The Mysterious History of Mary Shelley | The Huntington

The Mysterious History of Mary Shelley | The Huntington

To begin, the public was never meant to see Shelley and Mary. The volumes were compiled in the late 1870s by Jane Shelley, wife of Percy Florence Shelley, the only surviving son of Mary Shelley (1797–1851) and the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who wrote such poems as “Ode to the West Wind” and “Ozymandias.” In 1882, Jane privately printed the book purportedly in a run of only 12 copies. Shelley and Mary chronicles Mary and Percy’s life together, beginning with their elopement in 1814, when Mary was 16. Percy was 21 years old. Their elopement was scandalous because Percy was already married.

The volumes consist of excerpts from letters and journals belonging to Mary and Percy and their family and friends. Mary Shelley’s life has always been entangled in competing stories about her famous family and friends. Her parents, William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, were radical writers and philosophers, and Mary Shelley herself occupied an unconventional literary world peopled by shocking and original writers such as Lord Byron. Jane’s choice of documents and her intentional editing (many of the letters in Shelley and Mary are profoundly altered), however, crafted a narrative of Mary Shelley’s life that removed all hints of scandal, immorality, radicalism, or eccentricity.

After printing Shelley and Mary, however, Jane did something even more remarkable: She edited each copy by hand, sometimes radically altering the original document by adding notes and annotations that vary widely in number, content, and tone from copy to copy. She excised sentences—sometimes whole pages—from some copies and occasionally inserted additional letters, tailoring copies to her recipients. With the strictest instructions for confidentiality, Jane loaned and later gave copies to close friends and biographers.

The Huntington Library’s Shelley and Mary is an important surviving copy because it may be the first copy that Jane Shelley edited and tailored for an intended audience. In 1887, Jane gave this copy to her friend, Victorian feminist and social reformer Frances Power Cobbe. Jane’s note at the bottom of the title page admonishes, “No extracts to be made from these vols. without the permission of Sir Percy or Lady Shelley.” A three-page prefatory essay titled “Shelley’s Separation from Harriet,” written onto the flyleaves of the first volume, also accompanies this copy. In other copies, it is titled “Shelley’s Separation from His First Wife,” a title that more deliberately erases Percy’s first wife, who died by her own hand in 1816.

In almost every surviving copy of Shelley and Mary, Jane excised single sentences. The most controversial excision demonstrates her desire to erase Harriet and control the representation of Mary Shelley. In 1839, Mary was editing a posthumous collection of Shelley’s poetry that included the 1813 poem “Queen Mab,” which had been dedicated to Harriet. In her Feb. 12 journal entry, Mary writes, “[Thomas Jefferson] Hogg has written me an insulting letter because I left out the dedication to Harriet.” The sentence that follows has been removed from almost every surviving copy—except the one at Yale University’s Beinecke Library: “Poor Harriet, to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows, as the atonement claimed by fate for her death!” In the excised sentence, Mary reflects on Harriet’s suicide, a tragic act that nonetheless freed Percy to marry her; but fate, according to Mary, demanded recompense for Harriet’s death. The deaths of Shelley and three of their four children, as well as the conflicts with former friends, like Hogg, who criticized Mary’s handling of Shelley’s legacy, had left Mary alienated and alone in 1839. Despite having printed the sentence in 1882, Jane later removed it, most likely to avoid showing Mary as sympathetic toward Harriet.

After Jane’s death in 1899, Frances Power Cobbe sold her copy to American Wall Street broker and bibliophile Frederick R. Halsey. Following the purchase, Halsey wrote to Cobbe asking about the marginalia and excisions. Cobbe replied: “any Pen & ink notes in the books were (I believe) made by Lady Shelley herself—& she cut out (in the funniest way!)—certain words here & there which for some unknown reason, she wished deleted. I expressed my consternation to her at this singular proceeding, but she treated it as a joke!”

In 1915, Henry E. Huntington purchased Halsey’s library, which included Shelley and Mary, for $750,000 (approximately $24.8 million). The claim, however, that only twelve copies were printed turned out to be apocryphal, a ruse likely put forward by Jane herself to deter the public from seeking out these volumes. While more than twelve copies survive today, the Huntington Library’s copy offers an unusually clear record of its creation and provenance. Through it, we can see how the mysterious history of Mary Shelley was constructed, one edit at a time.

Nicole Lobdell is an associate professor of English at Northwestern State University of Louisiana and serves as editor of the journal Nineteenth Century Studies.