Notwithstanding the humorous elements in the connection of Lord Byron and Lady Caroline Lamb, the story is pathetic. His poetic personality attracted her as the light does the poor moth. Disraeli caricatured her in the character of Mrs. Felix Lorraine in Vivian Grey, and introduced her into Venetia under the title of Lady Monteagle, where he made much of her love for the poet Cadurcis, otherwise Lord Byron.
Lady Caroline Lamb wrote two other novels, but they are of no value. In her third, Ada Reis, considered her best, she introduced Bulwer as the good spirit.
The little poem written by Lady Caroline Lamb on the day fixed for her departure from Brocket Hall, after it had been decided that she was to live in retirement away from her husband and son, shows tenderness and poetic feeling:
They dance—they sing—they bless the day,
I weep the while—and well I may:
Husband, nor child, to greet me come,
Without a friend—without a home:
I sit beneath my favourite tree,
Sing then, my little birds, to me,
In music, love, and liberty.
At the time that the British public was smiling graciously, even if a little humorously, upon Lady Caroline Lamb, and was lionising Lord Byron, it spurned from its presence with the greatest disdain Percy and Mary Shelley. Even after the death of Shelley, when Mary returned to London with herself and son to support, it received her as the prodigal daughter for whom the crumbs from the rich man's table must suffice.
Mary Shelley had inherited from her mother the world's frown. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin had been, the greater part of her life, at variance with society. She was the author, as has been said, of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and had for a long time been an opponent of marriage, chiefly because the civil laws pertaining to it deprived both husband and wife of their proper liberty. Her bitter experience with Imlay had, however, so modified her views on this latter subject that she became the wife of William Godwin a short time before the birth of their daughter Mary, who in after years became Mrs. Shelley. Although her mother died at her birth, Mary Godwin was deeply imbued with her theories of life. She had read her books, and had often heard her father express the same views concerning the bondage of marriage and its uselessness. Her elopement with Shelley while his wife Harriet was still living gains a certain sanction from the fact that she plighted her troth to him at her mother's grave. After the sad death of Harriet, however, Shelley and Mary Godwin conceded to the world's opinion, and were legally married. But the anger of society was not appeased, and, even after both had become famous, it continued to ignore the poet Shelley and his gifted wife.
At the age of nineteen Mrs. Shelley was led to write her first novel. Mr. and Mrs. Shelley and Byron were spending the summer of 1816 in the mountains of Switzerland. Continuous rain kept them in-doors, where they passed the time in reading ghost stories. At the suggestion of Byron, each one agreed to write a blood-curdling tale. It is one of the strange freaks of invention that this young girl succeeded where Shelley and Byron failed. Byron wrote a fragment of a story which was printed with Mazeppa. Shelley also began a story, but when he had reduced his characters to a most pitiable condition, he wearied of them and could devise no way to bring the tale to a fitting conclusion. After listening to a conversation between the two poets upon the possibilities of science discovering the secrets of life, the story known as Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus shaped itself in Mary's mind.
Frankenstein is one of those novels that defy the critic. Everyone recognises that the letters written by Captain Walton to his sister in which he tells of his meeting with Frankenstein, and repeats to her the story he has just heard from his guest, makes an awkward introduction to the real narrative. Yet all this part about Captain Walton and his crew was added at the suggestion of Shelley after the rest of the story had been written. But the narrative of Frankenstein is so powerful, so real, that, once read, it can never be forgotten. Mrs. Shelley wrote in the introduction of the edition of 1839 that, before writing it, she was trying to think of a story, "one that would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood and quicken the beatings of the heart." That she has done this the experience of every reader will prove.
But the story has a greater hold on the imagination than this alone would give it. The monster created by Frankenstein is closely related to our own human nature. "My heart was fashioned to be susceptible of love and sympathy," he says, "and, when wrenched by misery to vice and hatred, it did not endure the violence of the change without torture, such as you cannot even imagine." There is a wonderful blending of good and evil in this demon, and, while the magnitude of his crimes makes us shudder, his wrongs and his loneliness awaken our pity. "The fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am quite alone," the monster complains to his creator. Who can forget the scene where he watches Frankenstein at work making for him the companion that he had promised? Perhaps sadder than the story of the monster is that of Frankenstein, who, led by a desire to widen human knowledge, finds that the fulfilment of his lofty ambition has brought only a curse to mankind.
In 1823, Mary Shelley published a second novel, Valperga, so named from a castle and small independent territory near Lucca. Castruccio Castracani, whose life Machiavelli has told, is the hero of the story. The greatest soldier and satirist of his times, the man of the novel is considered inferior to the man of history. Mrs. Shelley had read broadly before beginning the book, and she has described minutely the customs of the age about which she is writing. Shelley pronounced it "a living and moving picture of an age almost forgotten."