Aiming to revive “unjustly neglected and little known works” of great authors, Hesperus has gathered for the first time five of Mary Shelley’s short stories published between 1829 and 1837. As Kamila Shamsie notes in her affectionate foreword, the tragic details of Shelley’s life are never far from her work, and this collection is held together with the theme of loss.
Mary Shelley suffered the death of her two eldest children, followed by the loss of her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley. From anyone else, such descriptions of grief and pain as: “My brain and heart seemed on fire, whilst my blood froze in my veins” would seem melodramatic. Here, they are weighted by experience.
But it is to the father-daughter relationship that Shelley returns time and again. She described her attachment to her father William Godwin as “excessive and romantic”, a bond fired by the death of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft days after her birth. All but one of these stories centre on a woman torn between father and lover, a position Shelley found herself in when Godwin was outraged at her attachment to his protege. This terrible choice is most dramatically played out in The Dream, in which Constance de Villeneuve seeks St Catherine’s counsel on whether to embrace the lover who fought against her dead father.
Shelley might be best known for her visionary Frankenstein, but this collection is no less powerful, marrying thought-provoking storytelling with a fascinating glimpses into the mind of a woman whose life was uncommonly marked by grief.
This piece first appeared in The Observer Review.
Katie Toms 