Abstract
The act of writing letters, rehearsing scenes that precede a calamitous event, can in itself become a form of valuable catharsis. This essay explores the ways in which Mary Shelley’s correspondence rehearses the scenes of her tragic circumstances as much to herself as to her addressee, and investigates how letters became to her a way in which she tested the contours of her grief, replaying the scenes and spaces that came before and after the death of Percy Shelley. Always intrigued by the forms and shortcomings of correspondence, Mary Shelley tested her views on letter-writing both in her frequent correspondence and in her fiction. Her letters and literature, I argue, work in close symbiosis, illustrating everywhere how they inform and converse with each other, from Frankenstein (1818) through to the grief-laden The Last Man (1826) and beyond.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ‘To Maria Gisborne, Pisa August 15th 1822’, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett, 3 vols (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), I, pp. 244–51, p. 247.
- 2.
William Godwin, Things as They Are; or the Adventures of Caleb Williams (London: Crosby, 1794), I, p. 2.
- 3.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ‘To Shelley’, [5 Church Terrace, Pancras, 3 November 1814] in Letters I, pp. 4–5, p. 4.
- 4.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ‘To Maria Gisborne’, [Casa Magni, presso a Lerici June 2nd 1822] in Letters I, pp. 234–37, pp. 234–35.
- 5.
Mary A. Favret, Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 176.
- 6.
Favret , p. 176. Favret proceeds to argue that: ‘At the same time, this novel performs what the now stagnant epistolary form once promised. Frankenstein invites us to maintain correspondence even as it forces us to accept deformity, to dismiss authority and to listen to the voices of destruction. Ultimately it asks us to understand what Mikhail Bakhtin has called the “dialogic discourse of the novel”’.
- 7.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818 ed.), eds. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2000), pp. 49–50.
- 8.
Frankenstein, p. 53, p. 56.
- 9.
Betty T. Bennett, ‘Introduction’ to Letters, Vol. I, p. xv.
- 10.
Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (London: Routledge, 1988), pp. 52–69.
- 11.
Frankenstein, p. 231.
- 12.
Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822, in Letters I, pp. 244–51, p. 247.
- 13.
Byron, as quoted in Lady Blessington’s Conversations with Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 53. cit. Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), p. 259.
- 14.
Sunstein, p. 223.
- 15.
Mary Shelley to Thomas Medwin, Albaro, [Pisa] July 29th 1822 in Letters I, p. 242.
- 16.
Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822, in Letters I, pp. 244–51, p. 244.
- 17.
Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822 in Letters, ibid.
- 18.
Charlotte Gordon, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 437.
- 19.
Of her instinctual dislike for Casa Magni, Mary goes on to observe that ‘My ill health might account for much of this—bathing in the sea somewhat relieved me—but on the 8th June (I think it was) I was threatened with a miscarriage, & after a week of great ill health on Sunday the 16th this took place at eight in the morning’. Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822, in Letters I, pp. 244–51, p. 244. Shelley’s quick thinking in attempting to prevent Mary from bleeding to death after this miscarriage by placing her in a bath of ice is well documented.
- 20.
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 17.
- 21.
Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822 in Letters, I, p. 244.
- 22.
Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822 in Letters, I, p. 244.
- 23.
Gordon, p. 432.
- 24.
Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, August 15th 1822 in Letters, I, p. 250.
- 25.
Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, c.27th August 1822 in Letters, I, p. 252.
- 26.
Mary Shelley, ‘On Ghosts’, London Magazine 9 (March 1824), pp. 253–56. Repr, in The Mary Shelley Reader, ed. Betty T. Bennett and Charles E. Robinson (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 334–40, p. 334.
- 27.
‘On Ghosts’, p. 335.
- 28.
‘On Ghosts’, pp. 335–36.
- 29.
Mary Shelley, ‘Giovanni Villani’, The Liberal, No. 4 (1823), pp. 281–97. Excerpt reprinted in The Mary Shelley Reader, pp. 329–33, p. 330.
- 30.
‘On Ghosts’, p. 336.
- 31.
In relation to this passage of ‘On Ghosts’, Stephen Hebron and Elizabeth Denlinger, who curated the superb exhibition ‘Shelley’s Ghost’, reflect in the accompanying book that ‘It is too much to say that Mary ever looked for, let alone saw, Shelley’s ghost, but his death created a sudden void. She and her infant son were in Italy and facing an uncertain future, and images of Shelley that were almost palpable in their intensity and immediacy rushed in to fill the empty space’. Shelley’s Ghost (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2010), p. 98.
- 32.
Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, Pisa, c.27th August 1822 in Letters, I, p. 252.
- 33.
Journal entry May 24th, 1824 in The Journals of Mary Shelley, eds. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), II, pp. 476–77.
- 34.
‘Introduction’ to The Last Man, ed. Anne McWhir (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1996), p. 5.
- 35.
Introduction, p. 5.
- 36.
The Last Man, p. 285.
- 37.
‘The Choice’, Abinger Dep.d.311/4, l.118.
- 38.
The Last Man, p. 348.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wright, A. (2020). ‘The house of misery’: Space and Memory in the Later Correspondence and Literature of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. In: Callaghan, M., Howe, A. (eds) Romanticism and the Letter. Palgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29310-9_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-29309-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-29310-9
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)