Poor dear little Zella. I hope she is well and happy.... Thank you for your offer about money. I have plenty at present, and hope to do well hereafter. You are very thoughtful, which is a great virtue. I have not heard from your mother or Charlotte since you left; a day or two afterwards I saw Betsy Freeman; she was to go to her place the next day. I paid her for her work; she looked so radiantly happy that you would have thought she was going to be married rather than to a place of hardship. I never saw any one look so happy. I told her to let me know how she got on, and to apply to me if she wanted assistance.... I am glad you are amused at your brother’s. I really imagined that Fanny Butler had been the attraction, till, sending to the Gloucester, I found you were gone by the Southampton coach, and then I suspected another magnet—till I find that you are in all peace, or rather war, at Sherfield House—much better so.
I am better a great deal; quite well, I believe I ought to call myself, only I feel a little odd at times. I have seen nothing of the S.’s. I have met with scarce an acquaintance here, which is odd; but then I do not look for them. I am too lazy. I hope this letter will catch you before you leave your present perch.—Believe me always, yours truly,
M. W. Shelley.
Will this be a happy New Year? Tell me; the last I can’t say much for, but I always fear worse to come. Nobody’s mare is dead,—if this frost does not kill,—my own (such as it will be) is far enough off still.
The next letter is dated only three weeks later. What happened in that short time to account for its complete change of tone does not appear, except that from one allusion it may be inferred that Mrs. Shelley was overtaken by unexpected money difficulties at a moment when she had fancied herself tolerably at ease on that score. Nothing more likely, for in the matter of helping others she never learnt prudence or the art of self-defence.[18] Probably, however, there was a deeper cause for her sombre mood. She was being pressed on all sides to write the biography of her father. The task would have been well suited to her powers; she looked on it, moreover, in the light of a duty which she wished and intended to perform. Fragments and sketches of hers for this book have been published, and are among the best specimens of her writing. But circumstances—scruples—similar to those which had hindered her from writing Shelley’s life stood between her and the present fulfilment of the task. There were few people to whom she could bring herself to explain her reasons, and those few need not have required, still less insisted on any such explanation. But Trelawny, hot and vehement, could and would not see why Mary did not rush into the field at once, to immortalise the man whose system of philosophy, more than any other writer’s, had moulded Shelley’s. He never spared words, and he probably taxed her with cowardice or indolence, time-serving and “worldliness.”
Shaken by her father’s loss, and saddened by that of her friends, Mr. and Mrs. Gisborne, who had died within a short time of each other shortly before this, exhausted by work, her feelings warped by solitude, struggle, and disappointment, this challenge to explain her conduct evoked the most mournful of all her letters, as explicit as any one could wish; true in its bitterness, and most bitter in its truth.
Mrs. Shelley To Trelawny.
Brighton, Thursday, 27th January 1837.
Dear Trelawny—I am very glad to hear that you are amused and happy; fate seems to have turned her sunny side to you, and I hope you will long enjoy yourself. I know of but one pleasure in the world—sympathy with another, or others, rather; leaving out of the question the affections, the society of agreeable, gifted, congenial-minded beings is the only pleasure worth having in the world. My fate has debarred me from this enjoyment, but you seem in the midst of it.
With regard to my Father’s life I certainly could not answer it to my conscience to give it up. I shall therefore do it, but I must wait. This year I have to fight my poor Percy’s battle, to try and get him sent to College without further dilapidation of his ruined prospects, and he has now to enter life at College. That this should be undertaken at a moment when a cry was raised against his mother, and that not on the question of politics but religion, would mar all. I must see him fairly launched before I commit myself to the fury of the waves.