The Collaborative Literary Relationship of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Anna Mercer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367277956
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000024173
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Literary Collections

How did Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, two of the most iconic and celebrated authors of the Romantic Period, contribute to each other's achievements? This book is the first to dedicate a full-length study to exploring the nature of the Shelleys' literary relationship in depth. It offers new insights into the works of these talented individuals who were bound together by their personal romance and shared commitment to a literary career. Most innovatively, the book describes how Mary Shelley contributed significantly to Percy Shelley's writing, whilst also discussing Percy's involvement in her work.

A reappraisal of original manuscripts reveals the Shelleys as a remarkable literary couple, participants in a reciprocal and creative exchange. Hand-written evidence shows Mary adding to Percy's work in draft and vice-versa. A focus on the Shelleys' texts – set in the context of their lives and especially their travels – is used to explain how they enabled one another to accomplish a quality of work which they might never have achieved alone. Illustrated with reproductions from their notebooks and drafts, this volume brings Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley to the forefront of emerging scholarship on collaborative literary relationships and the social nature of creativity.

1 1814–18 London to Europe – Collaborative Beginnings

DOI: 10.4324/9780429297892-2

Journals and Travels

‘Our house is very political as well as poetical and I hope you will acquire a fresh spirit for both when you come here’ – MWS wrote this in a letter to the Shelleys’ friend Leigh Hunt on 2 March 1817.¹ I believe this quote neatly shows the close proximity in which the Shelleys worked as companions in a ‘political’ and ‘poetical’ household open to noteworthy intellectual visitors. This is a quality of their working lives that becomes increasingly apparent the more we examine their relationship and creative output. It is evident that 1814–18, especially the period of the composition of Frankenstein in 1816–18, can be understood as a peak in the Shelleys’ collaboration. Here the Shelleys’ writings consider similar themes, have a significant unity in tone and language, and provide evidence of their cooperative working to produce publishable texts.

The aim of this chapter is to establish how else the Shelleys collaborated in the years leading up to the composition of Frankenstein and to consider their shared labour on that novel. Crucially, I present observations on Frankenstein and its origins, particularly in relation to the Shelleys’ depictions of the mountainous European landscape emphasising the significance of the authors’ shared travels. The chapter also deals with the other texts composed during the time in which Frankenstein was written, and the writings of the period of its publication and reception in 1818. By considering a larger corpus of works, I can build on the significant attention MWS’s masterpiece has already received.

As one studies this period of their lives, it becomes increasingly evident that the Shelleys engaged in a reciprocal process of creative idea-sharing, drafting, reading, and copying, which had a hugely important effect on the works that they produced. The Shelleys’ individual voices reveal that they challenged each other’s ideas, and this aspect of their relationship would become more overt in the years after 1818. There is evidence of MWS’s literary confidence growing, and Dekker has argued that the exchange between the Shelleys and other members of the Geneva circle (Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont and John W. Polidori) shows ‘the collaborative spirit and nonpossessive attitude toward intellectual property that prevailed between these writers during their happiest years together’. Furthermore, this creative openness:

mainly broadened and enriched their work and can be partly attributed to the experiences they shared as tourists. They spent long hours together not just as fellow writers and political liberals but likewise as companionable tourists for whom the activity was inherently collaborative.²

The Shelleys first experienced exciting European landscapes – and recorded their impressions of them – as a couple travelling together. As I will show, the Alpine landscapes of Frankenstein and their correspondence to PBS’s ‘Mont Blanc’ are indicative of the various ways the Shelleys collaborated, across their respective canons.

In May 1814, the 16-year-old Mary Godwin (later MWS) met PBS in her father’s – William Godwin’s – house in London. Although this meeting was not their first (it is likely they were also both present in Godwin’s home in Skinner Street in November 1812),³ the events that unfolded in May–July 1814 would culminate in MWS and PBS eloping to the Continent on 28 July 1814 in a passionate declaration of love. PBS would leave behind an estranged wife, pregnant with his second child and caring for his first. Godwin strongly disapproved of their actions despite his previous unconventional relationship with MWS’s mother and the elopers’ insistence that the radical writings of MWS’s parents supported their decision to leave together. MWS’s step-sister Claire travelled with the Shelleys; her presence is evident in some of the Shelley manuscripts, but creating works intended for publication was apparently peculiar to PBS and MWS as a couple (though further research into Claire’s place in the Shelley household should not be dismissed, it is something I do not have space to explore sufficiently here). The drama of the Shelleys’ lives has frequently been the subject of literary biographies both academic and popular; the details of their often troubled experiences will not be fully recounted in this study.⁴ It is, however, useful to trace the movements of the young couple during the 1814–18 period, to illustrate how the Shelleys’ writings were shaped by their experiences of travel as well as by each other’s presence.

After their elopement journey (in which they visited France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland) the Shelleys returned to England in September 1814. What followed was an unsettled phase, accompanied by financial worries, in London until May 1815. In June and July they toured the south coast of England, finally making their home for a time at Bishopsgate in Windsor Great Park (August 1815–early May 1816). In the summer of 1816, one of the most celebrated periods in the history of Romantic literature, the Shelleys and Claire famously travelled to Lake Geneva to stay near Lord Byron. While there, they visited the Alps. They returned to England in September 1816; PBS and MWS married on 30 December. By February 1817 the Shelleys were established in Marlow but would move back to London by January 1818. On the 11 March (the end of the period covered by this chapter) the Shelleys left for Italy and spent the remainder of their time together in that country, until PBS’s death in 1822.⁵ Throughout their early years as a couple, the Shelleys’ existence was one of continuous exploration as they sought new landscapes abroad, and as they considered how and where they wanted to settle as a family.

When the Shelleys eloped in the summer of 1814, the spirit of collaboration blossomed between them as they toured Europe. Bennett states that: ‘as they travelled, the couple continued with their own writing […] The Shelleys […] had the same kind of dual relationship Godwin and Wollstonecraft shared, a passion for each other and a passion for writing’. MWS began her journal in 1814, and this document is ‘the first of the Shelleys’ many collaborations’.⁶ The 1814–15 journal has ‘Shelley and Mary’s journal book’ inscribed on the title page by MWS, and the first entries are in PBS’s hand. This record of their lives would continue as a shared project throughout these travels and the Shelleys’ second expedition to the Continent in 1816, although PBS’s most extensive contribution was in the first few months of the 1814 journal book. Mary Jean Corbett has shown how PBS’s opening entry ‘safely traces the coming together of the pair, the transformation of “I” and “she” into a united “we”’.⁷ MWS makes her first contribution to the journal by completing one of PBS’s sentences: ‘Mary was there. S.helley [sic] was also with me’ (Figure 1.1) (n.b. italics show PBS’s holograph in MWS’s/the shared journal, unless stated otherwise).⁸ This combination of two different hands in one sentence embodies

both voices, each marking the presence of the other […] this first segment of the […] Journals devotes itself not to the history of a single individual, but to the “pleasure and security”, in Shelley’s words, that two lovers – who are also two readers and two writers – seek and find in each other.⁹

The comfort offered by the presence of a literary partner, as Corbett suggests, is expressed within a communal writing space and indicates the Shelleys’ willingness to share paper and ideas, and (in Dekker’s terms) their ‘nonpossessive attitude toward intellectual property’. As time progressed, the journals, along with the Shelley’ letters, developed an intertextual connection with the Shelleys’ creative writings, including published works.

Figure 1.1 The Shelleys’ Journal, 1814. Oxford, Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Abinger d. 27, fol. 2r.

Percy Shelley’s Poems to Mary

The ‘Geneva Notebook’ from the 1816 period holds part of an early draft of ‘Mont Blanc’ that also appears in MWS’s journal.¹⁰ Above the pencil scrawl of the five unused lines are six draft lines of another poem in PBS’s hand, ‘evidently addressed to Mary S. for the second anniversary of their elopement on 28 July 1814, almost indecipherable and with a huge blot in the middle’:

I can not but [ ] there is no bourn

Where [ ] my thoughts return

From all my [ ] brief state & we [ ]

To steep in [ ]- not to mourn

Aught in ourselves or in the tie

That makes thee mine unchangeably¹¹

These tantalisingly broken lines show how PBS depicts his writing partner and lover in verse. The phrase ‘in the tie / That makes thee mine unchangeably’ emphasises the ‘tie’ as being unchangeable, not the possessiveness that is indicated by the word ‘mine’, as this is where the line break appears. PBS’s writings from the period 1814–18 underscore MWS’s presence, and her evident influence on her literary partner’s creativity.

On 28 September 1817 MWS wrote as a postscript to her letter to PBS: ‘What of Frankenstein? and your own poem have you fixed on a name’,¹² showing a concern not only with her own text but also with PBS’s progress in his work. PBS’s ‘Dedication’ to the poem alluded to in this letter – Laon and Cythna (composed 1817)¹³ – is addressed to MWS as literary partner and lover. PBS wanted to publish this work in 1817, but it was repressed because of its subject matter.¹⁴ It is PBS’s longest poem and a work of ‘violence & revolution […] relieved by milder pictures of friendship & love & natural affections’.¹⁵ In the ‘Dedication’, PBS considers MWS as a kindred spirit:

Thou Friend, whose presence on my wintry heart

Fell, like bright Spring upon some herbless plain;

How beautiful and calm and free thou wert

In thy young wisdom, when the mortal chain

Of Custom thou didst burst and rend in twain,

And walked as free as light the clouds among,

Which many an envious slave then breathed in vain

From his dim dungeon, and my spirit sprung

To meet thee from the woes which had begirt it long.

(‘Dedication to Mary – ’, Laon and Cythna, ll. 55–63)¹⁶

PBS praises MWS’s ability to fuel his creativity by her ‘wisdom’, and he pays tribute to her freedom, her integrity, her ability to ‘burst and rend’ the ‘mortal chain / Of Custom’. MWS is intellectually open and liberal; she is in essence ‘free’, rejecting the tyrannical society that PBS loathed. A commitment to radical beliefs was emerging in MWS’s own writings by 1817. Such attitudes stemmed from her upbringing (in the shadow of her parents) as well as her brave decision to elope with PBS to the Continent when he was married to someone else.

The image of ‘Spring’ falling on PBS’s ‘wintry heart’ introduces MWS as a source of renewal for the poet’s mind: this is an acknowledgement of her effect on his ability to write and his creative talent. PBS also describes returning to MWS, ‘mine own heart’s home’, after the ‘summer task’ (ll....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Author’s Note
• The Shelleys: A Brief Chronology
• Introduction
• 1 1814–18: London to Europe – Collaborative Beginnings
• 2 1818–22: Literary Exchanges in Italy
• 3 1818–22: The Italian Period and Shared Composition
• 4 1822 and Beyond: Approaching Posthumous Editing as Collaboration
• 5 1822 and Beyond: Intertextual Connections and Mary Shelley’s Later Novels
• Afterword: ‘We Have Now Lived Five Years Together’
• Abbreviations
• Bibliography