Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (32 page)

The quiet, studious days and weeks at the Villa Valsovano and the peaceful agricultural rhythms of the surrounding countryside did slowly begin to have a beneficial effect on Mary’s health. Prompted by Shelley’s example she began writing again, although the work she produced that autumn, ‘The Fields of Fancy’, was more private and internalised than Shelley’s politically engaged poetry. ‘The Fields of Fancy’ opens with a description of Rome, a city where the un-named narrator has ‘suffered a misfortune that reduced me to misery and despair’.
²⁴
The narrator is led through the Elysian Fields, where she hears the story of Matilda, who has been released by death from her grief for her dead father. In the novella which arose from ‘The Fields of Fancy’ –
Matilda
– Mary positioned the story of Matilda’s tragic life at the centre of her narrative, allowing the grieving Roman narrator to fade away.
Matilda
remained unpublished during Mary’s lifetime because its principle theme was the incestuous love Matilda’s father feels for his daughter. It is this which leads him to commit suicide and which causes her subsequent isolation, since she cannot share the reason for her guilt-stricken grief with anyone. Nor, indeed, does she want to:
Matilda
contains a powerful description of the selfishness of grief, and of the absolute need of the bereaved to be alone:

I was silent to all around me. I hardly replied to the slightest question, and was uneasy when I saw a human creature near me. I was surrounded by my female relations, but they were all of them nearly strangers to me: I did not listen to their consolations; and so little did they work their designed effect that they seemed to me to be spoken in an unknown tongue. I found if sorrow was dead within me, so was love and desire of sympathy. . . . the living were not fit companions for me, and I was ever meditating by what means I might shake them all off, and never be heard of again.
²⁵

It is tempting to read this as autobiographical, but
Matilda
is far more than a simple expression of Mary’s disabling depression. Paradoxically, from the depths of her emotional exile, Mary produced a prolonged meditation on the key relationships of her life. In the novella she acknowledged how much Godwin’s voice had shaped her writing while exploring the problems of her upbringing.
Matilda
thus confronts the dangers inherent in an excessive degree of fatherly love, but it is also intellectually indebted to Godwin. Like the novel he published in 1817,
Mandeville
, it is an exploration of an obsession, and it shares certain stylistic qualities with his earlier
Caleb Williams
.

In the character of Woodville – the young poet who comforts Matilda towards the end of her life – Mary also explored her relationship with Shelley. Woodville endows Matilda with a sense that her life might have some value, even if she herself is unable to feel joy or love. ‘Indeed I dare not die’, he tells her after she asks him to commit suicide with her:

If you can never be happy, can you never bestow happiness. Oh! believe me, if you beheld on lips pale with grief one smile of joy and gratitude, and knew that you were parent of that smile, and that without you it had never been, you would feel so pure and warm a happiness that you would wish to live for ever again and again to enjoy the same pleasure.
²⁶

Through Woodville Mary expressed the importance of human interaction, of suppressing one’s own sorrow in order to relieve the suffering of others. In part, he represented an acknowledgment of the value of the advice Shelley had given her in the past: to focus on keeping up her spirits, to direct her energy into her work and to remain, at all costs, open about her feelings with those who cared for her. But Mary also presented Woodville as naïve and overly optimistic and, in so doing, introduced a note of scepticism into the presentation of his arguments. Ultimately,
Matilda
acknowledged both the value of love and the bitter pain and suffering it could cause. It represented a brave attempt by Mary to rationalise her relationships with her father and her husband, as well as the emotional turmoil which overcame her in the months following William’s death.

The Shelleys left the Villa Valsovano at the beginning of October and settled in lodgings in Florence, in time to prepare for the birth of Mary’s fourth child. Percy Florence Shelley was born on 12 November, and was a robust and healthy baby. Mary sent happy descriptions of him to Maria Gisborne and Marianne Hunt. To Maria, in a letter written very soon after Percy Florence’s birth, she related that her baby was lively, alert, and had a nose which promised to become as big as his grandfather’s. To Marianne, who had recently given birth to a sixth little Hunt, she sent a more sober assessment of the last few months. In the period between Clara’s death and Percy’s birth Mary learnt to fear for her children, and she recognised that this changed the way she felt about them and her own existence. Even the joy of renewed motherhood could not rid her of the feeling that life was vengeful and capricious. Percy, she told Marianne, was her ‘only one’ and it was hard to know that her happiness depended so absolutely on a single fragile little life. Yet it was much better to fear for the life of a new baby than to be childless, as she had been for five hateful months. ‘Do not let us talk of those five months: when I look back on all I suffered at Leghorn
*
I shudder with horror yet even now a sickening feeling steps in the way of every enjoyment when I think – of what I will not write about.’
²⁷

Shelley sent his own account of his new son to Hunt. He was relieved that the baby was healthy and feeding well, but more relieved that ‘poor Mary begins (for the first time) to look a little consoled. For we have spent as you may imagine a miserable five months.’
²⁸
Shelley believed that the birth of Percy Florence would mark the end of Mary’s depression and that with a new baby to enjoy she would return to her old self. In some respects he was right: her mood and the tone of her letters lightened and superficially she seemed far removed from the grief-stricken woman who had shut herself away from human contact over the summer. But the events of 1818–1819 scarred her much more deeply than Shelley realised, and she remained emotionally withdrawn and fragile well into 1820. Her recovery was delayed by her anxiety about Godwin, who at the end of 1819 was found liable for years of unpaid rent on his Skinner Street house, a judgement which threatened to plunge him into bankruptcy.

Shelley became frustrated by Godwin’s aggressive demands for money and by Mary’s failure to rouse herself completely from her depression now that the cause of her misery was, in his word, ‘obsolete’. A letter from him to the Gisbornes, dated March 1820, gives the lie to the superficial cheerfulness of Mary’s own letters. The purpose of his letter was to ask Maria to stay with them while her husband and son travelled to England on business:

Mary has resigned herself, especially since the death of her child, to a train of thoughts, which if not cut off, cannot but conduct to some fatal end. Ill temper and irritation at the familiar events of life are among the external marks of this inward change, and by being freely yielded to, they exasperate the spirit, of which they are expressions. Unfortunately I, though not ill tempered, am irritable, and the effect produced on me, awakens the instinct of the power which annoys me in her, and which exists independently of her strong understanding, and of her better feelings, for Mary is certainly capable of the most exalted goodness – If she could be restrained from the expression of her inward sufferings, the sufferings themselves, the cause having become obsolete, would subside – A new habit of sentiment would take place – But all my attempts to restrain exasperate –

It needs a slight weight to turn the scale to good or evil. Mary considers me as a portion of herself, and feels no more remorse in torturing me than in torturing her own mind.
²⁹

Shelley did not just ask for Maria Gisborne’s company for Mary’s sake. He was ‘tortured’ by her mood: the presence of friends would at least spread the emotional burden he carried. But, despite his pleading, Maria accompanied her husband and son to England in the spring. Once again, Mary and Shelley needed the companionship of others, this time in order to escape from the growing distance between them. So in January 1820 they moved the short distance to Pisa to renew their acquaintance with ‘Mrs Mason’, an old friend of the Godwins whom they had met briefly during their journey to Florence.

‘Mrs Mason’ was Lady Mountcashell, the estranged wife of an Irish peer.  She was born Margaret King and, as a girl, had received an unusually enlightened education from her beloved governess, Mary Wollstonecraft. Her marriage to Lord Mountcashell was unhappy and in 1804 she formed a connection with George Tighe, with whom she was living when the Shelleys met her in Pisa. She had two daughters with Tighe, Laurette and Nerina, in addition to eight Mountcashell children whom she was not permitted to see. She was unconventional in her dress, manner and politics.  Shelley, Mary and Claire took to her instantly, and spent a good deal of time at her house, the Casa Silva. They developed a fondness for her quiet partner, George Tighe, whom they nicknamed ‘Tatty’ because of his interest in potatoes, and Claire befriended ten year old Laurette and played with four year old Nerina, who was only eighteen months older than Allegra. ‘Mrs Mason’ as they called her, was a source of much sage advice for all three. She advised Claire to live more independently, and took a robust approach to Shelley’s health, which continued to be a source of anxiety for both him and Mary, introducing him to an eminently sensible physician, Andrea Vaccà Berlinghieri. Vaccà, as he was universally known, was one of the best-known doctors in Europe and he advised Shelley to relax, stop dosing himself with quack remedies and to make the most of Pisa’s mild climate. Mrs Mason also helped Mary to establish her household, giving her much advice about the procurement of servants and suitable lodgings. With a supportive friend in residence, Mary, Shelley and Claire warmed to Pisa, and to the large, light, riverside apartments they took on the Lung’Arno. It was good to be out of their Florentine lodgings, and to have space to spread out again.

Mrs Mason’s influence over her young friends extended beyond the way they ordered their lives. She was actively interested in the question of Irish independence and had written pamphlets on the subject which both Shelley and Mary read during their first Pisan winter. It had been a long time since they had had a friend with whom they could talk politics and it had an impact on their work and their thinking. Shelley immersed himself in histories of the revolutions in South America and spent hours with Mrs Mason, discussing his discoveries. Inspired by their new friend’s talk, both Mary and Claire re-read Paine, while Mary described her reading and the lively conversation at Casa Silva in letters to the Hunts. She had no wish to be in England, she told Marianne. Life in Pisa was cheap, they were slowly accumulating a group of pleasant acquaintances, the climate suited Shelley’s health and Claire wanted to remain in the same country as Allegra. There was no reason for them to return to London, Mary concluded, ‘if I could but import a cargo of friends & books . . . here.’
³⁰
After almost two years of restless travelling, Mary felt they had finally found themselves in a place where they could make a permanent home.

At the end of December 1819 Byron left his Venetian
palazzo
and travelled to Ravenna, some seventy miles down the Adriatic coast. His journey was prompted by a woman, Teresa Guiccioli, whom he had first met earlier that year. Teresa was young, beautiful, and newly married to the elderly Count Guiccioli. She was an unhappy bride, and she and Byron embarked on an affair. In the autumn, Teresa went to join her cuckolded husband in Ravenna, leaving Byron unsure about his future in Italy. In England his work was once more back in the public eye. The first instalment of
Don Juan
was published in July 1819 and it did not take long for the secret of its authorship (the cantos were published anonymously) to leak out.
Don Juan
was Byron’s masterpiece: a brutally funny critique of Regency culture and society which only increased his notoriety. Frustrated by his separation from Teresa, Byron toyed with the idea of taking Allegra back to England, to face his public for the first time in three years. But he dithered about his plans throughout the autumn and at the end of the year was prevented from leaving Italy by Allegra, who became worryingly unwell. The delay occasioned by Allegra’s illness provided Teresa’s father, who had forbidden the couple to meet, time to reconsider his opposition to their liaison. At the end of the year they had a passionate reunion in Ravenna, and by the spring Byron had established himself as Teresa’s acknowledged consort.