TITLE: Mary Shelley (Biography)
AUTHOR: Miranda Seymour
PUBLISHER: Picador, Pan Macmillan (November 2001)
Reviewed by Ann Skea (http://ann.skea.com)
If Mary Shelley were alive today she would be a
"Famous Author". Publishers would be fighting over the rights to all
her work, she would travel the world on endless
promotion tours and become rich on film rights. As a single mother she would be
applauded; the hint of scandal in her private life could only enhance her
reputation; and any connection to famously intellectual, philosophical and
socially radical parents would probably be hushed up so as not to frighten off
the masses.
Instead of this, in Mary Shelley's own lifetime and
for years afterwards the opposite was true. So now, although everyone has heard
of Frankenstein (generally believed to be the monster), not many could tell you
the name of the author of the book from which he came and very few would be
aware of that author's many other published works. As well as her novels - Frankenstein:
or the Modern Prometheus, Matilda, Valpergo,
The Last Man, The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, Ladore
and Falkner - Mary Shelley published two plays, many stories for children
and adults, travel writing, biographical essays of famous Europeans and
numerous articles. She also edited and annotated several editions of her
husband's poetry and prose. Her husband was, of course, Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Not all of Mary Shelley's work, as Miranda Seymour
notes in this excellent biography, was great work. Much of it was mundane
hack-work which Mary undertook in order to support herself, her surviving son
(Percy Florence Shelley), her father and step-mother and various other relatives
who made claims on her. Throughout her life, Mary worked incredibly hard but
only Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, published in 1817 when she
was only nineteen, was truly successful. Even this book was originally
published anonymously and she made little money from it and none at all from
the successful dramatization of it by Richard Brinsley
Peake which appeared on stage in 1823.
So, if Mary Shelley's later work was less brilliant
than Frankenstein, why do we need a biography? Is it because of her
marriage to Percy Bysshe Shelley, her friendship with
Lord Byron and her allegedly scandalous life? Is it because at sixteen, along
with her fifteen-year-old step-sister Claire Clairmont,
she ran away from home to live with a married poet whose pregnant wife later
drowned herself in the Serpentine in Hyde Park?
Miranda Seymour tells us frankly that her reasons for
writing this biography began with the woman and with questions which her own
life experiences raised about the usual picture of Mary Shelley. How, she
wondered, could a young woman described as bad-tempered, a relentless social
climber and a nagging wife also be someone whose hard work, courage and
determination supported herself and her family and who was responsible for
establishing her dead husband's reputation as a poet. Mary was a woman whose
intense loyalty to her friends survived their betrayal of her; a woman whose
idealistic disregard of social conventions only made her own life harder.
Consider, too, Mary's parentage (she was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft,
whose Vindication of the Rights of Women was published in1792, and
William Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning the Nature of Political Justice
was one of the most influential arguments for a society of equals of his time);
she lived at a time when Europe was in revolutionary turmoil; she travelled
widely and chose to live in Europe until forced to return to England; and she
mixed with people like Coleridge, Byron, Scott, Trelawney, Disraeli, Lady Blessington and Caroline Norton. Seymour's curiosity was
piqued. The usual picture of Mary just did not seem right.
Clearly, this biography has been a quest for answers
to some of the puzzles and contradictions which prompted Seymour to begin it.
Equally clearly it has been a labour of love. Diligently
and meticulously researched as it is, it is still absorbing and very
easy-to-read. And the portrait of Mary Shelley which it reveals is of "a
woman who struggled all her life against the unpredictability of her own
nature"; a woman who was clever, idealistic, and often misguided in her
choice of friends; a woman who was distraught by the deaths of all but one of
her children and who suffered from bouts of clinical depression, yet
"seldom revealed her unhappiness and continued, until the end of her life,
to work to win Shelley, never herself, the honour she
felt was his due". A remarkable woman.
There is no doubt, given Seymour's summary of the
various ways in which Mary's life was presented to the world after her death,
that some rebalancing was due. There is no doubt, too, that it is good to place
Mary in the context of the changing times in which she lived and that her
strong, independent views on society and politics strongly influenced her life
and were reflected in her work. But whether Seymour's understanding and her
generous conclusions about Mary will be the final picture is doubtful - there
will always be another possible side to the story.
Biography is immensely popular with readers but it is
well to remember that it is, as the differences of opinion
amongst Mary Shelley's biographers demonstrates, a subjective art. At
worst, it panders to prurient interest in the private lives of others. At best,
it is reliant on limited factual evidence about its subject, on the subjective
comment of friends and relatives, and on the biographer's own selective
interpretation and presentation of the available material.
Miranda Seymour's biography of Mary Shelley is of the
latter kind, and it is as objective and factual as it is possible to be without
becoming dry and boring. Seymour wrote it with the general reader in mind and
it is enjoyable, varied and easy reading.
Scholars, too, will find Seymour's discussion of
Mary's work and some new suggestions of Mary's sources for Frankenstein
of interest, and her Bibliography and Notes valuable. The Notes, however, are
frustratingly organized by chapter only, without the added assistance of page
numbers; and the Index is badly arranged with long, compressed chronological
(rather than alphabetical) lists of sub-topics under, for example, major
headings like "Frankenstein" or "Mary Shelley". It is a
pity that such irritations should mar a well-researched and well-written book.
© Ann Skea 2001. For permission to quote any part of this document contact Dr Ann Skea at ann@skea.com
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