failure as a "parent" in the novel has been read as an expression of the anxieties which accompany pregnancy, giving birth, and particularly maternity.^[188]

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue in their seminal book The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) that in Frankenstein in particular, Shelley responded to the masculine literary tradition represented by John Milton's Paradise Lost. In their interpretation, Shelley reaffirms this masculine tradition, including the misogyny inherent in it, but at the same time "conceal[s] fantasies of equality that occasionally erupt in monstrous images of rage".^[189] Mary Poovey reads the first edition of Frankenstein as part of a larger pattern in Shelley's writing, which begins with literary self-assertion and ends with conventional femininity.^[190] Poovey suggests that Frankenstein's multiple narratives enable Shelley to split her artistic persona: she can "express and efface herself at the same time".^[191] Shelley's fear of self-assertion is reflected in the fate of Frankenstein, who is punished for his egotism by losing all his domestic ties.^[192]

Feminist critics sometimes focus on how authorship itself, particularly female authorship, is represented in and through Shelley's novels.^[193] Mellor argues that Shelley uses the Gothic style not only to explore repressed female sexual desire^[194] but also as way to "censor her own speech in Frankenstein".^[195] According to Poovey and Mellor, Shelley did not want to promote her own authorial persona and felt deeply inadequate as a writer, and "this shame contributed to the generation of her fictional images of abnormality, perversion, and destruction".^[196]

Shelley's writings focus on the role of the family in society and women's role within that family. She celebrates the "feminine affections and compassion" associated with the family and suggests that civil society will fail without them.^[197] Shelley was "profoundly committed to an ethic of cooperation, mutual dependence, and self-sacrifice".^[198] In Lodore, for example, the central story follows the fortunes of the wife and daughter of the title character, Lord Lodore, who is killed in a duel at the end of the first volume, leaving a trail of legal, financial, and familial obstacles for the two "heroines" to negotiate. The novel is engaged with political and ideological issues, particularly the education and social role of women.^[199] It dissects a patriarchal culture that separated the sexes and pressured women into dependence on men. In the view of Shelley scholar Betty T. Bennett, "the novel proposes egalitarian educational paradigms for women and men, which would bring social justice as well as the spiritual and intellectual means by which to meet the challenges life invariably brings".^[200] However, Falkner is the only one of Mary Shelley's novels in which the heroine's agenda triumphs.^[201] The novel's resolution proposes that when female values triumph over violent and destructive masculinity, men will be freed to express the "compassion, sympathy, and generosity" of their better natures.^[202]

Enlightenment and Romanticism

Frankenstein, like much Gothic fiction of the period, mixes a visceral and alienating subject matter with speculative and thought-provoking themes.^[203] Rather than focusing on the twists and turns of the plot, however, the novel foregrounds the mental and moral struggles of the protagonist, Victor Frankenstein, and Shelley imbues the text with her own brand of politicised Romanticism, one that criticised the individualism and egotism of traditional Romanticism.^[204] Victor Frankenstein is like Satan in Paradise Lost, and Prometheus: he rebels against tradition; he creates life; and he shapes his own destiny. These traits are not portrayed positively; as Blumberg writes, "his relentless ambition is a self-delusion, clothed as quest for truth".^[205] He must abandon his family to fulfill his ambition.^[206]

The frontispiece to the 1831 Frankenstein by Theodor von Holst, one of the first two illustrations for the novel^[207]

Mary Shelley believed in the Enlightenment idea that people could improve society through the responsible exercise of political power, but she feared that the irresponsible exercise of power would lead to chaos.^[208] In practice, her works largely criticise the way 18th-century thinkers such as her parents believed such change could be brought about. The creature in Frankenstein, for example, reads books associated with radical ideals but the education he gains from them is ultimately useless.^[209] Shelley's works reveal her as less optimistic than Godwin and Wollstonecraft; she lacks faith in Godwin's theory that humanity could eventually be perfected.^[210]

As literary scholar Kari Lokke writes, The Last Man, more so than Frankenstein, "in its refusal to place humanity at the centre of the universe, its questioning of our privileged position in relation to nature ... constitutes a profound and prophetic challenge to Western humanism."^[211] Specifically, Mary Shelley's allusions to what radicals believed was a failed revolution in France and the Godwinian, Wollstonecraftian, and Burkean responses to it, challenge "Enlightenment faith in the inevitability of progress through collective efforts".^[212] As in Frankenstein, Shelley "offers a profoundly disenchanted commentary on the age of revolution, which ends in a total rejection of the progressive ideals of her own generation".^[213] Not only does she reject these Enlightenment political ideals, but she also rejects the Romantic notion that the poetic or literary imagination can offer an alternative.^[214]

Politics

There is a new scholarly emphasis on Shelley as a lifelong reformer, deeply engaged in the liberal and feminist concerns of her day.^[215] In 1820, she was thrilled by the Liberal uprising in Spain which forced the king to grant a constitution.^[216] In 1823, she wrote articles for Leigh Hunt's periodical The Liberal and played an active role in the formulation of its outlook.^[217] She was delighted when the Whigs came back to power in 1830 and at the prospect of the Reform Act 1832 (2 & 3 Will. 4. c. 45).^[218]

Critics have until recently cited Lodore and Falkner as evidence of increasing conservatism in Mary Shelley's later works. In 1984, Mary Poovey influentially identified the retreat of Mary Shelley's reformist politics into the "separate sphere" of the domestic.^[219] Poovey suggested that Mary Shelley wrote Falkner to resolve her conflicted response to her father's combination of libertarian radicalism and stern insistence on social decorum.^[220] Mellor largely agreed, arguing that "Mary Shelley grounded her alternative political ideology on the metaphor of the peaceful, loving, bourgeois family. She thereby implicitly endorsed a conservative vision of gradual evolutionary reform."^[221] This vision allowed women to participate in the public sphere but it inherited the inequalities inherent in the bourgeois family.^[222]

However, in the last decade or so this view has been challenged. For example, Bennett claims that Mary Shelley's works reveal a consistent commitment to Romantic idealism and political reform^[223] and Jane Blumberg's study of Shelley's early novels argues that her career cannot be easily divided into radical and conservative halves. She contends that "Shelley was never a passionate radical like her husband and her later lifestyle was not abruptly assumed nor was it a betrayal. She was in fact challenging the political and literary influences of her circle in her first work."^[224] In this reading, Shelley's early works are interpreted as a challenge to Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley's radicalism. Victor Frankenstein's "thoughtless rejection of family", for example, is seen as evidence of Shelley's constant concern for the domestic.^[225]

Short stories

Shelley frequently wrote stories to accompany prepared illustrations for gift books, such as this one, which accompanied "Transformation" in the 1830 The Keepsake.^[226]

In the 1820s and 1830s, Mary Shelley frequently wrote short stories for gift books or annuals, including sixteen for The Keepsake, which was aimed at middle-class women and bound in silk, with gilt-edged pages.^[227] Mary Shelley's work in this genre has been described as that of a "hack writer" and "wordy and pedestrian".^[228] However, critic Charlotte Sussman points out that other leading writers of the day, such as the Romantic poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, also took advantage of this profitable market. She explains that "the annuals were a major mode of literary production in the 1820s and 1830s", with The Keepsake the most successful.^[229]

Many of Shelley's stories are set in places or times far removed from early 19th-century Britain, such as Greece and the reign of Henry IV of France. Shelley was particularly interested in "the fragility of individual identity" and often depicted "the way a person's role in the world can be cataclysmically altered either by an internal emotional upheaval, or by some supernatural occurrence that mirrors an internal schism".^[230] In her stories, female identity is tied to a woman's short-lived value in the marriage market while male identity can be sustained and transformed through the use of money.^[231] Although Mary Shelley wrote twenty-one short stories for the annuals between 1823 and 1839, she always saw herself, above all, as a novelist. She wrote to Leigh Hunt, "I write bad articles which help to make me miserable—but I am going to plunge into a novel and hope that its clear water will wash off the mud of the magazines."^[232]

Travelogues

When they ran off to France in the summer of 1814, Mary Godwin and Percy Shelley began a joint journal,^[233] which they published in 1817 under the title History of a Six Weeks' Tour, adding four letters, two by each of them, based on their visit to Geneva in 1816, along with Percy Shelley's poem "Mont Blanc". The work celebrates youthful love and political idealism and consciously follows the example of Mary Wollstonecraft and others who had combined travelling with writing.^[234] The perspective of the History is philosophical and reformist rather than that of a conventional travelogue; in particular, it addresses the effects of politics and war on France.^[235] The letters the couple wrote on the second journey confront the "great and extraordinary events" of the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo after his "Hundred Days" return in 1815. They also explore the sublimity of Lake Geneva and Mont Blanc as well as the revolutionary legacy of the philosopher and novelist Jean-Jacques Rousseau.^[236]

Mary Shelley's last full-length book, written in the form of letters and published in 1844, was Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842 and 1843, which recorded her travels with her son Percy Florence and his university friends. In Rambles, Shelley follows the tradition of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark and her own A History of a Six Weeks' Tour in mapping her personal and political landscape through the discourse of sensibility and sympathy.^[237] For Shelley, building sympathetic connections between people is the way to build civil society and to increase knowledge: "knowledge, to enlighten and free the mind from clinging deadening prejudices—a wider circle of sympathy with our fellow-creatures;—these are the uses of travel".^[238] Between observations on scenery, culture, and "the people, especially in a political point of view",^[239] she uses the travelogue form to explore her roles as a widow and mother and to reflect on revolutionary nationalism in Italy.^{[240][note 16]} She also records her "pilgrimage" to scenes associated with Percy Shelley.^[241] According to critic Clarissa Orr, Mary Shelley's adoption of a persona of philosophical motherhood gives Rambles the unity of a prose poem, with "death and memory as central themes".^[242] At the same time, Shelley makes an egalitarian case against monarchy, class distinctions, slavery, and war.^[243]

Biographies

Between 1832 and 1839, Mary Shelley wrote many biographies of notable Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French men and a few women for Dionysius Lardner's Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men. These formed part of Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, one of the best of many such series produced in the 1820s and 1830s in response to growing middle-class demand for self-education.^[244] Until the republication of these essays in 2002, their significance within her body of work was not appreciated.^{[245][note 17]} In the view of literary scholar Greg Kucich, they reveal Mary Shelley's "prodigious research across several centuries and in multiple languages", her gift for biographical narrative, and her interest in the "emerging forms of feminist historiography".^[246] Shelley wrote in a biographical style popularised by the 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779–1781), combining secondary sources, memoir and anecdote, and authorial evaluation.^[247] She records details of each writer's life and character, quotes their writing in the original as well as in translation, and ends with a critical assessment of their achievement.^[248]

For Shelley, biographical writing was supposed to, in her words, "form as it were a school in which to study the philosophy of history",^[249] and to teach "lessons". Most frequently and importantly, these lessons consisted of criticisms of male-dominated institutions such as primogeniture.^[250] Shelley emphasises domesticity, romance, family, sympathy, and compassion in the lives of her subjects. Her conviction that such forces could improve society connects her biographical approach with that of other early feminist historians such as Mary Hays and Anna Jameson.^[251] Unlike her novels, most of which had an original print run of several hundred copies, the Lives had a print run of about 4,000 for each volume: thus, according to Kucich, Mary Shelley's "use of biography to forward the social agenda of women's historiography became one of her most influential political interventions".^[252]

Editorial work

"The qualities that struck anyone newly introduced to Shelley, were, first, a gentle and cordial goodness that animated his intercourse with warm affection, and helpful sympathy. The other, the eagerness and ardour with which he was attached to the cause of human happiness and improvement."

— Mary Shelley, "Preface", Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley^[253]

Soon after Percy Shelley's death, Mary Shelley determined to write his biography. In a letter of 17 November 1822, she announced: "I shall write his life—& thus occupy myself in the only manner from which I can derive consolation."^[254] However, her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, effectively banned her from doing so.^{[255][note 18]} Mary began her fostering of Percy's poetic reputation in 1824 with the publication of his Posthumous Poems. In 1839, while she was working on the Lives, she prepared a new edition of his poetry, which became, in the words of literary scholar Susan J. Wolfson, "the canonizing event" in the history of her husband's reputation.^[256] The following year, Mary Shelley edited a volume of her husband's essays, letters, translations, and fragments, and throughout the 1830s, she introduced his poetry to a wider audience by publishing assorted works in the annual The Keepsake.^[257]

Evading Sir Timothy's ban on a biography, Mary Shelley often included in these editions her own annotations and reflections on her husband's life and work.^[258] "I am to justify his ways," she had declared in 1824; "I am to make him beloved to all posterity."^[259] It was this goal, argues Blumberg, that led her to present Percy's work to the public in the "most popular form possible".^[260] To tailor his works for a Victorian audience, she cast Percy Shelley as a lyrical rather than a political poet.^[261] As Mary Favret writes, "the disembodied Percy identifies the spirit of poetry itself".^[262] Mary glossed Percy's political radicalism as a form of sentimentalism, arguing that his republicanism arose from sympathy for those who were suffering.^[263] She inserted romantic anecdotes of his benevolence, domesticity, and love of the natural world.^[264] Portraying herself as Percy's "practical muse", she also noted how she had suggested revisions as he wrote.^[265]

Despite the emotions stirred by this task, Mary Shelley arguably proved herself in many respects a professional and scholarly editor.^[266] Working from Percy's messy, sometimes indecipherable, notebooks, she attempted to form a chronology for his writings, and she included poems, such as Epipsychidion, addressed to Emilia Viviani, which she would rather have left out.^[267] She was forced, however, into several compromises, and, as Blumberg notes, "modern critics have found fault with the edition and claim variously that she miscopied, misinterpreted, purposely obscured, and attempted to turn the poet into something he was not".^[268] According to Wolfson, Donald Reiman, a modern editor of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works, still refers to Mary Shelley's editions, while acknowledging that her editing style belongs "to an age of editing when the aim was not to establish accurate texts and scholarly apparatus but to present a full record of a writer's career for the general reader".^[269] In principle, Mary Shelley believed in publishing every last word of her husband's work;^[270] but she found herself obliged to omit certain passages, either by pressure from her publisher, Edward Moxon, or in deference to public propriety.^[271] For example, she removed the atheistic passages from Queen Mab for the first edition. After she restored them in the second edition, Moxon was prosecuted and convicted of blasphemous libel, though the prosecution was brought out of principle by the Chartist publisher Henry Hetherington, and no punishment was sought.^[272] Mary Shelley's omissions provoked criticism, often stinging, from members of Percy Shelley's former circle,^[273] and reviewers accused her of, among other things, indiscriminate inclusions.^[274] Her notes have nevertheless remained an essential source for the study of Percy Shelley's work. As Bennett explains, "biographers and critics agree that Mary Shelley's commitment to bring Shelley the notice she believed his works merited was the single, major force that established Shelley's reputation during a period when he almost certainly would have faded from public view".^[275]

Reputation

Engraving by George Stodart after a monument of Mary and Percy Shelley by Henry Weekes (1853)

In her own lifetime Mary Shelley was taken seriously as a writer, though reviewers often missed her writings' political edge. After her death, however, she was chiefly remembered as the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and as the author of Frankenstein.^[276] In fact, in the introduction to her letters published in 1945, editor Frederick Jones wrote, "a collection of the present size could not be justified by the general quality of the letters or by Mary Shelley's importance as a writer. It is as the wife of [Percy Bysshe Shelley] that she excites our interest."^[277] This attitude had not disappeared by 1980 when Betty T. Bennett published the first volume of Mary Shelley's complete letters. As she explains, "the fact is that until recent years scholars have generally regarded Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as a result: William Godwin's and Mary Wollstonecraft's daughter who became Shelley's Pygmalion."^[278] It was not until Emily Sunstein's Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality in 1989 that a full-length scholarly biography was published.^[279]

The attempts of Mary Shelley's son and daughter-in-law to "Victorianise" her memory by censoring biographical documents contributed to a perception of Mary Shelley as a more conventional, less reformist figure than her works suggest. Her own timid omissions from Percy Shelley's works and her quiet avoidance of public controversy in her later years added to this impression. Commentary by Hogg, Trelawny, and other admirers of Percy Shelley also tended to downplay Mary Shelley's radicalism. Trelawny's Records of Shelley, Byron, and the Author (1878) praised Percy Shelley at the expense of Mary, questioning her intelligence and even her authorship of Frankenstein.^[280] Lady Shelley, Percy Florence's wife, responded in part by presenting a severely edited collection of letters she had inherited, published privately as Shelley and Mary in 1882.^[281]

From Frankenstein's first theatrical adaptation in 1823 to the cinematic adaptations of the 20th century, including the first cinematic version in 1910 and now-famous versions such as James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, the seven films in the Hammer Horror series beginning with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Mel Brooks' satirical 1974 Young Frankenstein, and Kenneth Branagh's 1994 Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, many audiences first encounter the work of Mary Shelley through adaptation.^[282] Over the course of the 19th century, Mary Shelley came to be seen as a one-novel author at best, rather than as the professional writer she was; most of her works remained out of print until the 1980s, obstructing a larger view of her achievement.^[283][284] The republication of almost all her writing since the 1980s has stimulated a new recognition of its value, and she is now viewed as one of the most versatile and significant literary figures from the 19th century.^[283] Her habit of intensive reading and study, revealed in her journals and letters and reflected in her works, is now better appreciated.^[285] Shelley's conception of herself as an author has also been recognised; after Percy's death, she wrote of her authorial ambitions: "I think that I can maintain myself, and there is something inspiriting in the idea."^[286] Scholars now consider Mary Shelley to be a major Romantic figure, significant for her literary achievement and her political voice as a woman and a liberal.^[281]

Selected works

Main article: Mary Shelley bibliography

• History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817)
• Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818)
• Mathilda (1819)
• Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823)
• Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824)
• The Last Man (1826)
• The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck (1830)
• Lodore (1835)
• Falkner (1837)
• The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1839)
• Contributions to Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men (1835–39), part of Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia
• Rambles in Germany and Italy in 1840, 1842, and 1843 (1844)

Collections of Mary Shelley's papers are housed in Lord Abinger's Shelley Collection on deposit at the Bodleian Library, the New York Public Library (particularly The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle), the Huntington Library, the British Library, and in The John Murray Archive.

See also

• Godwin–Shelley family tree
• Map of 1814 and 1816 European journeys
• Map of 1840s European journeys
• Mary Shelley – 2017 period-drama film
• Yours, Creature – 2023 poetry collection by Jessica Cuello

Notes

1.  Claire's first name was "Jane", but from 1814 (see Gittings and Manton, 22) she preferred to be called "Claire" (her second name was "Clara"), which is how she is known to history. To avoid confusion, this article calls her "Claire" throughout.
2.  William St Clair, in his biography of the Godwins and the Shelleys, notes that "it is easy to forget in reading of these crises [in the lives of the Godwins and the Shelleys] how unrepresentative the references in surviving documents may be. It is easy for the biographer to give undue weight to the opinions of the people who happen to have written things down." (246)
3.  "Journal 6 December—Very Unwell. Shelley & Clary walk out, as usual, to heaps of places...A letter from Hookham to say that Harriet has been brought to bed of a son and heir. Shelley writes a number of circular letters on this event, which ought to be ushered in with ringing of bells, etc., for it is the son of his wife" (quoted in Spark, 39).
4.  Sunstein speculates that Mary Shelley and Jefferson Hogg made love in April 1815. (Sunstein, 98–99)
5.  The violent storms were, it is now known, a repercussion of the volcanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in the previous year (Sunstein, 118). See also The Year Without a Summer.
6.  Seymour argues that evidence from Polidori's diary conflicts with Mary Shelley's account of when the idea came to her (157).
7.  Alba was renamed "Allegra" in 1818. (Seymour, 177)
8.  At various times, the Shelleys lived at Livorno, Bagni di Lucca, Venice, Este, Naples, Rome, Florence, Pisa, Bagni di Pisa, and San Terenzo.
9.  Clara died of dysentery at the age of one, and William of malaria at three and a half. (Seymour, 214, 231)
10.  The Williamses were not technically married; Jane was still the wife of an army officer named Johnson.
11.  Elise had been employed by Byron as Allegra's nurse. Mary Shelley stated in a letter that Elise had been pregnant by Paolo at the time, which was the reason they had married, but not that she had had a child in Naples. Elise seems to have first met Paolo only in September. See Mary Shelley's letter to Isabella Hoppner, 10 August 1821, Selected Letters, 75–79.
12.  "Establishing Elena Adelaide's parentage is one of the greatest bafflements Shelley left for his biographers." (Bieri, 106)
13.  Dods, who had an infant daughter, assumed the name Walter Sholto Douglas and was accepted in France as a man.
14.  Beauclerk married Ida Goring in 1838 and, after Ida's death, Mary Shelley's friend Rosa Robinson in 1841. A clear picture of Mary Shelley's relationship with Beauclerk is difficult to reconstruct from the evidence. (Seymour, 425–426)
15.  According to Bieri, Medwin claimed to possess evidence relating to Naples. Medwin is the source for the theory that the child registered by Percy Shelley in Naples was his daughter by a mystery woman. See also, Journals, 249–250 n3.
16.  Mary Shelley donated the £60 fee for Rambles to the exiled Italian revolutionary Ferdinand Gatteschi, whose essay on the Carbonari rebels she included in the book. (Orr, "Mary Shelley's Rambles ")
17.  However, "precise attribution of all the biographical essays" in these volumes "is very difficult", according to Kucich.
18.  Sir Timothy Shelley made his allowance to Mary (on behalf of Percy Florence) dependent on her not putting the Shelley name in print.

References

All essays from The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley are marked with a "(CC)" and those from The Other Mary Shelley with an "(OMS)".

1.  Seymour, 458.
2.  Aldiss, Brian (1973). Billion Year Spree: The True History of Science Fiction (first ed.). Doubleday. ISBN 978-0385088879.
3.  Letter to Percy Shelley, 28 October 1814. Selected Letters, 3; St Clair, 295; Seymour 61.
4.  St Clair, 295.
5.  "Shelley's Ghost - Reshaping the image of a literary family". shelleysghost.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 8 September 2018. Retrieved 15 December 2024.
6.  Seymour, 28–29; St Clair, 176–178.
7.  St Clair, 179–188; Seymour, 31–34; Clemit, Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft (CC), 27–28.
8.  Seymour, 38, 49; St. Clair, 255–300.
9.  St Clair, 199–207.
10.  Seymour, 47–49; St Clair, 238–254.
11.  St Clair, 243–244, 334; Seymour, 48.
12.  St. Clair, 283–287.
13.  St. Clair, 306.
14.  St. Clair, 308–309.
15.  Bennett, An Introduction, 16–17.
16.  Sunstein, 38–40; Seymour, 53; see also Clemit, "Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft" (CC), 29.
17.  Seymour, 61.
18.  Sunstein, 58; Spark, 15.
19.  Seymour, 74–75.
20.  Quoted in Seymour, 72.
21.  Seymour, 71–74.
22.  Spark, 17–18; Seymour, 73–86.
23.  Qtd. in Spark, 17.
24.  St Clair, 358.
25.  Bennett, An Introduction, 17; St Clair, 357; Seymour, 89.
26.  Sunstein, 70–75; Seymour, 88; St. Clair, 329–335.
27.  St. Clair, 355.
28.  Spark, 19–22; St Clair, 358.
29.  Garrett, 19.
30.  Garrett, 20.
31.  Seymour, 94, 100; Spark, 22–23; St. Clair, 355.
32.  Letter to Maria Gisborne, 30 October – 17 November 1834. Seymour, 49.
33.  St Clair, 373; Seymour, 89 n, 94–96; Spark, 23 n2.
34.  Spark, 24; Seymour, 98–99.
35.  Quoted in Sunstein, 84.
36.  Garrett, 23.
37.  Spark, 26–30.
38.  Spark, 30; Seymour, 109, 113.
39.  St Clair, 318.
40.  Bennett, An Introduction, 20; St Clair, 373; Sunstein, 88–89; Seymour, 115–116.
41.  Spark, 31–32.
42.  Spark, 36–37; St Clair, 374.
43.  Sunstein, 91–92; Seymour, 122–123.
44.  Garrett, 25.
45.  Garrett, 26.
46.  Spark, 38–44.
47.  St Clair, 375.
48.  Sunstein, 94–97; Seymour, 127
49.  Spark, 41–46; Seymour, 126–127; Sunstein, 98–99.
50.  Seymour, 128.
51.  Quoted in Spark, 45.
52.  St Clair, 375; Spark, 45, 48.
53.  Sunstein, 93–94, 101; Seymour, 127–128, 130.
54.  Sunstein, 101–103.
55.  Gittings and Manton, 28–31.
56.  Buzwell, Greg (15 May 2014). "Mary Shelley, Frankenstein and the Villa Diodati". Discovering Literature: Romantics & Victorians. British Library. Archived from the original on 27 July 2021. Retrieved 27 July 2021.
57.  Sunstein, 117.
58.  Gittings and Manton, 31; Seymour, 152. Sometimes spelled "Chappuis"; Wolfson, Introduction to Frankenstein, 273.
59.  Sunstein, Emily W. (1991). Mary Shelley: romance and reality. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 978-0-8018-4218-4. Retrieved 11 January 2024 – via Internet Archive.
60.  Paragraph 6, Introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein; Sunstein, 118.
61.  Para. 7, Intro., Frankenstein 1831 edition
62.  Bridgwater, Patrick (2004). De Quincey's Gothic Masquerade. Rodopi. p. 55. ISBN 978-9042018136. Archived from the original on 18 March 2017. Retrieved 16 March 2016.
63.  Para. 8, Intro., Frankenstein 1831 edition
64.  Para. 10, Intro., Frankenstein 1831 edition
65.  Sleep disorders and literature: Hypnagogic hallucination inspired Frankenstein novel
66.  Shelley, Mary W. (1831). Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley. Retrieved 11 January 2024 – via Project Gutenberg.
67.  Quoted in Spark, 157, from Mary Shelley's introduction to the 1831 edition of Frankenstein.
68.  Mosse, Kate (18 September 2025). Feminist History for Every Day of the Year: 366 incredible women, from Boudica to Taylor Swift. Pan Macmillan. pp. 14–15. ISBN 978-1-5290-6623-4.
69.  Bennett, An Introduction, 30–31; Sunstein, 124.
70.  Radford, Tim (26 September 2011). "Frankenstein's hour of creation identified by astronomers". The Guardian. Retrieved 29 December 2022.
71.  Seymour, 195–196.
72.  Howard, Jennifer (7 November 2008). "The Birth of 'Frankenstein'". The Chronicle of Higher Education. ISSN 0009-5982. Archived from the original on 11 June 2015. Retrieved 15 September 2016.
73.  Robinson 1996, part 1, p. lxvii, quoted in Jones 1998.
74.  Sampson, Fiona (2018). "Why Hasn't Mary Shelley Gotten the Respect She Deserves?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 3 August 2020. Retrieved 24 May 2020.
75.  Sampson, Fiona (2016). "Frankenstein at 200: Why Hasn't Mary Shelley Been Given the Respect She Deserves?". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 3 August 2020. Retrieved 24 May 2020.
76.  Sunstein, 124–125; Seymour, 165.
77.  St Clair, 413; Seymour, 175.
78.  Sunstein, 129; St Clair, 414–15; Seymour, 176.
79.  Spark, 54–55; Seymour, 176–177.
80.  London, England Church of England Marriages and Banns 1754-1938 subscriber accessed on Ancestry.co.uk
81.  Spark, 57; Seymour, 177.
82.  Spark, 58; Bennett, An Introduction, 21–22.
83.  Seymour, 185; Sunstein, 136–37.
84.  Spark, 60–62; St Clair, 443; Sunstein, 143–49; Seymour, 191–92.
85.  St Clair, 445.
86.  Gittings and Manton, 39–42; Spark, 62–63; Seymour, 205–06.
87.  Bennett, An Introduction, 43.
88.  Seymour, 214–16; Bennett, An Introduction, 46.
89.  Sunstein, 170–71, 179–82, 191.
90.  Quoted in Seymour, 233.
91.  Bennett, An Introduction, 47, 53.
92.  Spark, 72.
93.  Sunstein, 384–85.
94.  Bennett, An Introduction, 115.
95.  Seymour, 235–36.
96.  Seymour, 251.
97.  Bieri, 170–76; Seymour, 267–70, 290; Sunstein, 193–95, 200–01.
98.  Bennett, An Introduction, 43–44; Spark, 77, 89–90; Gittings and Manton, 61–62.
99.  Holmes, 464; Bieri, 103–04.
100.  Gittings and Manton, 46.
101.  Gittings and Manton, 46; Seymour, 221–22.
102.  Spark, 73; Seymour, 224; Holmes, 469–70.
103.  Journals, 249–50 n3; Seymour, 221; Holmes, 460–74; Bieri, 103–12.
104.  Seymour, 221; Spark, 86; Letter to Isabella Hoppner, 10 August 1821, Selected Letters, 75–79.
105.  Seymour, 221.
106.  Holmes, 466; Bieri, 105.
107.  Garrett, 55.
108.  Garrett, 56–57.
109.  Garrett, 57–59.
110.  Garrett, 59.
111.  Spark, 79; Seymour, 292.
112.  Seymour, 301. Holmes, 717; Sunstein, 216.
113.  Gittings and Manton, 71.
114.  Holmes, 725; Sunstein, 217–218; Seymour, 270–273.
115.  Norman 1953, pp. 5, 9.
116.  Gittings and Manton, 71; Holmes, 715.
117.  Seymour, 283–284, 298.
118.  Holmes, 728.
119.  Seymour, 298.
120.  Letter to Maria Gisborne, 15 August 1815, Selected Letters, 99.
121.  Seymour, 302–307.
122.  Qtd. in Seymour, 319.
123.  Spark, 100–104.
124.  Spark, 102–103; Seymour, 321–322.
125.  Spark, 106–107; Seymour, 336–337; Bennett, An Introduction, 65.
126.  Seymour, 362.
127.  Spark, 108.
128.  Hoeveler, Diane Long (2016). The Cambridge Companion to Frankenstein. Cambridge University Press. pp. 175–189.
129.  Spark, 116, 119.
130.  Seymour, 341, 363–365.
131.  Spark, 111.
132.  Spark, 111–113; Seymour, 370–371.
133.  Seymour, 543.
134.  Spark, 117–119.
135.  Seymour, 384–385.
136.  Seymour, 389–390.
137.  Seymour, 404, 433–435, 438.
138.  Seymour, 406.
139.  Seymour, 450, 455.
140.  Seymour, 453.
141.  de Boinville, Barbara. At the Center of the Circle: Harriet de Boinville (1773-1847) and the Writers She Influenced During Europe's Revolutionary Era. (2023). Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, p. 175-182.
142.  Seymour, 465.
143.  Garrett, 98.
144.  Garrett, 99.
145.  See Bennett, Introduction to Selected Letters, xx, and Mary Shelley's letter of 24 May 1828, with Bennett's note, 198–199.
146.  Spark, 122.
147.  Seymour, 401–402, 467–468.
148.  Spark, 133–134; Seymour, 425–426; Bennett, Introduction to Selected Letters, xx.
149.  Spark, 124; Seymour, 424.
150.  Spark, 127; Seymour, 429, 500–501.
151.  Seymour, 489.
152.  Spark, 138.
153.  Seymour, 495.
154.  Spark, 140; Seymour, 506–507.
155.  Spark, 141–142; Seymour, 508–510.
156.  Seymour, 515–516; Bieri, 112.
157.  Sunstein, 383–384.
158.  Spark, 143; Seymour, 528.
159.  Garrett, Martin (2019). The Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Palgrave Macmillan UK. p. 66.
160.  Spark, 144; Bennett, Introduction to Selected Letters, xxvii.
161.  Seymour, 540.
162.  Bennett, "Mary Shelley's letters" (CC), 212–213.
163.  Mary Shelley, Introduction to 1831 edition of Frankenstein.
164.  Nora Crook, "General Editor's Introduction", Mary Shelley's Literary Lives, Vol. 1, xiv.
165.  Sussman, 163; St Clair, 297; Sunstein, 42.
166.  Seymour, 55; Carlson, 245; "Appendix 2: 'Mounseer Nongtongpaw': Verses formerly attributed to Mary Shelley", Travel Writing: The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, Vol. 8, Ed. Jeanne Moskal, London: William Pickering (1996).
167.  Quoted in Wolfson, Introduction to Frankenstein, xvii.
168.  Mellor, 184.
169.  See Nitchie, Introduction to Mathilda, and Mellor, 143.
170.  Bennett, An Introduction, 74; Lokke, "The Last Man" (CC), 119.
171.  Qtd. in Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 190.
172.  Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 191.
173.  See, for example, Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 190–192; Clemit, "From The Fields of Fancy to Matilda", 64–75; Blumberg, 84–85.
174.  Shelley, Valperga, 376–378.
175.  Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 140–141, 176; Clemit, "Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft" (CC), 31.
176.  Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 143–144; Blumberg, 38–40.
177.  Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 144.
178.  Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 187.
179.  Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 187, 196.
180.  Curran, "Valperga" (CC), 106–107; Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 179; Lew, "God's Sister" (OMS), 164–165.
181.  Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 183; Bennett, "Political Philosophy", 357.
182.  Lew, "God's Sister" (OMS), 173–178.
183.  Bunnell, 132; Lynch, "Historical novelist" (CC), 143–144; see also Lew, "God's Sister" (OMS), 164–165.
184.  Mellor, xi.
185.  Hoeveler, "Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory" (CC), 46.
186.  Hoeveler, "Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory" (CC), 46–47; Mellor, 40–51.
187.  Mellor, 40.
188.  Mellor, 41.
189.  Gilbert and Gubar, 220; see also, Hoeveler, "Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory" (CC), 47–48; see also, 52–53.
190.  Poovey, 115–116, 126–127.
191.  Poovey, 131; see also Hoeveler, "Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory" (CC), 48–49.
192.  Poovey, 124–125.
193.  Hoeveler, "Frankenstein, feminism, and literary theory" (CC), 49; Myers, "The Female Author", 160–172.
194.  Mellor, 55–56.
195.  Mellor, 57.
196.  Mellor, 56–57.
197.  Mellor, 117.
198.  Mellor, 125.
199.  Vargo, Introduction to Lodore, 21, 32.
200.  Bennett, An Introduction, 92, 96.
201.  Ellis, "Falkner and other fictions" (CC), 152–153; O'Sullivan, "A New Cassandra" (OMS), 154.
202.  Ellis, "Falkner and other fictions" (CC), 159–161.
203.  Spark, 154.
204.  Mellor, "Making a 'monster'" (CC), 14; Blumberg, 54; Mellor, 70.
205.  Blumberg, 47; see also Mellor, 77–79.
206.  Blumberg, 47; see also 86–87 for a similar discussion of Castruccio in Valperga; Mellor, 152.
207.  Browne, Max. "Theodor Richard Edward von Holst Archived 5 March 2016 at the Wayback Machine". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. (subscription required) Retrieved 20 April 2008.
208.  Bennett, An Introduction, 36–42.
209.  Blumberg, 21.
210.  Blumberg, 37, 46, 48; Mellor, 70–71, 79.
211.  Lokke, "The Last Man" (CC), 116; see also Mellor, 157.
212.  Lokke, "The Last Man" (CC), 128; see also Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 197–198.
213.  Clemit, Godwinian Novel, 198; see also 204–205.
214.  Paley, "Apocalypse without Millennium" (OMS), 111–121; Mellor, 159.
215.  Bennett, Betty T.; Curran, Stuart (2000). Mary Shelley in Her Times. Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 18–28. ISBN 978-0801863349.
216.  Morrison, Lucy; Stone, Staci (2003). A Mary Shelley Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 421.
217.  Morrison, Lucy (2010). Mary Shelley: Her Circle and Her Contemporaries. Cambridge Scholars Publishing. pp. 131–132.
218.  Morrison, Lucy; Stone, Staci (2003). A Mary Shelley Encyclopedia. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 444.
219.  Sites, "Utopian Domesticity", 82.
220.  Poovey, 161.
221.  Mellor, 86.
222.  Mellor, 87.
223.  Bennett, An Introduction, 121.
224.  Blumberg, 32.
225.  Blumberg, 54.
226.  Hofkosh, "Disfiguring Economies" (OMS), 207, 213.
227.  Sussman, "Stories for The Keepsake" (CC), 163; Hofkosh, "Disfiguring Economies" (OMS), 205.
228.  Qtd. in Sussman, "Stories for The Keepsake" (CC), 163.
229.  Sussman, "Stories for The Keepsake" (CC), 163–165.
230.  Sussman, "Stories for The Keepsake" (CC), 167.
231.  Sussman, "Stories for The Keepsake" (CC), 167, 176; Hofkosh, "Disfiguring Economies", (OMS), 207.
232.  Bennett, An Introduction, 72.
233.  Seymour, 187.
234.  Moskal, "Travel writing" (CC), 242.
235.  Bennett, An Introduction, 24–29.
236.  Moskal, "Travel writing" (CC), 244; Clemit, "Legacies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft" (CC), 30.
237.  Bennett, An Introduction, 114–115, 118; Orr, "Mary Shelley's Rambles "; Schor, "Mary Shelley in Transit" (OMS), 239.
238.  Qtd. in Schor, "Mary Shelley in Transit" (OMS), 239.
239.  Bennett, An Introduction, 117.
240.  Moskal, "Travel writing", 247–250; Orr, "Mary Shelley's Rambles ".
241.  Moskal, "Travel writing" (CC), 247–250; Bennett, An Introduction, 115.
242.  Orr, "Mary Shelley's Rambles ".
243.  Bennett, An Introduction, 117–118.
244.  Nora Crook, "General Editor's Introduction", Mary Shelley's Literary Lives, Vol. 1, xix; see also Kucich, "Biographer" (CC), 227.
245.  Kucich, "Biographer" (CC), 227–228.
246.  Kucich, "Biographer" (CC), 228.
247.  Nora Crook, "General Editor's Introduction", Mary Shelley's Literary Lives, Vol. 1, xxvii; Tilar J. Mazzeo, "Introduction by the editor of Italian Lives", Mary Shelley's Literary Lives, Vol. 1, xli.
248.  Lisa Vargo, "Editor's Introduction Spanish and Portuguese Lives", Mary Shelley's Literary Lives and other Writings, Vol. 2, xxii.
249.  Qtd. in Kucich, "Biographer" (CC), 228.
250.  Kucich, "Biographer" (CC), 236.
251.  Kucich, "Biographer" (CC), 230–231, 233, 237; Nora Crook, "General Editor's Introduction", Mary Shelley's Literary Lives, Vol. 1, xxviii; Clarissa Campbell Orr, "Editor's Introduction French Lives", Mary Shelley's Literary Lives, Vol. 2, lii.
252.  Kucich, "Biographer" (CC), 235; see Nora Crook, "General Editor's Introduction", Mary Shelley's Literary Lives, Vol. 1, xxv for the exact number; Tilar J. Mazzeo, "Introduction by the editor of Italian Lives", Mary Shelley's Literary Lives, Vol. 1, xli.
253.  Shelley, "Preface", Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, vii.
254.  Quoted in Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 205.
255.  Spark, 105–106.
256.  Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 193, 209 n12; Bennett, An Introduction, 112; Fraistat, "Shelley Left and Right", Shelley's Prose and Poetry, 645.
257.  Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 193.
258.  Bennett, An Introduction, 111–112.
259.  Qtd. in Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 193.
260.  Blumberg, 162.
261.  Fraistat, "Shelley Left and Right", Shelley's Prose and Poetry, 645–646; see also Seymour, 466; Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 195, 203; Favret, "Sympathy and Irony" (OMS), 19, 22.
262.  Favret, "Sympathy and Irony" (OMS), 28.
263.  Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 194; Fraistat, "Shelley Left and Right", Shelley's Prose and Poetry, 647, Favret, "Sympathy and Irony" (OMS), 18, 29.
264.  Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 203.
265.  Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 198.
266.  Bennett, Introduction to Selected Letters, xxiii–xxiv.
267.  Seymour, 466; Blumberg, 160–161, 169–170.
268.  Blumberg, 156.
269.  Wolfson, "Editorial Privilege" (OMS), 68, n. 34.
270.  Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 199; Spark, 130.
271.  Bennett, An Introduction, 112; Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 209 n16.
272.  Seymour, 467–468; Blumberg, 165–166; Townsend, 362.
273.  Spark, 130–131; Seymour, 467–468.
274.  Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 210 n26.
275.  Bennett, "Finding Mary Shelley", 300–301; see also Wolfson, "Mary Shelley, editor" (CC), 198; Bennett, An Introduction, 110.
276.  Mellor, xi, 39.
277.  Qtd. in Blumberg, 2.
278.  Bennett, "Finding Mary Shelley", 291.
279.  "Introduction" (OMS), 5.
280.  Seymour, 550.
281.  Bennett, An Introduction, ix–xi, 120–121; Schor, Introduction to Cambridge Companion, 1–5; Seymour, 548–561.
282.  Schor, "Frankenstein and film" (CC).
283.  Bowers, Will (29 November 2018). "Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley". Oxford Bibliographies. Retrieved 23 December 2025.
284.  Bennett, "Finding Mary Shelley", 292–293.
285.  Bennett, "Finding Mary Shelley", 298–299.
286.  Qtd. in Bennett, "Finding Mary Shelley", 298.

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Shelley, Mary. Collected Tales and Stories. Ed. Charles E. Robinson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ISBN 0-8018-1706-4.
• Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson. New York: Pearson Longman, 2007. ISBN 0-321-39953-6.
• Shelley, Mary. The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–44. Ed. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8018-5088-6.
• Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Ed. Morton D. Paley. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 1998. ISBN 0-19-283865-2.
• Shelley, Mary. Lodore. Ed. Lisa Vargo. Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997. ISBN 1-55111-077-6.
• Shelley, Mary. Mary Shelley's Literary Lives and Other Writings. 4 vols. Ed. Tilar J. Mazzeo. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2002. ISBN 1-85196-716-8.
• Shelley, Mary. Mathilda Archived 7 November 2015 at the Wayback Machine. Ed. Elizabeth Nitchie. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1959. Project Gutenberg. Retrieved 16 February 2008.
• Shelley, Mary. Matilda; with Mary and Maria, by Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd. London: Penguin, 1992. ISBN 0-14-043371-6.
• Shelley, Mary, ed. The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Archived 27 April 2016 at the Wayback Machine. London: Edward Moxon, 1840. Google Books. Retrieved 6 April 2008.
• Shelley, Mary. Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. ISBN 0-8018-4886-5.
• Shelley, Mary. Valperga; or, The Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca. Ed. Michael Rossington. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2000. ISBN 0-19-283289-1.
• Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Shelley's Poetry and Prose. Eds. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2002. ISBN 0-393-97752-8.

Secondary sources

• Bennett, Betty T. "Finding Mary Shelley in her Letters". Romantic Revisions. Ed. Robert Brinkley and Keith Hanley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-521-38074-X.
• Bennett, Betty T., ed. Mary Shelley in her Times. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8018-7733-4.
• Bennett, Betty T. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: An Introduction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-8018-5976-X.
• Bennett, Betty T. "The Political Philosophy of Mary Shelley's Historical Novels: Valperga and Perkin Warbeck". The Evidence of the Imagination. Ed. Donald H. Reiman, Michael C. Jaye, and Betty T. Bennett. New York: New York University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-8147-7372-9.
• Bieri, James. Percy Bysshe Shelley, a Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, 1816–1822. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005. ISBN 0-87413-893-0.
• Blumberg, Jane. Mary Shelley's Early Novels: "This Child of Imagination and Misery". Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1993. ISBN 0-87745-397-7.
• Brewer, William D. (Spring 1999). "William Godwin, Chivalry, and Mary Shelley's The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck". Papers on Language and Literature. 35 (2): 187–205.
• Bunnell, Charlene E. "All the World's a Stage": Dramatic Sensibility in Mary Shelley's Novels. New York: Routledge, 2002. ISBN 0-415-93863-5.
• Carlson, J.A. England's First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. ISBN 0-8018-8618-X.
• Clemit, Pamela. "From The Fields of Fancy to Matilda". Mary Shelley in her Times. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8018-7733-4.
• Clemit, Pamela. The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-811220-3.
• Conger, Syndy M., Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea, eds. Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein". Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8386-3684-5.
• Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, ed. Mary Shelley's Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner. New York: St. Martin's Press/Palgrave, 2000. ISBN 0-333-77106-0.
• Fisch, Audrey A., Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schorr, eds. The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond "Frankenstein". New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507740-7.
• Frank, Frederick S. "Mary Shelley's Other Fictions: A Bibliographic Consensus". Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein". Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth. Ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8386-3684-5.
• Garrett, Martin. Mary Shelley. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ISBN 0195217896
• Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. ISBN 0-300-02596-3.
• Gittings, Robert and Jo Manton. Claire Clairmont and the Shelleys. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-19-818594-4.
• Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. 1974. London: Harper Perennial, 2003. ISBN 0-00-720458-2.
• Jones, Steven. "Charles E. Robinson, Ed. The Frankenstein Notebooks: A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley's Novel, 1816–17 (Parts One and Two)". (Book Review). Romantic Circles website, 1 January 1998. Retrieved 15 September 2016.
• Jump, Harriet Devine, Pamela Clemit, and Betty T. Bennett, eds. Lives of the Great Romantics III: Godwin, Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley by Their Contemporaries. London: Pickering & Chatto, 1999. ISBN 1-85196-512-2.
• Levine, George, and U. C. Knoepflmacher, eds. The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley's novel. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979. ISBN 0-520-03612-3.
• Mellor, Anne K. Mary Shelley: Her Life, her Fiction, Her Monsters. London: Routledge, 1990. ISBN 0-415-90147-2.
• Myers, Mitzi. "Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley: The Female Author between Public and Private Spheres". Mary Shelley in her Times. Ed. Betty T. Bennett. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8018-7733-4.
• Norman, Sylva (1953). "Shelley's Last Residence". Keats–Shelley Journal. 2 (Jan). Keats–Shelley Association of America: 1–10. JSTOR 30212475.
• Orr, Clarissa Campbell. "Mary Shelley's Rambles in Germany and Italy, the Celebrity Author, and the Undiscovered Country of the Human Heart". Romanticism on the Net 11 (August 1998). Retrieved 22 February 2008.
• Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer: Ideology as Style in the Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley and Jane Austen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ISBN 0-226-67528-9.
• Robinson, Charles E., ed. The Frankenstein Notebooks: A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelley's Novel, 1816–17 (Parts One and Two). The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, Volume IX, Donald H. Reiman, general ed. Garland Publishing, 1996. ISBN 0-8153-1608-9.
• Schor, Esther, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-521-00770-4.
• Seymour, Miranda. Mary Shelley. London: John Murray, 2000. ISBN 0-7195-5711-9.
• Sites, Melissa. "Re/membering Home: Utopian Domesticity in Mary Shelley's Lodore". A Brighter Morn: The Shelley Circle's Utopian Project. Ed. Darby Lewes. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. ISBN 0-7391-0472-1.
• Smith, Johanna M. "A Critical History of Frankenstein". Frankenstein. Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. ISBN 0-312-22762-0.
• Spark, Muriel. Mary Shelley. London: Cardinal, 1987. ISBN 0-7474-0318-X.
• St Clair, William. The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. London: Faber & Faber, 1989. ISBN 0-571-15422-0.
• Sterrenburg, Lee. "The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions". Nineteenth Century Fiction 33 (1978): 324–347.
• Sunstein, Emily W. Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality. 1989. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-8018-4218-2.
• Townsend, William C. Modern State Trials. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1850.
• Wake, Ann M Frank. "Women in the Active Voice: Recovering Female History in Mary Shelley's Valperga and Perkin Warbeck". Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after "Frankenstein". Essays in Honor of the Bicentenary of Mary Shelley's Birth. Ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea. Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8386-3684-5.
• White, Daniel E. "'The god undeified': Mary Shelley's Valperga, Italy, and the Aesthetic of Desire Archived 31 March 2008 at the Wayback Machine". Romanticism on the Net 6 (May 1997). Retrieved 22 February 2008.

Further reading

• Goulding, Christopher. "The Real Doctor Frankenstein?" Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. The Royal Society of Medicine, May 2002.
• Richard Holmes, "Out of Control" (review of Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, Or, The Modern Prometheus: Annotated for Scientists, Engineers, and Creators of All Kinds, edited by David H. Guston, Ed Finn, and Jason Scott Robert, MIT Press, 277 pp.; and Mary Shelley, The New Annotated Frankenstein, edited and with a foreword and notes by Leslie S. Klinger, Liveright, 352 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIV, no. 20 (21 December 2017), pp. 38, 40–41.
• Gordon, Charlotte (2016). Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley, Random House.

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Here are some notable quotes by Mary Shelley:

• “Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.” Goodreads
• “Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.” Goodreads
• “I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.” BrainyQuote
• “Life, although it may only be an accumulation of anguish, is dear to me, and I will defend it.” Goodreads
• “There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.” Bookroo

These quotes reflect her thoughts on change, power, and the human experience.

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• Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Confidence, Powerful, Fear

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1993). “Frankenstein”, p.129, Wordsworth Editions

  100 Copy quote   

• Live, and be happy, and make others so.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Compassion

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2005). “Frankenstein”, p.72, Prestwick House Inc

  42 Copy quote   

• There is love in me the likes of which you've never seen. There is rage in me the likes of which should never escape. If I am not satisfied int he one, I will indulge the other.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Likes, Rage, Should

  42 Copy quote   

• Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Inspirational, Stay Strong, Motivation

  Frankenstein Letter 1 (1818)

  72 Copy quote   

• Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Change, Mind, Painful

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2009). “Frankenstein: Easyread Comfort Edition”, p.302, ReadHowYouWant.com

  30 Copy quote   

• I could not understand why men who knew all about good and evil could hate and kill each other.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Hate, Men, Evil

  5 Copy quote   

• Everything must have a beginning ... and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Linked

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1998). “Frankenstein, or, The modern Prometheus : with connections”, Holt Rinehart & Winston

  5 Copy quote   

• My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Dream, Annoyed, Pleasure

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1993). “Frankenstein”, p.1, Wordsworth Editions

  47 Copy quote   

• The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Angel, Devil, Fallen Angels

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2004). “Frankenstein”, p.265, Collector's Library

  35 Copy quote   

• If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear!

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Inspire, Causes, Frankenstein's Monster

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1823). “Frankenstein: ; Or, The Modern Prometheus”, DOSER Reads

  71 Copy quote   

• Look forward to future years, if not with eager anticipation, yet with a calm reliance upon the power of good, wholly remote from despair.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Years, Despair, Looks

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1835). “Lodore”, p.26

  6 Copy quote   

• A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Travel, Instinct, Solitary

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2015). “The Last Man”, p.583, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  19 Copy quote   

• There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Soul, Frankenstein's Monster, Shelley

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1993). “Frankenstein”, p.18, Wordsworth Editions

  65 Copy quote   

• Happiness is in its highest degree the sister of goodness.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Happiness, Degrees, Goodness

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2007). “The Last Man: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.166, ReadHowYouWant.com

  27 Copy quote   

• It is hardly surprising that women concentrate on the way they look instead of what is in their minds since not much has been put in their minds to begin with.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Mind, Looks, Way

  10 Copy quote   

• It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Cutting, Monsters, Asceticism

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2014). “Frankenstein: The Original Story”, p.140, Lettere Animate Editore

  12 Copy quote   

• Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Ambition, Discovery, Tranquility

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2001). “Frankenstein”, p.275, Courier Corporation

  8 Copy quote   

• Solitude was my only consolation - deep, dark, deathlike solitude.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Loneliness, Dark, Solitude

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (2009). “Frankenstein: Or the Modern Prometheus”, p.127, The Floating Press

  58 Copy quote   

• The world was to me a secret which I desired to devine.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Secret, World

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1993). “Frankenstein”, p.30, Wordsworth Editions

  4 Copy quote   

• A human being in perfection ought always to preserve a calm and peaceful mind and never to allow passion or a transitory desire to disturb his tranquility.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Passion, Perfection, Peaceful

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1993). “Frankenstein”, p.44, Wordsworth Editions

  30 Copy quote   

• The very winds whispered in soothing accents, and maternal Nature bade me weep no more.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Wind, Accents, Soothing

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1993). “Frankenstein”, p.74, Wordsworth Editions

  31 Copy quote   

• There is something at work in my soul which I do not understand. I am practically industrious - painstaking, a workman to execute with perseverance and labour - but besides this there is a love for the marvellous, a belief in the marvellous, intertwined in all my projects, which hurries me out of the common pathways of men, even to the wild sea and unvisited regions I am about to explore.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Perseverance, Men, Sea

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1993). “Frankenstein”, p.18, Wordsworth Editions

  8 Copy quote   

• It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Knowledge, Science, Heaven

  Frankenstein ch. 2 (1818)

  6 Copy quote   

• A truce to philosophy!—Life is before me, and I rush into possession. Hope, glory, love, and blameless ambition are my guides, and my soul knows no dread. What has been, though sweet, is gone; the present is good only because it is about to change, and the to come is all my own.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

  Sweet, Philosophy, Ambition

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1833). “The Last Man”, p.34

  16 Copy quote   

• Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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Percy Bysshe Shelley
Shelley in 1819
Born	4 August 1792 Field Place, Sussex, England
Died	8 July 1822 (aged 29) Gulf of La Spezia, Kingdom of Sardinia
Occupation	Author
Alma mater	University College, Oxford
Literary movement	Romanticism
Spouse	Harriet Westbrook ​ ​ (m. 1811; died 1816)​ Mary Shelley ​ (m. 1816)​
Children	6, including Sir Percy, 3rd Baronet
Parents	Timothy Shelley Elizabeth Pilfold
Signature

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Percy Bysshe Shelley (born August 4, 1792, Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England—died July 8, 1822, at sea off Livorno, Tuscany [Italy]) was an English poet who, with John Keats and Lord Byron, was a major figure among the second generation of English Romantic writers. Of the three, Shelley was the most politically radical. His passionate search for personal love and social justice was gradually channeled from overt actions into poems that rank with the greatest in the English language.

Early life, education, and expulsion from Oxford

“Ozymandias”

What inspired Shelley to write his great sonnet “Ozymandias” (1818)? Learn more.

Shelley was the heir to rich estates acquired by his grandfather, Bysshe (pronounced “Bish”) Shelley. Timothy Shelley, the poet’s father, was a mild-mannered, conventional man who was caught between an overbearing father and a rebellious son. From 1790 to 1792 and again from 1802 to 1818 he served as a member of Parliament, representing the Whig Party, which stood for everything Percy grew to detest. Shelley’s mother, Elizabeth Pilfold, came from a landowning family. The eldest of seven children (which included five girls and two boys), the young Shelley was particularly close to his three sisters, who admired his wild imagination and his capacity for mischief (two of his sisters did not survive infancy).

Shelley was educated at Syon House Academy (1802–04) and then at Eton (1804–10), where he resisted physical and mental bullying by indulging in imaginative escapism and literary pranks. Between the spring of 1810 and that of 1811, he published two Gothic novels and two volumes of juvenile verse. In the fall of 1810 Shelley entered University College, Oxford, where he enlisted his fellow student, the similarly anti-authoritarian Thomas Jefferson Hogg, as a disciple. But in March 1811, University College expelled both Shelley and Hogg for refusing to admit Shelley’s authorship of a pamphlet called The Necessity of Atheism. Hogg submitted to his family, but Shelley refused to apologize to his.

Marriage to Harriet Westbrook and Queen Mab

Late in August 1811, the 19-year-old Shelley eloped with 16-year-old Harriet Westbrook, the younger daughter of a London tavern owner. By marrying her, he betrayed the acquisitive plans of his grandfather and father, who tried to starve him into submission but only drove the strong-willed youth to rebel against the established order. Early in 1812, Shelley, Harriet, and her older sister Eliza Westbrook went to Dublin, where Shelley circulated pamphlets advocating political rights for Roman Catholics, political autonomy for Ireland (which was ruled by Britain), and freethinking ideals. The couple traveled back to England, to Lynmouth, Devon, where Shelley issued more political pamphlets, and then to North Wales, where they spent almost six months in 1812–13.

Lack of money finally drove Shelley to moneylenders in London, where in 1813 he issued Queen Mab, his first major poem—a nine-canto mixture of blank verse and lyric measures that attacks the evils of the past and present (commerce, war, the eating of meat, the church, monarchy, and marriage) but ends with resplendent hopes for humanity when freed from these vices.

Relationship with Mary Godwin and the “haunted summer” of 1816

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and the Birth of FrankensteinOn January 1, 1818, a small London publisher printed 500 copies of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus on the cheapest paper available. That was only the beginning.

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In June 1813 Harriet Shelley gave birth to their daughter Ianthe, but a year later the poet fell in love with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, the 16-year-old daughter of radical social philosopher William Godwin and his first wife, feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Against Godwin’s objections, Shelley and Mary Godwin eloped to France on July 27, 1814, taking with them Mary’s stepsister Jane (later “Claire”) Clairmont. Godwin quickly became pregnant with Shelley’s child. Following travels through France, Switzerland, and Germany, they returned to London, where they were shunned by the Godwins and most other friends. Shelley dodged creditors until the birth of his son Charles (born to Harriet on November 30, 1814), his grandfather’s death (January 1815), and provisions of Sir Bysshe’s will forced Sir Timothy to pay Shelley’s debts and grant him an annual income.

Settling near Windsor Great Park in 1815, Shelley read the classics with Hogg and another friend, Thomas Love Peacock. He also wrote Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude, a blank-verse poem, published with shorter poems in 1816, that warns idealists (like Shelley himself) not to abandon “sweet human love” and social improvement for the vain pursuit of evanescent dreams. In February 1815 Godwin gave birth to a daughter, Clara, who died within days. The following January Godwin and Shelley’s second child, William, was born.

Home of the “haunted summer” of 1816Villa Diodati, near Geneva, where Lord Byron, Mary Godwin (Shelley), Percy Shelley, John Polidori, and others stayed in 1816, engraving by William Purser; in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris.

By mid-May 1816, Shelley, Godwin, and Claire Clairmont hurried to Geneva to meet with Lord Byron, with whom Claire had begun an affair. They frequently gathered at Villa Diodati, a mansion in Cologny that Byron had leased for the summer, which proved to be a period of remarkable creativity for the group, perhaps inspired by the unusually gloomy weather. (The summer of 1816’s atypically cold and stormy weather is thought to have been caused by the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia.) During this memorable summer, Shelley composed the poems “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty” and “Mont Blanc,” both of which employ standard Romantic conventions of the transcendent qualities of beauty and nature. “Mont Blanc,” a five-part meditation on power in a godless universe while contemplating the highest mountain in the Alps, was a vehicle for Shelley to express his romantic atheism. Also that summer, Mary Godwin began her novel Frankenstein, instigated by Byron’s suggestion that the group make a contest out of inventing ghost stories.

(Read Britannica’s article about the “haunted summer of 1816.”)

Shelley’s party returned to England in September, settling in Bath. Late in the year, Harriet Shelley drowned herself in London; although she was pregnant when she died, it is unlikely that Shelley was the father. On December 30, 1816, Shelley and Mary were married with the Godwins’ blessing. But a Chancery Court decision declared Shelley unfit to raise Ianthe and Charles (his children by Harriet), who were placed in foster care at his expense.

Laon and Cythna and move to Italy

In March 1817 the Shelleys settled near Peacock at Marlow, where Shelley wrote his 12-canto romance-epic Laon and Cythna; or, The Revolution of the Golden City and Mary Shelley finished Frankenstein. They compiled History of a Six Weeks’ Tour jointly from the letters and journals of their trips to Switzerland, concluding with the poem “Mont Blanc.” In November, Laon and Cythna was suppressed by its printer and publisher, who feared that Shelley’s idealized tale of a peaceful national revolution, bloodily suppressed by a league of king and priests, violated the laws against blasphemous libel. After revisions, it was reissued in 1818 as The Revolt of Islam.

Because Shelley’s health suffered from the northern climate and his financial obligations outran his resources, the Shelleys and Claire Clairmont went to Italy, where Byron was residing. They reached Milan in April 1818 and proceeded to Pisa and Leghorn (Livorno). That summer, at Bagni di Lucca, Shelley translated Plato’s Symposium and wrote his own essay “On Love.” He also completed a modest poem titled Rosalind and Helen, in which he imagines his destiny in the poet-reformer “Lionel,” who—imprisoned for radical activity—dies young after his release.

Idealism and regeneration

Thus far, Shelley’s literary career had been politically oriented. Queen Mab, the early poems first published in 1964 as The Esdaile Notebook, Laon and Cythna, and most of his prose works were devoted to reforming society. Even Alastor, Rosalind and Helen, and Shelley’s personal lyrics voiced the concerns of an idealistic reformer who is disappointed or persecuted by an unreceptive society. But in Italy, far from the daily irritations of British politics, Shelley deepened his understanding of art and literature and, unable to reshape the world to conform to his vision, he concentrated on embodying his ideals within his poems. His aim became, as he wrote in “Ode to the West Wind,” to make his words “Ashes and sparks” as from “an unextinguished hearth,” thereby transforming subsequent generations and, through them, the world. Later, as he became estranged from Mary Shelley, he portrayed even love in terms of aspiration, rather than fulfillment:

The desire of the moth for the star,
Of the night for the morrow,
The devotion to something afar
From the sphere of our sorrow.

from the poem “To ----”

In August 1818, Shelley and Byron again met in Venice; the Shelleys remained there or at Este through October 1818. During their stay, little Clara Everina (their third child, born in 1817) became ill from dysentery and died. In “Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills” (published with Rosalind and Helen), Shelley writes how visions arising from the beautiful landscape seen from a hill near Este had revived him from despair to hopes for the political regeneration of Italy, thus transforming the scene into “a green isle… / In the deep wide sea of Misery.” He also began Julian and Maddalo—in which Byron (“Maddalo”) and Shelley debate human nature and destiny—and drafted Act I of Prometheus Unbound. In November 1818 the Shelleys traveled through Rome to Naples, where they remained until the end of February 1819.

Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci

Settling next at Rome, Shelley continued Prometheus Unbound and outlined The Cenci, a tragedy on the Elizabethan model based on a case of incestuous rape and patricide in sixteenth-century Rome. He completed this drama during the summer of 1819 near Leghorn, where the Shelleys fled in June after their son, William, died from malaria. Shelley himself terms The Cenci “a sad reality,” contrasting it with earlier “visions…of the beautiful and just.” Memorable characters, classic five-act structure, powerful and evocative language, and moral ambiguities still make The Cenci theatrically effective. Even so, it is a less notable achievement than Prometheus Unbound: A Lyrical Drama, which Shelley completed at Florence in the autumn of 1819, near the birth of Percy Florence, his only surviving child with Mary. Both plays appeared about 1820.

In Prometheus Shelley inverts the plot of a lost play by Aeschylus in a poetic masterpiece that combines supple blank verse with a variety of complex lyric measures. In Act I, Prometheus, tortured on Jupiter’s orders for having given mankind the gift of moral freedom, recalls his earlier curse of Jupiter and forgives him (“I wish no living thing to suffer pain”). By eschewing revenge, Prometheus, who embodies the moral will, can be reunited with his beloved Asia, a spiritual ideal transcending humanity; her love prevents him from becoming another tyrant when Jupiter is overthrown by the mysterious power known as Demogorgon.

Act II traces Asia’s awakening and journey toward Prometheus, beginning with her descent into the depths of nature to confront and question Demogorgon. Act III depicts the overthrow of Jupiter and the union of Asia and Prometheus, who—leaving Jupiter’s throne vacant—retreat to a cave from which they influence the world through ideals embodied in the creative arts. The end of the act describes the renovation of both human society and the natural world. Act IV opens with joyful lyrics by spirits who describe the benevolent transformation of the human consciousness that has occurred. Next, other spirits hymn the beatitude of humanity and nature in this new millennial age; and finally, Demogorgon returns to tell all creatures that, should the fragile state of grace be lost, they can restore their moral freedom through these “spells”:

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than Death or Night;
To defy Power which seems Omnipotent;
To love, and bear; to hope, till Hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates…

Prometheus Unbound, which was the keystone of Shelley’s poetic achievement, was written after he had been chastened by “sad reality” but before he began to fear that he had failed to reach an audience. Published with it were some of the poet’s finest and most hopeful shorter poems, including “Ode to Liberty,” “Ode to the West Wind,” “The Cloud,” and “To a Skylark.”

Political protest works and poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world”

The Peterloo Massacre occurred on August 16, 1819, in Manchester, where the British cavalry had been sent to brutally subdue a radical meeting held on St. Peter’s Fields. The event was likened to Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. To radicals and reformers Peterloo came to symbolize Tory callousness and tyranny.

While completing Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci, Shelley reacted to news of the Peterloo Massacre in England by writing The Masque of Anarchy and several radical songs that he hoped would rouse the British people to active but nonviolent political protest. Later in 1819 he sent to England Peter Bell the Third, which joins literary satire of William Wordsworth’s Peter Bell to attacks on corruptions in British society. He also drafted A Philosophical View of Reform, his longest (though incomplete) prose work, urging moderate reform to prevent a bloody revolution that might lead to new tyranny. Too radical to be published during Shelley’s lifetime, The Masque of Anarchy appeared after the reformist elections of 1832, Peter Bell the Third and the political ballads in 1839–40, and A Philosophical View of Reform not until 1920.

After moving to Pisa in 1820, Shelley was stung by hostile reviews into expressing his hopes more guardedly. His “Letter to Maria Gisborne” in heroic couplets and “The Witch of Atlas” in ottava rima (both 1820; published 1824) combine the mythopoeic mode of Prometheus Unbound with the urbane self-irony that had emerged in Peter Bell the Third, showing Shelley’s awareness that his ideals might seem naive to others. Late that year, Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant, his satirical drama on the trial for adultery of Caroline (estranged wife of King George IV), appeared anonymously but was quickly suppressed.

“Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” —from A Defence of Poetry

In 1821, however, Shelley reasserted his uncompromising idealism. Epipsychidion (in couplets) mythologizes his infatuation with Teresa (“Emilia”) Viviani, a convent-bound young admirer, into a Dantesque fable of how human desire can be fulfilled through art. His essay A Defence of Poetry (published 1840) eloquently declares that the poet creates humane values and imagines the forms that shape the social order: thus each mind recreates its own private universe, and “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Adonais, a pastoral elegy in Spenserian stanzas (a poetic form consisting of eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a ninth line of six iambic feet), commemorates the death of John Keats by declaring that, while we “decay / Like corpses in a charnel,” the creative spirit of Adonais, despite his physical death, “has outsoared the shadow of our night.”

The One remains, the many change
and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s
shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.

The verse drama Hellas (published 1822) celebrates the Greek revolution against Turkish rule and reiterates the political message of Laon and Cythna—that the struggle for human liberty can be neither totally defeated nor fully realized, since the ideal is greater than its earthly embodiments.

Death

After Byron’s arrival in Pisa late in 1821, Shelley, inhibited by his presence, completed only a series of urbane, yet longing lyrics during the early months of 1822. Most of these were addressed to Jane Williams, the common-law wife of Edward Ellerker Williams, a retired military officer who had befriended Shelley through the poet’s cousin Thomas Medwin. Shelley began writing the drama “Charles the First,” but he soon abandoned it. After the Shelleys and Edward and Jane Williams moved to Lerici, Shelley began “The Triumph of Life,” a dark fragment on which he was at work until he sailed to Leghorn to welcome his friend Leigh Hunt, who had arrived to edit a periodical called The Liberal. Shelley and Edward Williams drowned on July 8, 1822, when their boat sank during the stormy return voyage to Lerici.

(What piece of Shelley’s body did Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley keep after he died?)

Quick Facts

Born:

August 4, 1792, Field Place, near Horsham, Sussex, England

Died:

July 8, 1822, at sea off Livorno, Tuscany [Italy] (aged 29)

Notable Works:

“A Defence of Poetry”

“A Philosophical View of Reform”

“Adonais”

“Alastor; or The Spirit of Solitude”

“Epipsychidion”

“Hymn to Intellectual Beauty”

“Letter to Maria Gisborne”

“Mont Blanc”

“Ode to the West Wind”

“Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant”

“Ozymandias”

“Peter Bell the Third”

“Prometheus Unbound”

“Queen Mab”

“Rosalind and Helen”

“The Cenci”

“The Cloud”

“The Masque of Anarchy”

“The Necessity of Atheism”

“The Revolt of Islam”

“The Witch of Atlas”

“To a Sky-Lark”

Movement / Style:

Romanticism

Notable Family Members:

spouse Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Shelley faithfully collected her late husband’s unpublished writings, and by 1840, aided by Hunt and others, she had disseminated his fame and most of his writings. The careful study of Shelley’s publications and manuscripts has since elucidated his deep learning, clear thought, and subtle artistry. Shelley was a passionate idealist and consummate artist who, while developing rational themes within traditional poetic forms, stretched language to its limits in articulating both personal desire and social altruism.

Donald H. Reiman

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Percy Bysshe Shelley (/bɪʃ/ ^ⓘ BISH;^[1][2] 4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was an English writer who is considered one of the major English Romantic poets.^[3][4] A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition of his achievements in poetry grew steadily following his death, and he became an important influence on subsequent generations of poets, including Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and W. B. Yeats. American literary critic Harold Bloom describes him as "a superb craftsman, a lyric poet without rival, and surely one of the most advanced sceptical intellects ever to write a poem."^[5]

Shelley's reputation fluctuated during the 20th century, but since the 1960s he has achieved increasing critical acclaim for the sweeping momentum of his poetic imagery, his mastery of genres and verse forms, and the complex interplay of sceptical, idealist, and materialist ideas in his work.^[6][7] Among his best-known poetic works are the long poems Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), Julian and Maddalo (1818-19), The Mask of Anarchy (1819), Adonais (1821) and The Triumph of Life (1822); the short poems "Ozymandias" (1818), "Ode to the West Wind" (1819) and "To a Skylark" (1820); and the verse dramas The Cenci (1819), Prometheus Unbound (1820) and Hellas (1822).

Shelley also wrote prose fiction and a quantity of essays on political, social, and philosophical issues. Much of this poetry and prose was not published in his lifetime, or only published in expurgated form, due to the risk of prosecution for political and religious libel.^[8] From the 1820s, his poems and political and ethical writings became popular in Owenist, Chartist, and radical political circles,^[9] and later drew admirers as diverse as Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, and George Bernard Shaw.^[9][10][11]

Shelley's life was marked by family crises, ill health, and a backlash against his avowed atheism, political views, and defiance of social conventions. He went into permanent self-exile in Italy in 1818 and over the next four years produced what Zachary Leader and Michael O'Neill call "some of the finest poetry of the Romantic period".^[12] His second wife, Mary Shelley, was the author of Frankenstein. He died in a boating accident in 1822 at age 29.

Life

Early life and education

Shelley was born on 4 August 1792 at Field Place, Warnham, Sussex, England.^[13][14] He was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Shelley, 2nd Baronet of Castle Goring, a Whig Member of Parliament for Horsham from 1790 to 1792 and for Shoreham between 1806 and 1812, and his wife, Elizabeth Pilfold, the daughter of a successful butcher.^[15] He had four younger sisters and one much younger brother. Shelley's early childhood was sheltered and mostly happy. He was particularly close to his sisters and his mother, who encouraged him to hunt, fish and ride.^[16][17] At age six, he was sent to a day school run by the vicar of Warnham church, where he displayed an impressive memory and gift for languages.^[18]

In 1802, he entered the Syon House Academy of Brentford, Middlesex, where his cousin Thomas Medwin was a pupil. Shelley was bullied and unhappy at the school and sometimes responded with violent rage. He also began suffering from the nightmares, hallucinations and sleep walking that were to periodically affect him throughout his life. Shelley developed an interest in science which supplemented his voracious reading of tales of mystery, romance and the supernatural. During his holidays at Field Place, his sisters were often terrified at being subjected to his experiments with gunpowder, acids and electricity. Back at school he blew up a paling fence with gunpowder.^[19][20]

In 1804, Shelley entered Eton College, a period which he later recalled with loathing. He was subjected to particularly severe mob bullying which the perpetrators called "Shelley-baits".^[21] A number of biographers and contemporaries have attributed the bullying to Shelley's aloofness, nonconformity and refusal to take part in fagging. His peculiarities and violent rages earned him the nickname "Mad Shelley".^[22][23] His interest in the occult and science continued, and contemporaries describe him giving an electric shock to a master, blowing up a tree stump with gunpowder and attempting to raise spirits with occult rituals.^[24] In his senior years, Shelley came under the influence of a part-time teacher, James Lind, who encouraged his interest in the occult and introduced him to liberal and radical authors. Shelley also developed an interest in Plato and idealist philosophy which he pursued in later years through self-study.^[25][26] According to Richard Holmes, Shelley, by his leaving year, had gained a reputation as a classical scholar and a tolerated eccentric.^[25]

In his last term at Eton, his first novel Zastrozzi appeared and he had established a following among his fellow pupils.^[25] Prior to enrolling for University College, Oxford, in October 1810, Shelley completed Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (written with his sister Elizabeth), the verse melodrama The Wandering Jew and the gothic novel St. Irvine; or, The Rosicrucian: A Romance (published 1811).^[27][28]

At Oxford, Shelley attended few lectures, instead spending long hours reading and conducting scientific experiments in the laboratory he set up in his room.^[29] He met a fellow student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who became his closest friend. Shelley became increasingly politicised under Hogg's influence, developing strong radical and anti-Christian views. Such views were dangerous in the reactionary political climate prevailing during Britain's war with Napoleonic France, and Shelley's father warned him against Hogg's influence.^[30]

In the winter of 1810–1811, Shelley published a series of anonymous political poems and tracts: Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, The Necessity of Atheism (written in collaboration with Hogg) and A Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things. Shelley mailed The Necessity of Atheism to all the bishops and heads of colleges at Oxford, and he was called to appear before the college's fellows, including the Dean, George Rowley. His refusal to answer questions put by college authorities regarding whether or not he authored the pamphlet resulted in his expulsion from Oxford on 25 March 1811, along with Hogg. Hearing of his son's expulsion, Shelley's father threatened to cut all contact with Shelley unless he agreed to return home and study under tutors appointed by him. Shelley's refusal to do so led to a falling-out with his father.^[31]

Marriage to Harriet Westbrook

In late December 1810, Shelley had met Harriet Westbrook, a pupil at the same boarding school as his sisters. They corresponded frequently that winter and also after Shelley had been expelled from Oxford.^[32] Shelley expounded his radical ideas on politics, religion and marriage to Harriet, and they gradually convinced each other that she was oppressed by her father and at school.^[33] Shelley's infatuation with Harriet developed in the months following his expulsion, when he was under severe emotional strain due to the conflict with his family, his bitterness over the breakdown of his romance with his cousin Harriet Grove, and his unfounded belief that he might have a fatal illness.^[34] At the same time, Harriet Westbrook's elder sister Eliza, to whom Harriet was very close, encouraged the young girl's romance with Shelley.^[35] Shelley's correspondence with Harriet intensified in July, while he was holidaying in Wales, and in response to her urgent pleas for his protection, he returned to London in early August. Putting aside his philosophical objections to matrimony, he left with the 16-year-old Harriet for Edinburgh, Scotland, on 25 August 1811, and they were married there on 28 August.^[36]

William Godwin in 1802, by James Northcote

Hearing of the elopement, Harriet's father, John Westbrook, and Shelley's father, Timothy, cut off the allowances of the bride and groom. (Shelley's father believed his son had married beneath him, as Harriet's father had earned his fortune in trade and was the owner of a tavern and coffee house.)^[37] Surviving on borrowed money, Shelley and Harriet stayed in Edinburgh for a month, with Hogg living under the same roof. The trio left for York in October, and Shelley went on to Sussex to settle matters with his father, leaving Harriet behind with Hogg. Shelley returned from his unsuccessful excursion to find that Eliza had moved in with Harriet and Hogg. Harriet confessed that Hogg had tried to seduce her while Shelley had been away. Shelley, Harriet and Eliza soon left for Keswick in the Lake District, leaving Hogg in York.^[38]

For a year from June 1811, Shelley was also involved in an intense platonic relationship with Elizabeth Hitchener, a 28-year-old unmarried schoolteacher with whom he was corresponding frequently. Hitchener became his confidante and intellectual companion as he developed his views on politics, religion, ethics and personal relationships.^[39] Shelley became increasingly radicalised as the war with Napoleon brought economic recession, food riots, and government suppression of political dissent.^[40] He proposed that Hitchener join him, Harriet and Eliza in a communal household where all property would be shared.^[41]

The Shelleys and Eliza spent December and January in Keswick where Shelley visited Robert Southey, whose poetry he admired. Southey was taken with Shelley, even though there was a wide gulf between them politically, and predicted great things for him as a poet. Southey also informed Shelley that William Godwin, author of Political Justice, which had greatly influenced him in his youth, and which Shelley also admired, was still alive. Shelley wrote to Godwin, offering himself as his devoted disciple. Godwin, who had modified many of his earlier radical views, advised Shelley to reconcile with his father, become a scholar before he published anything else, and give up his avowed plans for political agitation in Ireland.^[42]

Meanwhile, Shelley had met his father's patron, Charles Howard, 11th Duke of Norfolk, who helped secure the reinstatement of Shelley's allowance.^[43] With Harriet's allowance also restored, Shelley now had the funds for his Irish venture. Their departure for Ireland was precipitated by increasing hostility towards the Shelley household from their landlord and neighbours who were alarmed by Shelley's scientific experiments, pistol shooting and radical political views. As tension mounted, Shelley claimed he had been attacked in his home by ruffians, an event which might have been real or a delusional episode triggered by stress. This was the first of a series of episodes in subsequent years where Shelley claimed to have been attacked by strangers during periods of personal crisis.^[44]

Early in 1812, Shelley wrote, published and with Harriet personally distributed in Dublin two political tracts: An Address, to the Irish People; and Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists. He also delivered a speech at a meeting of Daniel O'Connell's Catholic Committee. In these he called for Catholic emancipation, repeal of the Acts of Union, and an end to the oppression of the Irish poor while cautioning against a resort to violence.^[45] Reports of Shelley's subversive activities were sent to the Home Secretary.^[46]

Returning from Ireland, the Shelley household travelled to Wales, then to the small coastal village of Lynmouth in Devon. Here they were joined by Hitchener, and again came under government surveillance for distributing subversive literature. After several months, Hitchener had a falling out with the Shelleys and left. When Shelley's 15-year-old Irish servant was arrested for distributing Shelley's Declaration of Rights and his ballad attacking the government, The Devil's Walk, Shelley and his companions fled.^[47][a] In September 1812, the Shelley household had settled in Tremadog, Wales, where Shelley worked on Queen Mab, a utopian allegory with extensive notes preaching atheism, free love, republicanism and vegetarianism. The poem was published the following year in a private edition of 250 copies, although few were initially distributed because of the risk of prosecution for seditious and religious libel.^[49]

In February 1813, Shelley claimed he was attacked in his home at night. The incident might have been real, a hallucination brought on by stress, or a hoax staged by Shelley in order to escape government surveillance, creditors and his entanglements in local politics. The Shelleys and Eliza fled to Ireland, then London.^[50] Back in England, Shelley's debts mounted as he tried unsuccessfully to reach a financial settlement with his father. On 23 June, Harriet gave birth to a girl, Eliza Ianthe Shelley (known as Ianthe), and in the following months the relationship between Shelley and his wife deteriorated. Shelley resented the influence Harriet's sister had over her while Harriet was alienated from Shelley by his close friendship with an attractive widow, Mrs. Harriet de Boinville.^[51] Mrs. Boinville had married a French revolutionary émigré and hosted a salon, where Shelley was able to discuss politics, philosophy and vegetarianism.^[52][53] Mrs. Boinville became a confidante of Shelley during his marital crisis.^[54] During a breakdown, Shelley moved into Mrs. Boinville's home outside London. In February and March 1814, he became infatuated with her married daughter, Cornelia Turner, aged 18, and wrote erotic poetry about her in his notebook.^[55][56]

Following Ianthe's birth, the Shelleys moved frequently across London, Wales, the Lake District, Scotland and Berkshire to escape creditors and search for a home.^[57] In March 1814, Shelley remarried Harriet in London to settle any doubts about the legality of their Edinburgh wedding and secure the rights of their child. Nevertheless, the Shelleys lived apart for most of the following months, and Shelley reflected bitterly on "my rash & heartless union with Harriet".^[58]

Richard Rothwell's portrait of Mary Shelley in later life was shown at the Royal Academy in 1840, accompanied by lines from Percy Shelley's poem The Revolt of Islam calling her a "child of love and light".^{[59][full citation needed]}

Elopement with Mary Godwin

In May 1814, Shelley began visiting his mentor, William Godwin, almost daily. He soon fell in love with Godwin's sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary, whose mother was the late feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Shelley and Mary declared their love for each other during a visit to her mother's grave in the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church on 26 June. When Shelley told Godwin that he intended to leave Harriet and live with Mary, his mentor banished him from the house and forbade Mary from seeing him. Shelley and Mary eloped to Europe on 28 July, taking Mary's step-sister Claire Clairmont with them. Before leaving, Shelley had secured a loan of £3,000 but had left most of the funds at the disposal of Godwin and Harriet, who was again pregnant. The financial arrangement with Godwin led to rumours that he had sold his daughters to Shelley.^[60]

Shelley, Mary and Claire made their way across war-ravaged France, where Shelley wrote to Harriet, asking her to meet them in Switzerland with the money he had left for her. Hearing nothing from Harriet in Switzerland, and unable to secure sufficient funds or suitable accommodation, the three travelled to Germany and Holland, before returning to England on 13 September.^[61]

Shelley spent the next few months trying to raise loans and avoid bailiffs. Mary was pregnant, lonely, depressed and ill. Her mood was not improved when she heard that, on 30 November, Harriet had given birth to Charles Bysshe Shelley, heir to the Shelley fortune and baronetcy.^[62] This was followed, in early January 1815, by news that Shelley's grandfather, Sir Bysshe, had died leaving an estate worth £220,000. The settlement of the estate, and a financial settlement between Shelley and his father (now Sir Timothy), however, was not concluded until April the following year.^[63]

Routes of the 1814 and 1816 continental tours

In February 1815, Mary gave premature birth to a baby girl who died ten days later, deepening her depression. In the following weeks, Mary became close to Hogg who temporarily moved into the household. Shelley was almost certainly having a sexual relationship with Claire at this time, and it is possible that Mary, with Shelley's encouragement, was also having a sexual relationship with Hogg. In May Claire left the household, at Mary's insistence, to reside in Lynmouth.^[64]

In August, Shelley and Mary moved to Bishopsgate, where Shelley worked on Alastor, a long poem in blank verse based on the myth of Narcissus and Echo. Alastor was published in an edition of 250 copies in early 1816 to poor sales and largely unfavourable reviews from the conservative press.^[65][66]

On 24 January 1816, Mary gave birth to William Shelley. Shelley was delighted to have another son, but was suffering from the strain of prolonged financial negotiations with his father, Harriet and William Godwin. Shelley showed signs of delusional behaviour and was contemplating an escape to the continent.^[67]

Byron

Claire initiated a sexual relationship with Lord Byron in April 1816, just before his self-exile on the continent, and then arranged for Byron to meet Shelley, Mary, and her in Geneva.^[68] Shelley admired Byron's poetry and had sent him Queen Mab and other poems. Shelley's party arrived in Geneva in May and rented a house close to Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Byron was staying. There Shelley, Byron and the others engaged in discussions about literature, science and "various philosophical doctrines". One night, while Byron was reciting Coleridge's Christabel, Shelley suffered a severe panic attack with hallucinations. The previous night Mary had had a more productive vision or nightmare which inspired her novel Frankenstein.^[69]

Shelley and Byron then took a boating tour around Lake Geneva, which inspired Shelley to write his "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty", his first substantial poem since Alastor.^[70] A tour of Chamonix inspired "Mont Blanc", which has been described as an atheistic response to Coleridge's "Hymn before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamoni".^[71] During this tour, Shelley often signed guest books with a declaration that he was an atheist. These declarations were seen by other British tourists, including Southey, which hardened attitudes against Shelley back home.^[72]

Relations between Byron and Shelley's party became strained when Byron was told that Claire was pregnant with his child. Shelley, Mary, and Claire left Switzerland in late August, with arrangements for the expected baby still unclear, although Shelley made provision for Claire and the baby in his will.^[73] In January 1817 Claire gave birth to a daughter by Byron whom she named Alba, but later renamed Allegra in accordance with Byron's wishes.^[74]

Marriage to Mary Godwin

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart.... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

Shelley and Mary returned to England in September 1816, and in early October they heard that Mary's half-sister Fanny Imlay had killed herself. Godwin believed that Fanny had been in love with Shelley, and Shelley himself suffered depression and guilt over her death, writing: "Friend had I known thy secret grief / Should we have parted so."^[75][76] Further tragedy followed in December when Shelley's estranged wife Harriet drowned herself in the Serpentine.^[77] Harriet, pregnant and living alone at the time, believed that she had been abandoned by her new lover. In her suicide letter she asked Shelley to take custody of their son Charles but to leave their daughter in her sister Eliza's care.^[78]

Shelley married Mary Godwin on 30 December, despite his philosophical objections to the institution. The marriage was intended to help secure Shelley's custody of his children by Harriet and to placate Godwin who had refused to see Shelley and Mary because of their previous adulterous relationship.^[79][80] After a prolonged legal battle, the Court of Chancery eventually awarded custody of Shelley and Harriet's children to foster parents, on the grounds that Shelley had abandoned his first wife for Mary without cause and was an atheist.^[81][82]

In March 1817, the Shelleys moved to the village of Marlow, Buckinghamshire, where Shelley's friend Thomas Love Peacock lived. The Shelley household included Claire and her baby Allegra, both of whose presence Mary resented.^[83][84] Shelley's generosity with money and increasing debts also led to financial and marital stress, as did Godwin's frequent requests for financial help.^[84][85]

On 2 September, Mary gave birth to a daughter, Clara Everina Shelley. Soon afterwards, Shelley left for London with Claire, which increased Mary's resentment towards her stepsister.^[86][87] Shelley was arrested for two days in London over money he owed, and attorneys visited Mary in Marlow over Shelley's debts.^[88]

Shelley took part in the literary and political circle that surrounded Leigh Hunt, and during this period he met William Hazlitt and John Keats. Shelley's major work during this time was Laon and Cythna, a long narrative poem featuring incest and attacks on religion. It was hastily withdrawn after publication due to fears of prosecution for religious libel, and was re-edited and reissued as The Revolt of Islam in January 1818.^[89] Shelley also published two political tracts under a pseudonym: A Proposal for putting Reform to the Vote throughout the Kingdom (March 1817) and An Address to the People on the Death of Princess Charlotte (November 1817).^[90] In December he wrote "Ozymandias", which is considered to be one of his finest sonnets, as part of a competition with friend and fellow poet Horace Smith.^[91][92]

Italy

Posthumous Portrait of Shelley Writing Prometheus Unbound in Italy – painting by Joseph Severn, 1845

On 12 March 1818, the Shelleys and Claire left England to escape its "tyranny civil and religious". A doctor had also recommended that Shelley go to Italy for his chronic lung complaint, and Shelley had arranged to take Claire's daughter, Allegra, to her father Byron who was now in Venice.^[93] After travelling some months through France and Italy, Shelley left Mary and baby Clara at Bagni di Lucca (in today's Tuscany) while he travelled with Claire to Venice to see Byron and make arrangements for visiting Allegra. Byron invited the Shelleys to stay at his summer residence at Este, and Shelley urged Mary to meet him there. Clara became seriously ill on the journey and died on 24 September in Venice.^[94] Following Clara's death, Mary fell into a long period of depression and emotional estrangement from Shelley.^[95][96]

On 1 December, the Shelleys moved to Naples, where they stayed for three months. During this period, Shelley was ill, depressed and almost suicidal: a state of mind reflected in his poem "Stanzas written in Dejection – December 1818, Near Naples".^[97] While in Naples, Shelley registered the birth and baptism of a baby girl, Elena Adelaide Shelley (born 27 December), naming himself as the father and falsely naming Mary as the mother. The parentage of Elena has never been conclusively established. Biographers have variously speculated that she was adopted by Shelley to console Mary for the loss of Clara, that she was Shelley's child by Claire, that she was his child by his servant Elise Foggi, or that she was the child of a "mysterious lady" who had followed Shelley to the continent.^[98] Shelley registered the birth and baptism on 27 February 1819, and the household left Naples for Rome the following day, leaving Elena with carers.^[99] Elena was to die in a poor suburb of Naples on 9 June 1820.^[100][101]

In Rome, Shelley was in poor health, probably having developed nephritis and tuberculosis which later was in remission.^[102] Nevertheless, he made significant progress on three major works: Julian and Maddalo, Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci.^[103] Julian and Maddalo is an autobiographical poem which explores the relationship between Shelley and Byron and analyses Shelley's personal crises of 1818 and 1819. The poem was completed in the summer of 1819, but was not published in Shelley's lifetime.^[104] Prometheus Unbound is a long dramatic poem inspired by Aeschylus's retelling of the Prometheus myth. It was completed in late 1819 and published in 1820.^[105] The Cenci is a verse drama of rape, murder and incest based on the story of the Renaissance Count Cenci of Rome and his daughter Beatrice. Shelley completed the play in September and the first edition was published that year. It was to become one of his most popular works and the only one to have two authorised editions in his lifetime.^[106]

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

— From "Ode to the West Wind", 1819

Shelley's three-year-old son William died in June 1819, probably of malaria. The new tragedy caused a further decline in Shelley's health and deepened Mary's depression. On 4 August, she wrote: "We have now lived five years together; and if all the events of the five years were blotted out, I might be happy".^[107][108] The Shelleys were now living in Livorno where, in September, Shelley heard of the Peterloo Massacre of peaceful protesters in Manchester. Within two weeks he had completed one of his most famous political poems, The Mask of Anarchy, and despatched it to Leigh Hunt for publication. Hunt, however, decided not to publish it for fear of prosecution for seditious libel. The poem was only officially published in 1832.^[109]

In October, the Shelleys moved to Florence, where Shelley read a scathing review of the Revolt of Islam (and its earlier version Laon and Cythna) in the conservative Quarterly Review. He was angered by the personal attack on him in the article, which he erroneously believed had been written by Southey. His bitterness over the review lasted for the rest of his life.^[110]

On 12 November, Mary gave birth to a boy, Percy Florence Shelley.^[111][112] Around the time of Percy's birth, the Shelleys met Sophia Stacey, who was a ward of one of Shelley's uncles and was staying at the same pension as the Shelleys. Sophia, a talented harpist and singer, formed a friendship with Shelley while Mary was preoccupied with her newborn son. Shelley wrote at least five love poems and fragments for Sophia including "Song written for an Indian Air".^[113][114]

The Shelleys moved to Pisa in January 1820, ostensibly to consult a doctor who had been recommended to them. There they became friends with the Irish republican Margaret Mason (Lady Margaret Mountcashell) and her lover George William Tighe. Mrs Mason became the inspiration for Shelley's poem "The Sensitive Plant", and Shelley's discussions with Mason and Tighe influenced his political thought and his critical interest in the population theories of Thomas Malthus.^[115][116]

In March, Shelley wrote to friends that Mary was depressed, suicidal and hostile towards him. Shelley was also beset by financial worries, as creditors from England pressed him for payment and he was obliged to make secret payments in connection with his "Neapolitan charge" Elena.^[117]

Meanwhile, Shelley was writing A Philosophical View of Reform, a political essay which he had begun in Rome. The unfinished essay, which remained unpublished in Shelley's lifetime, has been called "one of the most advanced and sophisticated documents of political philosophy in the nineteenth century".^[118]

Another crisis erupted in June when Shelley claimed that he had been assaulted in the Pisan post office by a man accusing him of foul crimes. Shelley's biographer James Bieri suggests that this incident was possibly a delusional episode brought on by extreme stress, as Shelley was being blackmailed by a former servant, Paolo Foggi, over baby Elena.^[119] It is likely that the blackmail was connected with a story spread by another former servant, Elise Foggi, that Shelley had fathered a child by Claire in Naples and had sent it to a foundling home.^[120][121] Shelley, Claire and Mary denied this story, and Elise later recanted.^[122][123]

In July, hearing that John Keats was seriously ill in England, Shelley wrote to the poet inviting him to stay with him at Pisa. Keats replied with hopes of seeing him, but instead, arrangements were made for Keats to travel to Rome.^[124] Following the death of Keats in 1821, Shelley wrote Adonais, which Harold Bloom considers one of the major pastoral elegies.^[125] The poem was published in Pisa in July 1821, but sold few copies.^[126]

In early July 1820, Shelley heard that baby Elena had died on 9 June. In the months following the post office incident and Elena's death, relations between Mary and Claire deteriorated and Claire spent most of the next two years living separately from the Shelleys, mainly in Florence.^[127]

That December, Shelley met Teresa (Emilia) Viviani, the 19-year-old daughter of the Governor of Pisa, who was living in a convent awaiting a suitable marriage.^[128] Shelley visited her several times over the next few months and they started a passionate correspondence, which dwindled after her marriage the following September. Emilia was the inspiration for Shelley's major poem Epipsychidion.^[129]

In March 1821, Shelley completed "A Defence of Poetry", a response to Peacock's article "The Four Ages of Poetry". Shelley's essay, with its famous conclusion "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world", remained unpublished in his lifetime.^[130]

Shelley went alone to Ravenna in early August to see Byron, making a detour to Livorno for a rendezvous with Claire. Shelley stayed with Byron for two weeks and invited the older poet to spend the winter in Pisa. After Shelley had heard Byron recite his newly completed fifth canto of Don Juan he wrote to Mary: "I despair of rivalling Byron."^[131]

In November, Byron moved into Villa Lanfranchi in Pisa, just across the river from the Shelleys. Byron became the centre of the "Pisan circle", which was to include Shelley, Thomas Medwin, Edward Williams and Edward Trelawny.^[132]

In the early months of 1822, Shelley became increasingly close to Jane Williams, who was living with her partner Edward Williams in the same building as the Shelleys. Shelley wrote a number of love poems for Jane, including "The Serpent is shut out of Paradise" and "With a Guitar, to Jane". His obvious affection for Jane was to cause increasing tension among Shelley, Edward Williams and Mary.^[133]

Claire arrived in Pisa in April at Shelley's invitation, and soon afterwards they heard that her daughter Allegra had died of typhus in Ravenna. The Shelleys and Claire then moved to Villa Magni, near Lerici, on the shores of the Gulf of La Spezia.^[134] Shelley acted as mediator between Claire and Byron over arrangements for the burial of their daughter, and the added strain led to Shelley having a series of hallucinations.^[135]

Mary almost died from a miscarriage on 16 June, her life only being saved by Shelley's effective first aid. Two days later Shelley wrote to a friend that there was no sympathy between Mary and him and if the past and future could be obliterated he would be content in his boat with Jane and her guitar. That same day he also wrote to Trelawny asking for prussic acid.^[136] The following week, Shelley woke the household with his screaming over a nightmare or hallucination in which he saw Edward and Jane Williams as walking corpses and himself strangling Mary.^[137]

During this time, Shelley was writing his final major poem, the unfinished The Triumph of Life, which Harold Bloom has called "the most despairing poem he wrote".^[138]

Death

The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Édouard Fournier (1889). Pictured in the centre are, from left, Trelawny, Hunt, and Byron. In fact, Hunt did not observe the cremation, and Byron left early. Mary Shelley, who is pictured kneeling at left, did not attend the funeral.

On 1 July 1822, Shelley and Edward Williams sailed in Shelley's new boat the Don Juan to Livorno where Shelley met Leigh Hunt and Byron in order to make arrangements for a new journal, The Liberal. After the meeting, on 8 July, Shelley, Williams, and their boat boy sailed out of Livorno for Lerici. A few hours later, the Don Juan and its inexperienced crew were lost in a storm.^[139] The vessel, an open boat, had been custom-built in Genoa for Shelley. Mary Shelley declared in her "Note on Poems of 1822" (1839) that the design had a defect and that the boat was never seaworthy. The sinking, however, was probably due to the severe storm and poor seamanship of the three men on board.^[140]

Shelley's badly decomposed body washed ashore at Viareggio ten days later and was identified by Trelawny from the clothing and a copy of Keats's Lamia in a jacket pocket. On 16 August, his body was cremated on a beach near Viareggio and the ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome.^[141]

The day after the news of his death reached England, the Tory London newspaper The Courier printed: "Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is God or no."^[142] Shelley's ashes were reburied in a different plot at the cemetery in 1823. His grave bears the Latin inscription Cor Cordium (Heart of Hearts), and a few lines of "Ariel's Song" from Shakespeare's The Tempest:^[143]

Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.

Shelley's remains

Shelley's gravestone in the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome; phrases from "Ariel's Song" in Shakespeare's The Tempest appear below

When Shelley's body was cremated on the beach, his presumed heart resisted burning and was retrieved by Trelawny.^[144] The heart was possibly calcified from an earlier tubercular infection, or was perhaps his liver. Trelawny gave the scorched organ to Hunt, who preserved it in spirits of wine and refused to hand it over to Mary.^[145] He finally relented and the heart was eventually buried either at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, or in Christchurch Priory.^[146][147] Hunt also retrieved a piece of Shelley's jawbone which, in 1913, was given to the Shelley-Keats Memorial in Rome.^[144]

Family history

Shelley's paternal grandfather was Bysshe Shelley (21 June 1731 – 6 January 1815), who, in 1806, was created Sir Bysshe Shelley, 1st Baronet of Castle Goring.^[148] On Sir Bysshe's death in 1815, Shelley's father inherited the baronetcy, becoming Sir Timothy Shelley.^[149]

Shelley was the eldest of several legitimate children. Bieri argues that Shelley had an older illegitimate brother but, if he existed, little is known of him.^[150] His younger siblings were: Elizabeth (1794–1831), Hellen (1796–1796), Mary (1797–1884), Hellen (1799–1885), Margaret (1801–1887) and John (1806–1866).^[151]

Shelley had two children by his first wife Harriet: Eliza Ianthe Shelley (1813–1876) and Charles Bysshe Shelley (1814–1826).^[152] He had four children by his second wife Mary: an unnamed daughter born in 1815 who only survived ten days; William Shelley (1816–1819); Clara Everina Shelley (1817–1818); and Percy Florence Shelley (1819–1889).^[153] Shelley also declared himself to be the father of Elena Adelaide Shelley (1818–1820), who might have been an illegitimate or adopted daughter.^[154] His son Percy became the third baronet in 1844, following the death of Sir Timothy.^[155]

Political, religious and ethical views

Politics

Shelley was a political radical influenced by thinkers such as Rousseau, Paine, Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Leigh Hunt.^[156] He advocated Catholic emancipation, republicanism, parliamentary reform, the extension of the franchise, freedom of speech and peaceful assembly, an end to aristocratic and clerical privilege, and a more equal distribution of income and wealth.^[157] The views he expressed in his published works were often more moderate than those he advocated privately because of the risk of prosecution for seditious libel and his desire not to alienate more moderate friends and political allies.^[158] Nevertheless, his political writings and activism brought him to the attention of the Home Office and he came under government surveillance at various periods.^[159]

Shelley's most influential political work in the years immediately following his death was the poem Queen Mab, which included extensive notes on political themes. The work went through 14 official and pirated editions by 1845, and became popular in Owenist and Chartist circles. His longest political essay, A Philosophical View of Reform, was written in 1820, but not published until 1920.^[160]

Nonviolence

Shelley's advocacy of nonviolent resistance was largely based on his reflections on the French Revolution and rise of Napoleon, and his belief that violent protest would increase the prospect of a military despotism.^[161] Although Shelley sympathised with supporters of Irish independence, such as Peter Finnerty and Robert Emmet,^[162] he did not support violent rebellion. In his early pamphlet An Address, to the Irish People (1812), he wrote: "I do not wish to see things changed now, because it cannot be done without violence, and we may assure ourselves that none of us are fit for any change, however good, if we condescend to employ force in a cause we think right."^[163]

In his later essay A Philosophical View of Reform, Shelley did concede that there were political circumstances in which force might be justified: "The last resort of resistance is undoubtably [sic] insurrection. The right of insurrection is derived from the employment of armed force to counteract the will of the nation."^[164] Shelley supported the 1820 armed rebellion against absolute monarchy in Spain, and the 1821 armed Greek uprising against Ottoman rule.^[165]

Shelley's poem "The Mask of Anarchy" (written in 1819, but first published in 1832) has been called "perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent resistance".^[166] Gandhi was familiar with the poem and it is possible that Shelley had an indirect influence on Gandhi through Henry David Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.^[10]

Religion

Shelley was an avowed atheist, who was influenced by the materialist arguments in Holbach's Le Système de la nature.^[167][168] His atheism was an important element of his political radicalism as he saw organised religion as inextricably linked to social oppression.^[169] The overt and implied atheism in many of his works raised a serious risk of prosecution for religious libel. His early pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism was withdrawn from sale soon after publication following a complaint from a priest. His poem Queen Mab, which includes sustained attacks on the priesthood, Christianity and religion in general, was twice prosecuted by the Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1821. A number of his other works were edited before publication to reduce the risk of prosecution.^[170]

Free love

Shelley's advocacy of free love drew heavily on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft and the early work of William Godwin. In his notes to Queen Mab, he wrote: "A system could not well have been devised more studiously hostile to human happiness than marriage." He argued that the children of unhappy marriages "are nursed in a systematic school of ill-humour, violence and falsehood". He believed that the ideal of chastity outside marriage was "a monkish and evangelical superstition" which led to the hypocrisy of prostitution and promiscuity.^[171]

Shelley believed that "sexual connection" should be free among those who loved each other and last only as long as their mutual love. Love should also be free and not subject to obedience, jealousy and fear. He denied that free love would lead to promiscuity and the disruption of stable human relationships, arguing that relationships based on love would generally be of long duration and marked by generosity and self-devotion.^[171]

When Shelley's friend T. J. Hogg made an unwanted sexual advance to Shelley's first wife Harriet, Shelley forgave him of his "horrible error" and assured him that he was not jealous.^[172] It is very likely that Shelley encouraged Hogg and Shelley's second wife Mary to have a sexual relationship.^[173][174]

Vegetarianism

Shelley converted to a vegetable diet in early March 1812 and sustained it, with occasional lapses, for the remainder of his life. His vegetarianism was influenced by ancient authors such as Hesiod, Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Ovid and Plutarch, but more directly by John Frank Newton, author of The Return to Nature, or, A Defence of the Vegetable Regimen (1811). Shelley wrote two essays on vegetarianism: A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813) and "On the Vegetable System of Diet" (written c. 1813–1815, but first published in 1929). Michael Owen Jones argues that Shelley's advocacy of vegetarianism was strikingly modern, emphasising its health benefits, the alleviation of animal suffering, the inefficient use of agricultural land involved in animal husbandry, and the economic inequality resulting from the commercialisation of animal food production.^[11] Shelley's life and works inspired the founding of the Vegetarian Society in England in 1847 and directly influenced the vegetarianism of George Bernard Shaw.^[11]

Reception and influence

Shelley's work was not widely read in his lifetime outside a small circle of friends, poets and critics. Most of his poetry, drama and fiction was published in editions of 250 copies which generally sold poorly. Only The Cenci went to an authorised second edition while Shelley was alive^[175] – in contrast, Byron's The Corsair (1814) sold out its first edition of 10,000 copies in one day.^[3]

The initial reception of Shelley's work in mainstream periodicals (with the exception of the liberal Examiner) was generally unfavourable. Reviewers often launched personal attacks on Shelley's private life and political, social and religious views, even when conceding that his poetry contained beautiful imagery and poetic expression.^[176] There was also criticism of Shelley's intelligibility and style, Hazlitt describing it as "a passionate dream, a straining after impossibilities, a record of fond conjectures, a confused embodying of vague abstraction".^[177]

Shelley's poetry soon gained a wider audience in radical and reformist circles. Queen Mab became popular with Owenists and Chartists, and Revolt of Islam influenced poets sympathetic to the workers' movement such as Thomas Hood, Thomas Cooper and William Morris.^[9][178]

However, Shelley's mainstream following did not develop until a generation after his death. Bieri argues that editions of Shelley's poems published in 1824 and 1839 were edited by Mary Shelley to highlight her late husband's lyrical gifts and downplay his radical ideas.^[179] Matthew Arnold famously described Shelley as a "beautiful and ineffectual angel".^[7]

Shelley was a major influence on a number of important poets in the following decades, including Robert Browning, Algernon Swinburne, Thomas Hardy and William Butler Yeats.^[5] Shelley-like characters frequently appeared in nineteenth-century literature; they include Scythrop in Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey,^[180] Ladislaw in George Eliot's Middlemarch and Angel Clare in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.^[181]

Twentieth-century critics such as Eliot, Leavis, Allen Tate and Auden variously criticised Shelley's poetry for deficiencies in style, "repellent" ideas, and immaturity of intellect and sensibility.^{[5][182][183]} However, Shelley's critical reputation began to rise in the 1960s as a new generation of critics highlighted Shelley's debt to Spenser and Milton, his mastery of genres and verse forms, and the complex interplay of sceptical, idealist, and materialist ideas in his work.^[183] According to Donald H. Reiman, "Shelley belongs to the great tradition of Western writers that includes Dante, Shakespeare and Milton."^[184][185]

Legacy

Keats–Shelley Memorial House, at right with a red sign, by the Spanish Steps in Rome

Bronze statue of Shelley by Amelia Robertson Hill, 1882, on display at Tate Britain (idealised only)

At the time of Shelley's death, many of his works had been left unfinished, unpublished or published in expurgated versions with multiple errors. Since the 1980s, a number of projects have aimed at establishing reliable editions of his manuscripts and works. Among the most notable of these are:^[186][187]

• Reiman, D. H. (general ed.), The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts (23 vols.), New York (1986–2002)
• Reiman, D. H. (general ed.), The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Shelley (9 vols., 1985–97)
• Reiman, D. H., and Fraistat, N. (et al.) The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (3 vols.), 1999–2012, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press
• Cameron, K. N., and Reiman, D. H. (eds), Shelley and his Circle 1773–1822, Cambridge, Mass., 1961– (8 vols.)
• Everest K., Matthews, G., et al. (eds), The Poems of Shelley, 1804–1821 (4 vols.), Longman, 1989–2014
• Murray, E. B. (ed.), The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1, 1811–1818, Oxford University Press, 1995

Shelley's long-lost "Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things" (1811) was rediscovered in 2006 and subsequently made available online by the Bodleian Library in Oxford.^[188]

Charles E. Robinson^{[189][page needed]} has argued that Shelley's contribution to Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein was very significant and that Shelley should be considered her collaborator in writing the novel. Charlotte Gordon and others have disputed this contention.^[190] Fiona Sampson has said: "In recent years Percy's corrections, visible in the Frankenstein notebooks held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, have been seized on as evidence that he must have at least co-authored the novel. In fact, when I examined the notebooks myself, I realised that Percy did rather less than any line editor working in publishing today."^[191]

Organisations

The Shelley Society was founded in London in 1885 by Frederick James Furnivall, and branches were later formed in provincial Britain and abroad, including in Australia, New Zealand, and the United States. Its lectures, publications, and publicity helped popularise Shelley and shaped contemporary discussions about the place of English literature in scholarly study. The society ceased regular operations in the early 20th century.^[192]

The Keats–Shelley Memorial Association, founded in 1903, supports the Keats–Shelley Memorial House in Rome which is a museum and library dedicated to the Romantic writers with a strong connection with Italy. The association is also responsible for maintaining the grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the non-Catholic Cemetery at Testaccio. The association publishes the scholarly Keats–Shelley Review. It also runs the annual Keats–Shelley and Young Romantics Writing Prizes and the Keats–Shelley Fellowship.^[193]

Selected works

Works are listed by estimated year of composition. The year of first publication is given when this is different. Source is Bieri,^[194] unless otherwise indicated.

Poetry

• Original Poetry by Victor and Cazire (1810, collaboration with Elizabeth Shelley)
• Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson (1810, collaboration with Thomas Jefferson Hogg)
• The Devil's Walk (1812)
• Queen Mab (1813)
• Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1815, published 1816)
• Mont Blanc (1816, published 1817)
• Mutability (1816)
• Hymn to Intellectual Beauty (1817)
• The Revolt of Islam (1817, published 1818)
• Ozymandias (1818)
• Rosalind and Helen (1818, published 1819)
• Lines Written Among the Euganean Hills (1818, published 1819)
• Song to the Men of England (1819, published 1839)
• England in 1819 (1819, published 1839)
• Love's Philosophy (1819)
• Ode to the West Wind (1819, published 1820)
• The Mask of Anarchy (1819, published 1832)
• Julian and Maddalo (1819, published 1824)
• Peter Bell the Third (1820, published 1839)
• Letter to Maria Gisborne (1820, published 1824)
• To a Skylark (1820)
• The Cloud (1820)
• The Sensitive Plant (1820)^[195]
• The Witch of Atlas (1820, published 1824)
• Adonais (1821)
• Epipsychidion (1821)
• Music, When Soft Voices Die (1821, published 1824)
• One Word is Too Often Profaned (1822, published 1824)
• A Dirge (1822, published 1824)
• The Triumph of Life (1822, unfinished, published 1824)
• Posthumous Poems (1824)

Drama

• The Cenci (1819)
• Prometheus Unbound (1820)
• Oedipus Tyrannus; or, Swellfoot the Tyrant (1820)
• Hellas (1822)
• Charles the First (1822, unfinished, published 1824)
• Fragments from an Unfinished Drama (1822, published 1824)

Fiction

• Zastrozzi (1810)
• St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian (1810, published 1811)

Short prose works

• "The Assassins, A Fragment of a Romance" (1814)
• "The Coliseum, A Fragment" (1817)
• "Una Favola (A Fable)" (1819, originally in Italian)

Essays

• The Necessity of Atheism (with Thomas Jefferson Hogg) (1811)
• Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things (1811)
• An Address, to the Irish People (1812)
• Proposals for an Association of Philanthropists (1812)
• Declaration of Rights (1812)^[196]
• A Letter to Lord Ellenborough (1812)
• A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813)
• A Refutation of Deism (1814)^[197]
• Speculations on Metaphysics (1814)
• On the Vegetable System of Diet (1814–1815, published 1929)
• On a Future State (1815)
• On The Punishment of Death (1815)
• Speculations on Morals (1817)
• On Christianity (1817, unfinished, published 1859)
• On Love (1818)
• On the Literature, the Arts and the Manners of the Athenians (1818)
• On The Symposium, or Preface to The Banquet of Plato (1818)
• On Frankenstein (1818, published 1832)
• On Life (1819)
• A Philosophical View of Reform (1819–20, published 1920)
• A Defence of Poetry (1821, published 1840)

Chapbooks

• Wolfstein; or, The Mysterious Bandit (1822)
• Wolfstein, the Murderer; or, The Secrets of a Robber's Cave (1850)

Translations

• The Banquet of Plato (1818, first published in unbowdlerised form 1931)
• Ion of Plato (1821)

Collaborations with Mary Shelley

• History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817)
• Proserpine (1820)
• Midas (1820)^[198]

See also

• Biography portal
• Poetry portal

• List of peace activists
• List of vegetarians
• Godwin–Shelley family tree
• Rising Universe – A 1996 water sculpture celebrating the life of Shelley in Horsham, West Sussex, near his birthplace; largely removed in 2016

Notes

1.  Shelley attempted to distribute these works by various methods including setting them adrift in sealed bottles, miniature boats and hand-made balloons. His Irish servant, Dan Healy, was arrested and spent six months in jail after being caught posting the broadsheets in a nearby town.^[48]

References

Notes

1.  "Shelley". Collins English Dictionary. HarperCollins. Retrieved 7 June 2019.
2.  "Shelley". Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Merriam-Webster. OCLC 1032680871. Retrieved 7 June 2019.
3.  Ferber, Michael (2012). The Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 6–8. ISBN 978-0-521-76906-8.
4.  "Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822), poet". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. 2004. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25312. ISBN 978-0-19-861412-8. Retrieved 8 February 2021. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
5.  Bloom, Harold (2004). The Best Poems of the English Language, From Chaucer through Frost. New York: Harper Collins. p. 410. ISBN 0-06-054041-9.
6.  Leader, Zachary; O'Neill, Michael, eds. (2003). Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Major Works. Oxfordshire: Oxford University Press. pp. xi–xix. ISBN 0-19-281374-9.
7.  O'Neill, Michael; Howe, Anthony, eds. (2013). The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 5. ISBN 9780199558360.
8.  Holmes, Richard (1974). Shelley, the Pursuit. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. pp. 391, 594, 678. ISBN 0297767224.
9.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 208–10, 402.
10.  Weber, Thomas (2004). Gandhi as Disciple and Mentor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 26–30. ISBN 0-521-84230-1.
11.  Jones, Michael Owen (2016). "In Pursuit of Percy Shelley, 'The First Celebrity Vegan': An Essay on Meat, Sex, and Broccoli". Journal of Folklore Research. 53 (2): 1–30. doi:10.2979/jfolkrese.53.2.01. JSTOR 10.2979/jfolkrese.53.2.01. S2CID 148558932.
12.  Leader and O'Neill (2003), p. xiv.
13.  Field Place Historic England. "Details from listed building database (1026916)". National Heritage List for England. Retrieved 16 March 2022.
14.  Holmes, Richard (1974). Shelley, the Pursuit. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. pp. 10–11. ISBN 0297767224.
15.  Bieri, James (2008). Percy Bysshe Shelley: a biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. p. 19. ISBN 978-0-8018-8860-1.
16.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 1–17.
17.  Bieri, James (2004). Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography: Youth's Unextinguished Fire, 1792–1816. Newark: University of Delaware Press. pp. 55–57.
18.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 2.
19.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 4–17.
20.  Medwin, Thomas (1847). The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London.
21.  Gilmour, Ian (2002). Byron and Shelley: The Making of the Poets. New York: Carol & Graf Publishers. pp. 96–97.
22.  Bieri, James (2004). Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography: Youth's Unextinguished Fire, 1792–1816. Newark: University of Delaware Press. p. 86.
23.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 19–20.
24.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 24–25.
25.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 25–30.
26.  Notopoulos, James (1949). The Platonism of Shelley. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. pp. 32–34.
27.  O'Neill, Michael (2004). "Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792–1822)". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/25312. (Subscription, Wikipedia Library access or UK public library membership required.)
28.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 31.
29.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 38–39.
30.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 43–47.
31.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 58–60.
32.  Bieri, James (2008). Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. pp. 111, 114, 137–45. ISBN 978-0-8018-8861-8.
33.  Holmes, Richard (1974). Shelley: the Pursuit. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. pp. 67–68. ISBN 0-2977-6722-4.
34.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 156, 173.
35.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 139, 148–49.
36.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 77–79.
37.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 136–37, 162–63.
38.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 165–77.
39.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 149–54.
40.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 96-99
41.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 170, 193–95.
42.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 187–91.
43.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 182–83.
44.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 191–94.
45.  Fitzsimons, Eleanor (2014). "The Shelleys in Ireland: Passion Masquerading as Insight?". The Keats-Shelley Review. 28 (1): 7–13. doi:10.1179/0952414214Z.00000000037. ISSN 0952-4142.
46.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 198–210.
47.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 210–30.
48.  Holmes (1974), pp. 146-149, 158-160
49.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 238–51, 255.
50.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 238–54.
51.  Holmes, Richard, (1974). p. 216.
52.  Bieri, James, (2005). pp. 259–60.
53.  Kenneth Neil Cameron, Donald H. Reiman, and Doucet Devin Fischer, eds, Shelley and His Circle, 1773–1822, 10 vols. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961–2002, 3: 275–76.
54.  Holmes, Richard (1974). pp. 216–19, 224–29
55.  Holmes, Richard, (1974). pp. 227–28.
56.  de Boinville, Barbara. At the Center of the Circle: Harriet de Boinville (1773–1847) and the Writers She Influenced During Europe's Revolutionary Era (New Academia Publishing, 2023), p. 99.
57.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 256–69.
58.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 269–70.
59.  Seymour, p. 458.
60.  Bieri, James (2008), pp, 273–84, 292.
61.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 285–92.
62.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 293–300.
63.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 300–02, 328–29.
64.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 305–09.
65.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 308–10.
66.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 321–23.
67.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 322–24.
68.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 324–28.
69.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 331–36.
70.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 336–41.
71.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 340.
72.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 342–43.
73.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 338, 345–46.
74.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 356, 412.
75.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 347.
76.  Bieri, James (2005). Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography: Exile of Unfulfilled Renown, 1816–1822. Newark: University of Delaware Press. pp. 15–16. ISBN 0-87413-893-0.
77.  "On Tuesday a respectable female, far advanced in pregnancy, was taken out of the Serpentine river.... A want of honour in her own conduct is supposed to have led to this fatal catastrophe, her husband being abroad". The Times (London), Thursday, 12 December 1816, p. 2.
78.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 21–24.
79.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 355–56.
80.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 25–27.
81.  Volokh, Eugene. "Parent-Child Speech and Child Custody Speech Restrictions" (PDF). UCLA. Retrieved 9 November 2015.
82.  For details of Harriet's suicide and Shelley's remarriage see Bieri (2008), pp. 360–69.
83.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 369.
84.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 41–42.
85.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 411.
86.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 376–77.
87.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 42–44.
88.  Bieri, James (2005), p. 44.
89.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 48–54.
90.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 35–37, 45–46.
91.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 410.
92.  Bieri, James (2005), p. 55.
93.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 40–43.
94.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 77–80.
95.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 446–47.
96.  Bieri, James (2005), p. 80.
97.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 112–14.
98.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 439–45.
99.  Bieri, James (2005), p. 115.
100.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 465–66.
101.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 106–07.
102.  Bieri, James (2005), p. 119.
103.  Bieri, James (2005), p. 125.
104.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 76–77, 84–87.
105.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 125–32, 400.
106.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 133–42.
107.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 123–25.
108.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 519, 526.
109.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 529–41.
110.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 162–64.
111.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 560.
112.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 352–54.
113.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 564–68.
114.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 170–77.
115.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 188–89.
116.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 575–76.
117.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 182–88.
118.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 177–80.
119.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 191–93.
120.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 246–47, 252.
121.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 467–68.
122.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 247–49, 292.
123.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 473.
124.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 199–201.
125.  Bloom, Harold (2004), p. 419.
126.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 238, 242.
127.  Holmes, Richard (2005), pp. 596–601.
128.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 214–15.
129.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 220–23.
130.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 231–33.
131.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 244–51.
132.  Bieri, James (2005), p. 269, and chs 14, 15, passim.
133.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 280–85, 297.
134.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 297–300.
135.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 713–15.
136.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 307–10.
137.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 313–14.
138.  Bloom, Harold (2004), p. 438.
139.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 319–27
140.  "The Sinking of the Don Juan" by Donald Prell, Keats–Shelley Journal, Vol. LVI, 2007, pp. 136–54.
141.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 331–36.
142.  "Richard Holmes on Shelley's drowning myths". TheGuardian.com. 24 January 2004.
143.  Bieri, James (2005), p. 336.
144.  Anthony Holden, The Wit in the Dungeon: A Life of Leigh Hunt (2005), ch. 7 'I never beheld him more': 1821–22, p. 166.
145.  Bieri, James (2005), pp. 334–35, 354.
146.  Bieri, James (2005), p. 354.
147.  Lee, Hermoine (2007). "Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters". Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on biography. Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691130446.
148.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 6, 11–12, 71.
149.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 300–01.
150.  Bieri, James (2008), p. 3 and note 2.
151.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 30, 71–72.
152.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 258, 299, 625, 672.
153.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 304–05, 322, 383, 419, 457, 502, 675.
154.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 465–66.
155.  Bieri, James (2008), p. 673.
156.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 43, 97–98, 153, 350–32.
157.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 120–22, 556–58, 583–93.
158.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 120–2, 365, 592–93.
159.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 198–230.
160.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 208–10, 592–93.
161.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 557.
162.  Morgan, Alison (3 July 2014). ""Let no man write my epitaph": the contributions of Percy Shelley, Thomas Moore and Robert Southey to the memorialisation of Robert Emmet". Irish Studies Review. 22 (3): 285–303. doi:10.1080/09670882.2014.926124. ISSN 0967-0882. S2CID 170900710.
163.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 120.
164.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 591.
165.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 528–29, 589.
166.  "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 January 2011. Retrieved 8 March 2010.
167.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 50.
168.  Bieri, James (2008), p. 267.
169.  Holmes, Richard (1974), p. 76.
170.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 30, 201, 208–09.
171.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 204–08.
172.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 90–92.
173.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 276–83.
174.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 302–09.
175.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 309, 510, 595.
176.  Holmes, Richard (1974), pp. 210, 309, 402–05, 510, 542–43.
177.  Leader and O'Neill (2003), p. xix.
178.  Some details on this can also be found in William St Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: CUP, 2005) and Richard D. Altick's The English Common Reader (Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1998) 2nd. ed.
179.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 671–3.
180.  Bieri, James (2008), p. 466.
181.  O'Neill and Howe (2013), p. 10.
182.  Leader and O'Neill (2003), p. xi.
183.  Howe and O'Neill (2013), pp. 3–5.
184.  Reiman, Donald H. (1977). "The Purpose and Method of Shelley's Poetry". In Donald H. Reiman; Sharon B. Powers (eds.). Shelley's poetry and Prose – Authoritative Texts, Criticism. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co. p. 544. ISBN 0-393-04436-X.
185.  "Percy Shelley". The Telegraph. 11 November 2015. Retrieved 8 February 2021.
186.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 781–85.
187.  O'Neill and Howe (2013), pp. 4–5.
188.  "Shelley's Poetical Essay: The Bodleian Libraries' 12 millionth book". poeticalessay.bodleian.ox.ac.uk. Oxford: Bodleian Library. November 2015. Retrieved 13 November 2015.
189.  Shelley, Mary (with Shelley, Percy), edited by Robinson, Charles E. (2009). The Original Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus: The Original Two-Volume Novel of 1816–1817 from the Bodleian Library Manuscripts. New York: Random House. ISBN 0307474429.
190.  "Percy Bysshe Shelley helped wife Mary write Frankenstein, claims professor". The Telegraph. 24 August 2008. Retrieved 8 February 2021.
191.  "Frankenstein at 200 – why hasn't Mary Shelley been given the respect she deserves?", The Guardian, 13 January 2018.
192.  Dunstan, Angela (1 June 2014). "The Shelley Society, Literary Lectures, and the Global Circulation of English Literature and Scholarly Practice". Modern Language Quarterly. 75 (2): 279–296. doi:10.1215/00267929-2416635. ISSN 0026-7929.
193.  "Keats–Shelley Memorial Association". Keats–Shelley Memorial Association.
194.  Bieri, James (2008), pp. 781–83.
195.  "Percy Bysshe Shelley: 'The Sensitive Plant' from Andre digte". Kalliope. Retrieved 5 October 2018.
196.  Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1812). "Declaration of Rights". panarchy.org. Titles are tinsel, power a corruptor, glory a bubble, and excessive wealth, a libel on its possessor
197.  "Shelley : A Refutation of Deism". www.ratbags.com.
198.  Pascoe, Judith (2003). Esther Schor (ed.). Proserpine and Midas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-00770-4..

Bibliography

• Blunden, Edmund (1946). Shelley: A Life Story. London: Collins.
• James Bieri, Percy Bysshe Shelley: A Biography, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008, ISBN 0-8018-8861-1.
• Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1998.
• Cameron, Kenneth Neill. The Young Shelley: Genesis of a Radical. First Collier Books edn New York: Collier Books, 1962, cop. 1950.
• Edward Chaney. "Egypt in England and America: The Cultural Memorials of Religion, Royalty and Religion", Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, eds M. Ascari and A. Corrado. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2006, pp. 39–69.
• Holmes, Richard. Shelley: The Pursuit. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974.
• Leighton, Angela. Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems, Cambridge University Press, 1984.
• Meaker, M. J. Sudden Endings, 12 Profiles in Depth of Famous Suicides, Garden City, New York, Doubleday, 1964 pp. 67–93: "The Deserted Wife: Harriet Westbrook Shelley".
• Maurois, André, Ariel ou la vie de Shelley, Paris, Bernard Grasset, 1923.
• St Clair, William. The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family. London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
• St Clair, William. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Hay, Daisy. Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives, Bloomsbury, 2010.
• Everest K., Matthews, G., et al. (eds), The Poems of Shelley, 1804–1821 (4 vols), Longman, 1989–2014
• Murray, E. B. (ed.), The Prose Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. 1, 1811–1818, Oxford University Press, 1995.
• Reiman, D. H., and Fraistat, N. (et al.), The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley (3 vols), 1999–2012, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press.
• Shelley, Mary, with Percy Shelley. The Original Frankenstein. Edited with an Introduction by Charles E. Robinson. NY: Random House Vintage Classics, 2008. ISBN 978-0-307-47442-1.

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Percy Bysshe Shelley’s words capture the beauty of love, imagination, and human thought, offering timeless reflections on life and nature.

Selected Quotes on Love and Human Connection

• "Soul meets soul on lovers' lips." (Hellas, 1822) A-Z Quotes+1
• "All love is sweet, given or received." Goodreads
• "Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear." A-Z Quotes
• "Sometimes it's better to put love into hugs than to put it into words." A-Z Quotes

Quotes on Nature and Life

• "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" Goodreads+1
• "The sunlight claps the earth, and the moonbeams kiss the sea: what are all these kissings worth, if thou kiss not me?" Goodreads
• "Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought." A-Z Quotes+2
• "The babe is at peace within the womb, the corpse is at rest within the tomb. We begin in what we end." A-Z Quotes

Quotes on Imagination, Morality, and Philosophy

• "The great instrument of moral good is the imagination." (A Defence of Poetry, 1821) A-Z Quotes+2
• "Poets and philosophers are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Goodreads
• "A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own." Goodreads
• "The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys." A-Z Quotes+2

Quotes on Art and Poetry

• "A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds." Goodreads+1
• "Poetry is the record of the best and happiest moments of the happiest and best minds." BrainyQuote+1
• "Music, when soft voices die, vibrates in the memory." Goodreads
  These quotations reflect Shelley’s Romantic ideals, emphasizing the power of imagination, the freedom of love, and the profound connection between humanity and nature. They remain widely cited for their lyrical beauty and philosophical depth, inspiring readers across generations.

8888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888888

• Fear not for the future, weep not for the past.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Positive, Fear, Moving Forward

  63 Copy quote   

• The more we study the more we discover our ignorance.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Ignorance, Study, Funny Exam

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1824). “Posthumous Poems”, p.367

  100 Copy quote   

• Away, away, from men and towns,
  To the wild wood and the downs, -
  To the silent wilderness,
  Where the soul need not repress
  Its music.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Men, Rivers, Soul

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1872). “A Selection from the Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley Edited with a Memoir by Mathilde Blind”, p.84

  100 Copy quote   

• Sometimes it's better to put love into hugs than to put it into words. Soul meets soul on lovers' lips.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Soul, Hug, Lips

  22 Copy quote   

• Life may change, but it may fly not;
  Hope may vanish, but can die not;
  Truth be veiled, but still it burneth;
  Love repulsed, - but it returneth!

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Love, Life, Change

  1822 'Hellas', l.34-7.

  120 Copy quote   

• Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Sad, Song, Musical

  "To a Skylark" l. 88 (1819)

  102 Copy quote   

• When my cats aren't happy, I'm not happy. Not because I care about their mood but because I know they're just sitting there thinking up ways to get even.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Happy, Humorous, Cat

  132 Copy quote   

• Until the mind can love, and admire, and trust, and hope, and endure, reasoned principles of moral conduct are seeds cast upon the highway of life which the unconscious passenger tramples into dust.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Dust, Mind, Principles

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2015). “Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Top Complete Works Collection”, p.432, 谷月社

  10 Copy quote   

• I arise from dreams of thee
  In the first sweet sleep of night,
  when the winds are breathing low,
  and the stars are shining bright.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Love, Sexy, Dream

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1874). “The Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.299

  68 Copy quote   

• The man of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Men, Command Not, Soul

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1994). “The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley”, p.23, Wordsworth Editions

  13 Copy quote   

• Love withers under constraints: its very essence is liberty: it is compatible neither with obedience, jealousy, nor fear.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  New Relationship, Essence, Liberty

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1994). “The Selected Poetry and Prose of Shelley”, p.74, Wordsworth Editions

  103 Copy quote   

• I love tranquil solitude.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Solitude, Tranquil

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley”, p.294

  19 Copy quote   

• a single word even may be a spark of inextinguishable thought

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  May, Sparks, Single Word

  'A Defence of Poetry' (written 1821; published 1840)

  38 Copy quote   

• The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Imagination, Moral, Instruments

  1821 A Defence of Poetry.

  10 Copy quote   

• The babe is at peace within the womb, the corpse is at rest within the tomb. We begin in what we end.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Death, Ends, Babe

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Geoffrey Matthews, Kelvin Everest (1989). “The Poems of Shelley: 1817-1819”, p.711, Pearson Education

  5 Copy quote   

• If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, what doubts should we have concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Wise, Prayer, Doubt

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2012). “Uma Defesa da Poesia e Outros Ensaios (Edição Bilíngue): Edição bilíngue português - inglês”, p.199, Editora Landmark LTDA

  14 Copy quote   

• O, wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Spring, Winter, Clouds

  "Ode to the West Wind" l. 70 (1819)

  96 Copy quote   

• Strange thoughts beget strange deeds.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Deeds, Strange, Begets

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1853). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete in One Volume”, p.294

  10 Copy quote   

• And Spring arose on the garden fair,
  Like the Spirit of Love felt everywhere;
  And each flower and herb on Earth's dark breast
  rose from the dreams of its wintry rest.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Inspirational, Dream, Nature

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Illustrated)”, p.416, Delphi Classics

  93 Copy quote   

• It is not a merit to tolerate, but rather a crime to be intolerant.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Tolerance, Merit, Crime

  10 Copy quote   

• All spirits are enslaved which serve things evil

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Evil, Spirit, Positive Atheism

  Percy Bysshe Shelley, Geoffrey Matthews, Kelvin Everest (1989). “The Poems of Shelley: 1817-1819”, p.564, Pearson Education

  6 Copy quote   

• Nothing in the world is single, All things by a law divine, In one spirit meet and mingle-Why not I with thine?

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Law, Why Not, World

  'Love's Philosophy'

  12 Copy quote   

• The wise want love; and those who love want wisdom.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Love, Wise, Wisdom

  'Prometheus Unbound' (1820) act 1, l. 625

  12 Copy quote   

• Worse than a bloody hand is a hard heart.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Heart, Hands, Bloody

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1871). “The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Complete in One Volume”, p.300

  51 Copy quote   

• Fate,Time,Occasion,Chance, and Change? To these All things are subject but eternal love.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

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