As soon as they had gone, the Shelleys and Clare left Milan; and travelling leisurely through Parma, Modena, Bologna, and Pisa (where a letter from Elise reached them), they arrived on the 9th of May at Leghorn. Here they made the acquaintance of Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne. The lady, formerly Mrs. Reveley, had been an intimate friend of Mary Wollstonecraft’s (when Mary Godwin), and had been so warmly admired by Godwin before his first marriage as to arouse some jealousy in Mr. Reveley. Indeed, his admiration had been returned by so warm a feeling of friendship on her part that Godwin was frankly surprised when on his pressing her, shortly after her widowhood, to become his second wife, she refused him point blank, nor, by all his eloquence, was to be persuaded to change her mind. A beautiful girl, and highly accomplished, she had married very young, and had one son of her first marriage, Henry Reveley, a young civil engineer, who was now living in Italy with her and her second husband.
This Mr. Gisborne struck Mary as being the reverse of intelligent, and is described in Shelley’s letters in most uncomplimentary terms. His appearance cannot certainly have been in his favour, but that there must have been more in him than met the eye seems also beyond a doubt, as, at a later time, Shelley addressed to him some of his most interesting and most intimate letters.
To Mrs. Gisborne they bore a letter of introduction from Godwin, and it was not long before her acquaintance with Mrs. Shelley ripened into friendship. “Reserved, yet with easy manners;” so Mary described her at their first meeting. On the next day the two had a long conversation about Mary’s father and mother. Of her mother, indeed, Mary learned more from Mrs. Gisborne than from any one else. She wrote her father an immediate account of these first interviews, and his answer is unusually demonstrative in expression.
I received last Friday a delightful letter from you. I was extremely gratified by your account of Mrs. Gisborne. I have not seen her, I believe, these twenty years; I think not since she was Mrs. Gisborne; and yet by your description she is still a delightful woman. How inexpressibly pleasing it is to call back the recollection of years long past, and especially when the recollection belongs to a person in whom one deeply interested oneself, as I did in Mrs. Reveley. I can hardly hope for so great a pleasure as it would be to me to see her again.
At the Bagni di Lucca, where they settled themselves for a time, Mary heard from her father of the review of Frankenstein in the Quarterly. Peacock had reported it to be unfavourable, so it was probably a relief to find that the reviewers “did not pretend to find anything blasphemous in the story.”
They say that the gentleman who has written the book is a man of talents, but that he employs his powers in a way disagreeable to them.
All this, however, tended to keep Mary’s old ardour alive. She never was more strongly impelled to write than at this time; she felt her powers fresh and strong within her; all she wanted was some motive, some suggestion to guide her in the choice of a subject. While at Leghorn Shelley had come upon a manuscript account, which Mary transcribed, of that terrible story of the Cenci afterwards dramatised by himself. His first idea was that Mary should take it for the subject of a play. He was convinced that she had dramatic talent as a writer, and that he had none; two erroneous conclusions, as the sequel showed. But such an assurance from such a source could not but be flattering to Mary’s ambition, and stimulating to her innate love of literary work. During all the early part of their time in Italy their thoughts were busy with some subject for Mary’s tragedy. One proposed and strongly urged by Shelley was Charles the First. It was partially carried out by himself before his death, and perhaps occurred to him now in connection with a suggestion of Godwin’s for a book very different in scope and character, and far better suited to Mary’s genius than the drama. It would have been a series of Lives of the Commonwealth’s Men; “our calumniated Republicans,” as Shelley calls them.
She was immensely attracted by the idea, but was forced to abandon it at the time, for lack of the necessary books of reference. But Shelley, who believed her powers to be of the highest order, was as eager as she herself could be for her to undertake original work of some kind, and was constantly inciting her to effort in this direction.
More than two months were spent at the Bagni di Lucca—reading, writing, riding, and enjoying to the full the balmy Italian skies. Shelley, in whom the creative mood was more or less dormant, and who “despaired of providing anything original,” translated the Symposium of Plato, partly as an exercise, partly to “give Mary some idea of the manners and feelings of the Athenians, so different on many subjects from that of any other community that ever existed.” Together they studied Italian, and Shelley reported Mary’s progress to her father.
Mary has just finished Ariosto with me, and indeed has attained a very competent knowledge of Italian. She is now reading Livy.