#valperga

[mournfulroses]

Mary Shelley, from The Complete Works; “Valperga,” written c. November 1823

[reliquiaeperustae]

Shelley's literary sources merge with the biographical facts of her life to produce her literary output, and in the process we see a blurring of the boundaries that existed between formal, public utterance, and private, reflective comment; between the creative self seen both as artificer and as the central subject of the work of art produced. In these circumstances, Shelley was destined never to be able to write popular fiction to order; neither Scott's historicizing nor Radcliffe's Gothicizing would be allowed to pass without a significant injection of her own critical assessment of the kind of writing they represented.

williams, "translating shelley's valperga" in european gothic, ed. horner

[yelloweyedthing]

"Yet will I arouse all the pride and all the nobility of my nature: I will not sink beneath this trial; the great and good of past ages have left their lessons for me to meditate, and I will be no indocile pupil; the honey of the cup is exhausted, but all is not gall that remains." MARY SHELLEY ILY

[dailyhistoryposts]

Mary Shelley

The woman herself, today we celebrate Halloween by taking a look at Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851).

Born in Somers Town, London to a feminist mother (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792) and an anarchist father (William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1793), Shelley's mother died almost immediately, leaving Godwin to raise both her and her older half-sister (her mother's illegitimate child) despite being deeply in debt. Shelley's childhood was largely happy, but when Godwin remarried, she disliked her new stepmother and stepsiblings.

In 1812, she was sent to live with the Baxter family near Dundee, Scotland, a family of radicals (the 18th century political movement that would advocate for democratic reform and eventually turn into social liberalism). It was here she started writing.

In 1814, she met Percy Bysshe Shelley, himself a radical reformer who had alienated his wealthy aristocratic family due to his plans to redistribute their hereditary wealth. They eloped and left for France.

Their marriage was not perfect--though both believed marriage to be regressive and in free love, Percy had extramarital partners while Mary did not. Mary's father refused to have anything to do with her after the elopement, and neither had as much money as they were used to.

In 1831, Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John William Polidori sat in a room, where Lord Byron dared them each to write a ghost story. What started as a short story became Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), notable for Mary Shelley being perhaps the only person to invent a monster rather than take one from mythology.

I end today's tale at the start of Frankenstein, but there's more to say about her eventual marriage to Percy Shelley, her charity lesbians, single mothers, and adultresses, the numerous attempts at blackmail, and her feminist principles. You could--and people have--written many books about her life. One of the most notable figures in literary history, Shelley's other works, including Valperga (1823) and The Last Man (1826) are becoming more and more widely read.

[phantomsolotour]

when beatrice said “i loved to throw off my cloak, to bare my arms, my face, my neck to the scorching sun-beams, that i might the sooner destroy a delicacy i despised”

[lasiurus-cinereus]

I found these two at a used bookstore yesterday, so I had to get both of course.

Kiss me; - oh! thy lips are cold;
 Round my neck thine arms enfold- 
They are soft, but chill and dead;
 And thy tears upon my head 
Burn like points of frozen lead.

Hasten to the bridal bed-
 Underneath the grave ‘tis spread: 
In darkness may our love be hid,
 Oblivion be our coverlid-
 We may rest, and none forbid.        - Invocation to Misery, Percy Shelley 1818

[lasignorinanessuno]

Le si prospettava un continuo e disperato vuoto; le energie della sua mente erano paralizzate; la sua immaginazione ripiegava le ali nella sua anima rabbuiata.

Mary Shelley.

[mxryshcllcy]

Mary Shelley's antipathy to the separation of individual interests and public interests came naturally to the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft....Following her mother's example and contrary even to most Enlightenment philosophers, Mary Shelley includes women in the revolutionary concepts of individual worth and the capacity for self-determination. Going beyond rejecting gender barriers, she rejects the usual polarized positions the social code assigned to genders. In fictions as varied as Frankenstein, Valperga, and The Last Man, she advocates a more flexible model of gender, one that rescues women from being exclusively assigned to "domestic" roles. In these and other works, Mary Shelley was among a relatively small number of women writers who published visions of women actively engaged in the public sphere.

Betty T. Bennett, “Mary Shelley’s letters: the public/private self,” in the Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, p. 212.