The volume of Lardner’s Cyclopædia, with my Lives, was published on the first of this month; it is called Lives of Eminent Literary Men, vol. i. The lives of Dante and Ariosto are by Mr. Montgomery, the rest are mine.
Do write, my dearest Maria, and believe me ever and ever, affectionately yours,
M. W. Shelley.
Lodore, Mrs. Shelley’s fifth novel, came out in 1835. It differs from the others in being a novel of society, and has been stigmatised, rather unjustly, as weak and colourless, although at the time of its publication it had a great success. It is written in a style which is now out of date, and undoubtedly fails to fulfil the promise of power held out by Frankenstein and to some extent by Valperga, but it bears on every page the impress of the refinement and sensibility of the author, and has, moreover, a special interest of its own, due to the fact that some of the incidents are taken from actual occurrences in her early life, and some of the characters sketched from people she had known.
Thus, in the description of Clorinda, it is impossible not to recognise Emilia Viviani. The whole episode of Edward Villier’s arrest and imprisonment for debt, and his young wife’s anxieties, is an echo of her own experience at the time when Shelley was hiding from the bailiffs and meeting her by stealth in St. Paul’s or Holborn. Lodore himself has some affinity to Byron, and possibly the account of his separation from his wife and of their daughter’s girlhood is a fanciful train of thought suggested by Byron’s domestic history. Most of Mary’s novels present the contrast of the Shelleyan and Byronic types. In this instance the latter was recognised by Clare, and drew from her one of those bitter tirades against Byron, which, natural enough in her at the outset, became in the course of years quite morbidly venomous. Not content with laying Allegra’s death to his charge, she, in her later letters, accuses him of treacherously plotting and conspiring, out of hatred to herself, to do away with the child, an allegation unjust and false. In the present instance, however, she only entered an excited protest against his continual reappearance as the hero of a novel.
Mrs. Hare admired Lodore amazingly; so do I, or should I, if it were not for that modification of the beastly character of Lord Byron of which you have composed Lodore. I stick to Frankenstein, merely because that vile spirit does not haunt its pages as it does in all your other novels, now as Castruccio, now as Raymond,[15] now as Lodore. Good God! to think a person of your genius, whose moral tact ought to be proportionately exalted, should think it a task befitting its powers to gild and embellish and pass off as beautiful what was the merest compound of vanity, folly, and every miserable weakness that ever met together in one human being! As I do not want to be severe on the poor man, because he is dead and cannot defend himself, I have only taken the lighter defects of his character, or else I might say that never was a nature more profoundly corrupted than his became, or was more radically vulgar than his was from the very outset. Never was there an individual less adapted, except perhaps Alcibiades, for being held up as anything but an object of commiseration, or as an example of how contemptible is even intellectual greatness when not joined with moral greatness. I shall be anxious to see if the hero of your new novel will be another beautified Byron. Thank heaven! you have not taken to drawing your women upon the same model. Cornelia I like the least of them; she is the most like him, because she is so heartlessly proud and selfish, but all the others are angels of light.
Euthanasia[16] is Shelley in female attire, and what a glorious being she is! No author, much less the ones—French, English, or German—of our day, can bring a woman that matches her. Shakespeare has not a specimen so perfect of what a woman ought to be; his, for amiability, deep feeling, wit, are as high as possible, but they want her commanding wisdom, her profound benevolence.
I am glad to hear you are writing again; I am always in a fright lest you should take it into your head to do what the warriors do after they have acquired great fame,—retire and rest upon your laurels. That would be very comfortable for you, but very vexing to me, who am always wanting to see women distinguishing themselves in literature, and who believe there has not been or ever will be one so calculated as yourself to raise our sex upon that point. If you would but know your own value and exert your powers you could give the men a most immense drubbing! You could write upon metaphysics, politics, jurisprudence, astronomy, mathematics—all those highest subjects which they taunt us with being incapable of treating, and surpass them; and what a consolation it would be, when they begin some of their prosy, lying, but plausible attacks upon female inferiority, to stop their mouths in a moment with your name, and then to add, “and if women, whilst suffering the heaviest slavery, could out-do you, what would they not achieve were they free?”
With this manifesto on the subject of women’s genius in general and of Mary’s in particular—perhaps just redeemed by its tinge of irony from the last degree of absurdity—it is curious to contrast Mrs. Shelley’s own conclusions, drawn from weary personal experience, and expressed, towards the end of the following letter, in a mood which permitted her no illusions and few hopes.
Mrs. Shelley to Mrs. Gisborne.