Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron and Other Tangled Lives (47 page)

Mary did however receive more valuable advice from Byron, who, along with Godwin, encouraged her to return to England. Both men believed that surrounded by her family and her old social circle she would be able to negotiate more effectively with both Sir Timothy’s solicitor and her publishers. Their advice gathered strength early in the year when
Valperga
was published to moderately friendly reviews. Mary had sent the novel to Godwin in January 1822 and he had seen it through the press on her behalf, but if she intended to earn a living by her pen then it made sense for her to live in the country in which her books were printed. Byron even offered to fund her journey home, thus allowing her to travel in tolerable comfort.

Hogg and Jane Williams, by contrast, enthusiastically advised her from London to remain in Italy. However, their advice was self-interested, and had more to do with their developing friendship than with concern for Mary’s welfare. Hogg grew extremely attentive to Jane after her return to London, and did not want a promising new relationship disrupted by Mary, who knew from experience that Jane was not the first woman connected with Shelley to attract his attention. Jane herself was most insistent that Mary should remain where she was. Although her advice was cloaked with solicitous concern, there was no mistaking the strength of her opposition to Mary’s presence in England. Mary had no idea that Jane had blackened her name with both Hunt and Hogg, and was mystified and a little hurt by her friend’s reluctance to welcome her back to London.

In the end, the counsels of Godwin and Byron prevailed over those of Hogg and Jane, largely because, by the middle of the year, there was nothing to keep Mary in Genoa. Byron was actively trying to withdraw from
The Liberal
, and when the London Greek Committee asked him to travel to Greece as their representative in the fight for independence, he was provided with an ideal excuse to end his involvement with the Hunt brothers. Teresa Guiccioli was most distressed by his plans, and expended considerable effort in attempting to persuade him to allow her to travel to Greece with him. Byron thought this nonsensical, and was immensely relieved when Teresa reluctantly agreed to accompany her father back to Ravenna, to where he had been recalled from exile. In June, Marianne confounded expectations by surviving the birth of her seventh child – a boy, named Vincent after Vincent Novello. Mary knew that without
The Liberal
her ability to earn money in Italy was limited, and felt that Marianne’s safe delivery freed her from responsibility for the Hunts. She began to make arrangements for her journey home soon after Vincent’s birth.

In the final weeks of Mary’s time in Italy, Hunt and Mary finally confronted each other about the breakdown of their friendship, and the misunderstandings of the winter were swept away. Mary revealed something of her suffering to Hunt, and he realised how mistaken he had been to listen to Jane’s gossip. Although he did not tell Mary that Jane had spread rumours about her, he did inform Jane that her malice had been exposed, and that he no longer believed in her reports of Mary’s unfeeling coldness. By way of recompense, he wrote kindly of Mary to Vincent Novello, asking him to extend his friendship to her when she arrived in England, and warning him not to be put off by her calm exterior. ‘She is a torrent of fire under a Hecla snow’, he told his friend.
⁴⁷
 He wrote in a similar vein to Bess, in a letter which expressed a degree of embarrassment about how easily he had believed Jane’s version of events, and guilt about his behaviour towards Mary. ‘How sorry was I’, he admitted, ‘when I found that during all my cold and almost cruel treatment of her, on her first residing here, she had been recording her remorse in private!’ Jane, he decided, did not have ‘intellect enough to see very far into a case where great thoughts, passions, etc, are concerned.’
⁴⁸
 

Hunt failed to mention that he too had demonstrated the lack of intellect he detected in Jane, and that, even after a prolonged period of co-habitation with Mary, he had failed to understand the depth of her feelings. Instead he focused on Mary’s ‘repentance’ for her failure to demonstrate her remorse publicly. He did not display much self-awareness as he cleared Mary of cruelty towards Shelley, but at least the breach was healed. As Mary made her preparations for her journey home, she did so secure in the knowledge that she had regained Hunt’s support and affection. She wrote more cheerfully to Jane that ‘Hunt is all kindness, consideration, and friendship’ and noted happily that ‘all feeling of alienation towards me has disappeared even to its last dreg – He perfectly approves of what I have done.’
⁴⁹
This can not have made very satisfactory reading for Jane, who knew that Hunt’s renewed regard for Mary could only have come about because he had started to disbelieve her stories about the state of the Shelleys’ marriage.

Hunt’s friendship was particularly valuable to Mary when her last weeks in Genoa were marred by a serious quarrel with Byron, which developed when Hunt tactlessly reminded Byron of his promise to pay for Mary’s journey home, and of a debt of £1,000 – the sum of the old bet between Shelley and Byron – he owed to the Shelley estate. Byron was irritated at being reprimanded about his debts by Hunt, who, in assuming the role of Byron’s conscience, seemed to forget that he was heavily indebted to Byron himself. He responded to Hunt’s demands in a series of letters which, according to Mary, were ‘so full of contempt against me & my lost Shelley that I could stand it no longer’.
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Mary was too principled to take money from a man who made slighting remarks about her husband, and was compelled to borrow from Mrs Mason and Trelawny in order to pay for transport back to England.

What Mary did not know was that, despite their quarrel, Byron wanted to pay for her journey without her knowledge, in order to allow her to travel in comfort without denting her pride. He secretly advanced the money to Hunt, and asked him to hand it over to Mary. ‘Thus’, he told Hunt, ‘she will be spared any fancied humiliation’ and enabled to travel ‘handsomely and conveniently in all respects.’
⁵¹
 Mary never received this money but it seems Hunt did, and, as Miranda Seymour has argued (on the strength of evidence presented by John Cam Hobhouse, who was later shown a receipt signed by Hunt), ‘shockingly, kept it’.
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Such fraudulent deception seems out of character for Hunt, but it is equally unlikely that Hobhouse would have lied in his private diary. It is possible that Hunt was so short of money that the temptation to keep Byron’s gift, while convincing himself that this was what Mary would have wanted, was irresistible. Whatever the truth of the matter, Mary left Genoa convinced of Byron’s rudeness and Hunt and Trelawny’s kindness. However, through the good offices of Teresa Guiccioli, Mary and Byron did part on a friendly note. ‘I am too poor’, Mary confessed to Teresa, ‘to lose my friends as well – and if I lost the friendship of LB the rest would not be worth much.’
⁵³
But neither Mary nor Hunt could easily forgive Byron’s slights on Shelley’s reputation. Byron acknowledged that Mary had a right to be indignant, but he did not accept that Hunt had a similar right to feel angry. ‘
I
knew you long before Mr. S knew either you or me’, he reminded him.
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Despite all that had passed between them, Byron was not prepared to leave Italy on bad terms with Hunt. They had known each other for too long, he suggested, for their relationship to crumble over a fancied spat about a dead friend. In a final act of generosity, Byron provided Hunt with funds to move his family to Florence, where they could enjoy the friendship and support of a lively English expatriate community.

Byron left Genoa first, on 13 July. He was accompanied by Trelawny, who sailed as factotum and self-appointed stage manager of Byron’s Greek adventure.  Mary’s departure was fixed for 25 July and a
vetturino
(rather than a comfortable post-chaise, as Byron had intended) was engaged to take her as far as Lyon. She was sorry to leave the Hunts, particularly since, she told Jane, ‘Hunt’s kindness is now as active & warm as it was dormant before.’
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She half-wished she could give up her journey to England and settle with the Hunts in Florence, thus remaining cushioned from the reality of a future without Shelley. But she knew that to do so was an unrealistic dream. Both she and Hunt had to find ways of starting their lives again, of facing the reality of the present. Five years earlier Mary had arrived in Italy accompanied by Shelley, Claire, William, Clara, Allegra and two servants.  When she left Genoa to return to England, with only three year old Percy for company, she was still six weeks short of her twenty-sixth birthday.

10

The Present

Mary’s journey across Europe was not easy, but she was glad to be travelling again.  From Genoa she made her way north to Asti, where she started an affectionate journal letter to the Hunts, and then to Turin, where she and Percy spent their second night on the road. They passed through ‘pretty scenery’ and Percy behaved immaculately.  Nevertheless by the time they arrived in Turin they were tired and Mary was moved to bless ‘the man who first invented baths’. She was determined to be cheerful even though, as she told the Hunts, ‘tomorrow . . . is the anniversary when nine years ago I quitted England with Shelley.’ ‘Never mind’, she continued briskly. ‘Sufferance is the badge of all our tribe – I will make an order of the badge & so it may feel lighter.’
¹

The following day, she and Percy travelled onwards to Susa, on a road which took them through the Alps. Now she was among the mountains Shelley had loved, it was harder to avoid melancholic thoughts of the past. They arrived in Lyon on 2 August, nine days after leaving Genoa. Once again, Mary found herself passing under the shadow of Mont Blanc, and she wrote wistfully to Hunt that the mountain was ‘associated to me with many delightful hours’.
²
Memories of those delightful hours underlined how much her life had changed, and made her feel much older than her twenty-five years and certainly much older than thirty-five-year-old Marianne. Percy, meanwhile, missed the Hunt children, and babbled to his mother about sending Marianne’s babies toys and kisses.

Ten days later they arrived in Paris. There they were visited by Horace Smith, who was taken aback by how tired Mary looked and swept her and Percy off to Versailles, where he had settled with his family. It was, Mary told Hunt, a pleasure to be among friends again, and to let someone else make the arrangements for their travel. She spent three days at Versailles, catching up on gossip about Hazlitt, the Lambs, Wordsworth and Coleridge, and rebuilding her strength for the rest of her journey.

On 25 August, a month after their departure from Genoa, the boat carrying Mary and Percy crossed the Channel and docked in the Thames. The crossing was easy, no one was seasick, and Percy rampaged about the deck in ‘high glee’. The boat was met by Godwin and Mary’s younger half-brother William, and any awkwardness which might have been felt after a separation of five years was swept away by Percy, who enchanted his serious grandfather by chattering enthusiastically in his own peculiar mix of Italian and English. Mary and her stepmother also had a reasonably civil reunion. She was resolved, she told Hunt, ‘not to think of certain things, to take all as a matter of course and thus . . . to keep myself out of the gulph of melancholy, on the edge of which I was & am continually peeping.’
³

In the weeks and months which followed her return to England, Mary would battle hard to keep away from the inviting edge of the ‘gulph of melancholy’.  Leaving Italy marked the beginning of a new life for her and Percy, one which she was determined they would survive. Stripped of the protection of Shelley’s aristocratic mantle, she could not allow herself to fall into the lethargic depression that claimed her after the deaths of Clara, William and Shelley himself. Lodgings had to be found; money had to be made. She embarked on a long-running dispute with Shelley’s father about an allowance, and, aided by Godwin and Peacock, eventually managed to persuade him to loan her £200 a year, to be paid back to the Shelley estate on Sir Timothy’s death. This was Mary’s first experience of financial negotiation, and it gave her confidence in her ability to live independently. With no husband to protect her, she had to learn quickly how to deal with solicitors and publishers. Godwin helped her as much as he could, but it was nevertheless her own resilience which enabled her to negotiate a new life as a single woman. She rediscovered some of the stubborn self-belief which had led her, at the tender age of sixteen, to declare her love for Shelley, as she embarked on a battle for her professional, emotional and physical survival. Mary understood that these three kinds of survival were intimately linked. She had to earn enough money to supplement her allowance so that she could put a roof over her head, feed and clothe herself and Percy, and pay the servant girl whose presence would allow her to concentrate on writing. Her letters indicate that she also knew that she stood a better chance of escaping depression if she was busy, and could see her work received with some degree of success.