The Monsters (40 page)

Pacchiani introduced the Shelleys to Countess Teresa Viviani, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the governor of Pisa. Emilia,
as the Shelleys called her, was currently living in the convent of Saint Anna, “where she sees no one but the maids and the
idiots,” according to Mary. She was compelled to remain there until her parents arranged a suitable marriage for her, and
Mary commented, “It is grievous to see this beautiful girl wearing out the best years of her life in an odious convent where
both mind and body are sick from want of . . . exercise.”

Nothing appealed to Percy more than a maiden in distress. He had “rescued” Harriet from her father in 1811, and repeated the
performance with Mary in 1814. After he married the rescued maidens, unfortunately, they became less attractive to him. A
friend, a poet manqué himself, who knew Percy in his last year of life commented, “He was inconstant in Love as men of vehement
temperament are apt to be—his spirit hunting after new fancies; nothing real can equal the ideal. Poets and men of ardent
imagination should not marry—marriage is only suitable to stupid people.”

Shelley accordingly took Emilia under his wing, writing her what must have been a puzzling letter: “Here are we then, bound
by a few days friendship, gathered together by some strange fortune from the ends of the earth to be perhaps a consolation
to each other.” A copy of this letter, and four others like it, were found, half-finished, in one of Shelley’s notebooks.
It would have been difficult for him to carry on a love affair with someone in as protected a position as Emilia, but of course
for Shelley once a deed was imagined, it was as good as done in actuality.

Emilia became the inspiration for Shelley’s poem
Epipsychidion
(“on the subject of the soul”), which he told a friend was “an idealized history of my life and feelings.” He portrayed her
as the incarnation of Venus, goddess of love:

I never thought before my death to see

Youth’s vision thus made perfect. Emily,

I love thee. . . .

Claire appeared in the poem as a comet:

. . . O Comet beautiful and fierce,

Who drew the heart of this frail Universe

Towards thine own; till wreckt in that convulsion,

Alternating attraction and repulsion,

Thine went astray and that was rent in twain.

Mary was represented as the Moon, a cold figure who put the poet to sleep:

And all my being became bright or dim

As the Moon’s image in a summer sea,

According as she smiled or frowned on me;

And there I lay, within a chaste cold bed:

Alas, I then was nor alive nor dead.

When Shelley sent
Epipsychidion
to his publisher, Charles Ollier, he asked that it be published anonymously. “I make its author a secret, to avoid the malignity
of those who turn sweet food into poison.” Obviously, he feared Mary’s reaction. Stranger still, Shelley told Ollier that
the poem was “a production of a portion of me already dead.” He wrote a preface saying that the anonymous author “died at
Florence, as he was preparing for a voyage to one of the wildest of the Sporades [Greek islands] . . . where it was his hope
to have realised a scheme of life, suited perhaps to that happier and better world of which he is now an inhabitant, but hardly
practicable in this.”

Mary ultimately did learn of the poem, possibly having it in mind in 1839 when she wrote, “There are other verses I should
well like to obliterate for ever.” At the time, she was preparing an edition of Shelley’s poems for publication.
Epipsychidion
was the only one of his long works that she printed without an introduction.

Two more people, Jane and Edward Williams, joined the Shelley circle in January 1821. Their relationship was as irregular
as the Shelleys’ had been in 1816. Edward Ellerker Williams had joined the English navy at the age of eleven and eventually
served in India, where he met Jane, who was in an unhappy marriage. The two ran off together but were never formally married
because Jane’s husband refused to give her a divorce. Edward spent his time writing plays that were never produced, something
Percy could sympathize with, and the two of them became fast friends. Jane, like Claire, had musical talents, but at the time
Percy met the couple, he was still infatuated with Emilia, and described Jane as “an extremely pretty & gentle woman—apparently
not
very
clever.”

Mary’s first impressions gave no indication that she found Jane a threat. “Jane is certainly very pretty,” she wrote,

but she wants animation and sense; her conversation is
nothing particular,
and she speaks in a slow monotonous voice: but she appears good tempered and tolerant.
Ned
seems the picture of good humour and obligingness, he is lively and possesses great talent in drawing so that with him one
is never at a loss for subjects of conversation.

In March, Mary helped with the birth of the Williamses’ second child and brought the news to Edward that he was now the father
of a girl.

The following month, Percy, Edward Williams, and Henry Reveley, the son of Maria Gisborne, went on a sailing trip. When their
boat capsized, Williams easily made his way to the shore, but only Reveley’s quick assistance saved Shelley, who was helpless
in the water. The threesome stayed at a local farmhouse for the night before making their way back to Pisa. Shelley’s response
seems bizarre. He wrote to Reveley on his return, “Our ducking last night has added fire instead of quenching the nautical
ardour which produced it; and I consider it as a good omen in any enterprise that it begins in evil: as being more probable
that it will end in good.” Few people would have considered a narrow escape from drowning as “a good omen.”

Byron joined the group in Pisa in November 1821. The Shelleys were now ensconced on the top floor of a villa on the Arno,
with the Williams family living on the floor below. Byron settled on the opposite bank at the Palazzo Lanfranchi. Countess
Teresa Guiccioli and her brother Pietro Gamba had a house just up the street, and Byron visited her daily. He loved his palazzo,
a sixteenth-century building with dungeons in its cellar. His longtime valet, however, had misgivings. Byron wrote to John
Murray that the palazzo “was so full of
Ghosts
that the learned Fletcher (my Valet) has begged leave to change his room—and then refused to occupy his
new
room—because there were more Ghosts there than in the other.—It is quite true;—that there are most extraordinary noises
(as in all old buildings), which have terrified the servants so—as to incommode me extremely.”

Shelley enjoyed the company and conversation of women, while Byron claimed to prefer the harem, where “they lock them up,
and they are much happier. Give a woman a looking-glass and a few sugar-plums, and she will be satisfied.” As a result, Byron’s
circle was always male-dominated. He liked to host stag dinners and take part in outdoor activities like shooting, riding,
and boating. Even on Christmas Day the men all dined at the Casa Lanfranchi without the women. On these occasions Mary and
Teresa looked to each other for companionship. Mary found Teresa a pretty and amiable woman, without pretensions.

The reason for Byron’s arrival was ostensibly to begin preparations for the magazine that he, Shelley, and Leigh Hunt were
to publish. However, this had to be delayed because Hunt’s wife fell ill before they could leave England. The Hunts would
not arrive in Italy until the spring of 1822.

In January 1822, the Shelley circle welcomed another member. Edward Trelawny was born the same year as Percy but he was a
man of action rather than thought. Everyone recognized him as a romantic figure. Mary described Trelawny as “six feet high—raven
black hair which curls thickly & shortly, like a Moor’s . . . and a smile which expresses good nature and kindheartedness.
. . . His company is delightful.” He had, by his own account, a spectacularly checkered past, in which he left school at twelve
after leading a mutiny in which the students flogged a cruel assistant headmaster. Trelawny enlisted in the British navy,
from which he said he deserted to join a pirate band that roamed the sea from India to Malaysia. Finally he married an Arab
woman whom he had rescued. He sounded exactly like a hero out of one of Byron’s poems, and even Byron was taken in by the
man’s stories. After meeting Trelawny for the first time, Byron told Teresa that Trelawny was “the personification of my Corsair.”

Edward Williams, who had known Trelawny in India, introduced him to the group, and Trelawny won acceptance with his tall tales.
Mary liked his rakishness: “He tells strange stories of himself—horrific ones—so that they harrow one up . . . [with] simple
yet strong language—he portrays the most frightful situations. . . . I believe them now I see the man. . . . I am glad to
meet with one who among other valuable qualities has the rare merit of interesting my imagination.”

In fact, though Trelawny had spent seven years in the navy, he never rose above the rank of midshipman and had an undistinguished
record. He returned to England on a naval ship (not a pirate vessel) and made an unhappy marriage (not with an Arab) that
ended in divorce. Most recently he had been living in Switzerland, supported by an allowance from his father. Trelawny had
come to Italy specifically to meet Byron and Shelley, for he now fancied embarking on a literary career. Indeed, he made his
relatively brief friendship with them his lifelong meal ticket.

Trelawny left a description of Mary at this time: “She brought us back from the ideal world Shelley had left us in, to the
real one, welcomed me to Italy, and asked me the news of London and Paris, the new books, operas, and bonnets, marriages,
murders, and other marvels.” Like others, he was struck by “her calm, grey eyes.” He described her as “rather under the English
standard of women’s height, very fair and light-haired, witty, social, and animated in the society of friends, though mournful
in solitude.”

Trelawny glimpsed some of the fault lines in the Shelleys’ marriage during a day with the couple in the pine forest of Cascine
outside Pisa. Mary became tired and rested beneath a tree while Trelawny found Shelley deep in the forest, daydreaming beside
a deep pool. Shelley fantasized about the shapes of the rocks and trees. “We talked and laughed, and shrieked, and shouted,
as we emerged from under the shadows of the melancholy pines,” Trelawny wrote. When they rejoined Mary, Shelley’s mood changed.
He sighed, “Poor Mary! hers is a sad fate. Come along; she can’t bear solitude, nor I society—the quick coupled with the dead.”

Trelawny had brought with him the model of a schooner, which immediately captured Shelley’s interest. He and Edward Williams
decided to have a full-scale one built, under Trelawny’s supervision. A year later, Mary was to recall, “Thus on that night—one
of gaiety and thoughtlessness—Jane’s and my miserable destiny was decided. We then said laughing each to the other, ‘Our husbands
decide without asking our consent . . . for, to tell you the truth, I hate this boat, though I say nothing.’ How well I remember
that night! How short-sighted we are!”

From the time she finished
Mathilda
Mary had been building a life of her own. She realized that Shelley could not be relied on and that his romantic ideas would
never meet her need for a stable life. Increasingly, Mary turned to her friends and her mother’s writing to enrich her existence.
Her journal entries for February are introspective and searching—very different from the sort of notation previously offered.
For example, on February 25, she wrote: “Let me in my fellow creatures love that which is & not fix my affections on a fair
form endued with imaginary attributes . . . above all let me fearlessly descend into the remotest caverns of my own mind—carry
the torch of self knowledge into its dimmest recesses—but too happy if I dislodge any evil spirit or enshrine a new deity
in some hitherto uninhabited nook—Read Wrongs of Women [one of her mother’s books].”

Looking within herself was Mary’s only solace, for Percy had now fixated on the loveliness of Jane Williams. She had a fine
singing voice and he bought her a guitar. He wrote her a series of love poems, cautioning, “I commit them to your secrecy.”
Shelley, however, showed them to Edward Williams, a liberal-minded husband like himself. In one poem, Percy summoned up another
ménage à trois—he compares the three of them to characters from Shakespeare’s
The Tempest:
Jane as Miranda, Edward as Ferdinand, and Percy as the ethereal spirit Ariel. He saw the Williamses’ happy marriage as an
ideal that contrasted with his own. Mary did not learn of the poems until after Shelley’s death.

The death of Allegra gave a bad start to the summer, which only became worse as time went on. Mary had hoped Byron could join
them in a repetition of 1816, but Byron had rented a large house up the coast at Livorno, where he was adding new cantos to
his
Don Juan
. The Shelleys and the Williamses, along with three children and—as always—Claire, moved into a small house near a coastal
village called San Terenzo. Casa Magni, which Mary had chosen reluctantly at Shelley’s urging, turned out to be a hateful
place for her. It was literally on the beach, almost trapped between the land and the bay. “The sea came up to the door [and]
a steep hill sheltered it behind,” Mary wrote. “The proprietor of the estate on which it was situated was insane.” He had
uprooted olive trees that had been growing on the hillside and planted hardwood trees, an act that to the local people was
a glaring manifestation of his madness. But Shelley thought the new trees made the location seem like England, and praised
the house’s serenity and charm.

Mary recalled the location differently: “The gales and squalls that hailed our first arrival surrounded the bay with foam;
the howling wind swept round our exposed house, and the sea roared unremittingly, so that we almost fancied ourselves on board
ship.” The ground floor of the house was uninhabitable because the earthen floors had never been paved, so the group lived
in close quarters on the upper floor, where there were only four rooms and a terrace. They were forced to eat in the hallway
between rooms.