Good as her Word: Selected Journalism. Lorna Sage

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      Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley JANE DUNN

      JANE DUNN’S TITLE SETS out the glaring problem for Mary Shelley’s biographers: that she exists more as the child of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, and as Shelley’s satellite, than as her own focus of interest. For much of her life she was, even to herself, a lesser light, so that although we know a lot about her, the information hasn’t ever quite added up.

      Her other relationships, too, were oblique, filtered through Shelley: (Byron, Hogg, Claire Clairmont, Jane Williams); and after his death the pattern if anything intensified: with her fantasy-relation to Washington Irving and her indiscreet letters to the blackmailing Gatteschi look very like sad attempts to re-create scenes from the drama of her marriage. She was, as Jane Dunn says, intensely lonely for most of her 53 years, precisely because of her talent for intimacy.

      She had of course, other talents: ‘my dreams,’ she wrote in her introduction to Frankenstein, ‘were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed – my dearest pleasure when free.’ For once (or almost twice, if you count The Last Man, the only other of her novels with something of this force) she contrived to build the contradictions of her experience – her agonies about parenthood as child and mother (or indeed, both simultaneously), the depressing human debris that surrounded her passionate marriage – into a fantasy that would dominate other people’s imaginations.

      Frankenstein toiling away in his charnel-house laboratory (‘my workshop of filthy creation’) grew out of what was for her a natural association of creativity with destruction. There were the circumstances of her own birth, which killed her mother; then her father’s chilly and increasingly groundless and absurd performance of the role of ‘great man’ (‘You have it in your power,’ he wrote once to a prospective second wife, ‘to give me new life … to raise me from the grave in which my heart is buried. You are invited to form the sole happiness of one of the best-known men of the age’). Her first assignations with Shelley took place round her mother’s grave in St Pancras churchyard; and the way he seems to have talked of rejecting his first wife, Harriet – ‘I felt as if a dead and living body had been linked together in loathsome and horrible communion’ – reveals a truly Frankensteinish capacity to switch from enthusiastic consciousness-raising to revulsion.

      By the time Mary finished the first draft of the book, Harriet’s suicide had lent a more literal horror to Shelley’s cruel metaphor (‘Poor Harriet,’ she wrote years later in her journal, ‘to whose sad fate I attribute so many of my own heavy sorrows, as the atonement claimed by fate for her death’). Her half-sister Fanny Imlay, Mary Wollstone-craft’s illegitimate daughter, put an apologetic end to her drab, unwanted existence with an overdose of laudanum, leaving nothing to identify her body but her mother’s initials on her stays. Further shades of the charnel-house were supplied by the death (the year before) of Mary’s first child: the way she talks about the book (‘my hideous progeny’ and so on) shows that she made that connection too.

      Her own life, for the moment, was going well (was, in other words, only routinely precarious, dogged with money worries, begging letters from Godwin, and Shelley’s relation to Claire) and that seems to have enabled her to create the elaborate mythic mix of loneliness, guilt and innocent outrage that makes the novel such a splendid focus for everyone’s nightmares.

      Usually, though, and almost always in the long years of her widowhood (she was 24 when Shelley died), her complex inner life was consigned to the amorphous, unhappy pages of her journal, where it came to nothing: ‘It has struck me what a very imperfect picture these querulous pages afford of me. This arises from their being a record of my feelings, and not of my imagination … my Kubla Khan, my pleasure grounds.’ She seems to have played her part courageously, but (as though the playing of it exhausted her, as well it might) she became more and more unable to imagine. Her losses and her memories isolated, as she said ‘islanded’, her, ‘sunk me in a state of loneliness no other human being ever before, I believe, endured except Robinson Crusoe.’

      There were compensations – her surviving son Percy Florence (reassuringly ordinary), her socialising: she was abused by Shelley’s friends for her lack of radical fire, but she could reassure herself that while she couldn’t deal with abstractions (except in symbols), she practised liberation (‘I have never written to vindicate the rights of women, I have ever befriended women when oppressed’).

      A very clever, perceptive woman. And yet still in eclipse. Jane Dunn retells the story fairly straightforwardly, but that’s not enough to rescue Mary Shelley from unreality. It was a mistake, too, to underplay the fiction and the intellectual issues (references to ‘Shelley and his philosophising, and his ideas’ just won’t do) as if they weren’t part of the life. All too often Jane Dunn gets stuck on the conventional surface of her narrative (Byron was ‘worldly, red-blooded and extravagant’, Paolo ‘a hard-working but amoral Italian’) when what’s needed is precisely the boldness and inventiveness to delve underneath and challenge that ready-made perspective; and I suspect that her assumptions are too common-sensical and un-literary for such a venture.