Considerations XIX: 3
ter these terrible losses. In her depression following William’s death she withdrew from everyone, even her beloved Shelley, for long periods. But her worst loss was yet to come. She and Shelley were sharing Casa Magni, a large converted boathouse on the Gulf of Spezia with various friends in the summer of 1822. In the spring her half-sister Claire’s daughter Allegra by Byron, died of typhus in her convent school. On 16th June Mary miscarried at 3½ months and nearly bled to death. She, Shelley and their friend Jane Williams had bloody nightmares and frightening visions and premonitions that month. On 1st July Shelley left , Mary begging him not to go, to sail to Genoa with Edward Williams to meet other friends there. On the 19th July, their friend Trelawny told Mary and Jane that he had seen their husbands’ bodies washed up on the shore near via Reggio. They had apparently drowned in a storm on 8th July 8th. Over 15-16th August 1822, Trelawney, watched by friends Hunt and Byron, performed the grisly task of exhuming and cremating Shelley’s and Edward Williamson’s bodies on the beach where they had been washed ashore. Quarantine regulations prevented the bodies from being buried. In 1823, on 25th July, just before the ninth anniversary of her elopement with Shelley on 28th July 1814, Mary Shelley returned home to England with her half sister and her one surviving child. She was never to live abroad again. Since this case study concerns her life up until she wrote Frankenstein, I shall ignore the rest of her life. She died of a brain tumor at the age of 53 on 1st February 1851, attended by her devoted son Percy and his equally devoted wife Jane. Emily W. Sunstein’s conclusion to her book puts forward the essence of Mary Shelley’s life very clearly: Mary Shelley was an important Romantic who survived into the Victorian age. Her private life, career and works are a rich resource for that historical evolution, a broader mine than those of her great associates, Shelley and Byron, whom kind death saved from erosion. Far from being subjected to romantic turbulence, she chose it. Aspiration, enthusiasm, challenge, active mind and spirit, and optimism were among her cardinal qualities, contrary to the impression that she was temperamentally cool, quiet and pessimistic... her creative and scholarly works establish her as a major literary figure of the first half of the nineteenth century. She belongs among the great editors for her editions of Shelley’s works... Perhaps she will be best remembered for her perception in Frankenstein and The Last Man, that the Promethean drive is at the heart of human progress and yet a bringer of new ills if not focused on ethical means and ends; and even so, if Nature shrugs we perish. In that ambiguity she may be said to have heralded the consciousness that dis-
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