Description
Tales and Stories by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
249 pages
IT is customary to regard Mary Shelley’s claims to literary distinction as so entirely rooted
and grounded in her husband’s as to constitute a merely parasitic growth upon his fame. It
may be unreservedly admitted that her association with Shelley, and her care of his
writings and memory after his death, are the strongest of her titles to remembrance. It is
further undeniable that the most original of her works is also that which betrays the
strongest traces of his influence. Frankenstein was written when her brain, magnetized by
his companionship, was capable of an effort never to be repeated. But if the frame of mind
which engendered and sustained the work was created by Shelley, the conception was not
his, and the diction is dissimilar to his. Both derive from Godwin, but neither is Godwin’s.
The same observation, except for an occasional phrase caught from Shelley, applies to all
her subsequent work. The frequent exaltation of spirit, the ideality and romance, may well
have been Shelley’s—the general style of execution neither repeats nor resembles him.
Mary Shelley’s voice, then, is not to die away as a mere echo of her illustrious husband’s.
She has the prima facie claim to a hearing due to every writer who can assert the
possession of a distinctive individuality; and if originality be once conceded to
Frankenstein, as in all equity it must, none will dispute the validity of a title to fame
grounded on such a work. It has solved the question itself—it is famous. It is full of faults
venial in an author of nineteen; but, apart from the wild grandeur of the conception, it has
that which even the maturity of mere talent never attains—the insight of genius which
looks below the appearances of things, and perhaps even reverses its own first conception
by the discovery of some underlying truth. Mary Shelley’s original intention was probably
that which would alone have occurred to most writers in her place. She meant to paint
Frankenstein’s monstrous creation as an object of unmitigated horror. The perception that
he was an object of intense compassion as well imparted a moral value to what otherwise
would have remained a daring flight of imagination. It has done more: it has helped to
create, if it did not itself beget, a type of personage unknown to ancient fiction. The
conception of a character at once justly execrable and truly pitiable is altogether modern.
Richard the Third and Caliban make some approach towards it; but the former is too self–
sufficing in his valour and his villainy to be deeply pitied, and the latter too senseless and
brutal. Victor Hugo has made himself the laureate of pathetic deformity, but much of his
work is a conscious or unconscious variation on the original theme of Frankenstein.
None of Mary Shelley’s subsequent romances approached Frankenstein in power and
popularity. The reason may be summed up in a word—Languor. After the death of her
infant son in 1819, she could never again command the energy which had carried her so
vigorously through Frankenstein. Except in one instance, her work did not really interest
her. Her heart is not in it. Valperga contains many passages of exquisite beauty; but it was,
as the authoress herself says, “a child of mighty slow growth;” “laboriously dug,” Shelley
adds, “out of a hundred old chronicles,” and wants the fire of imagination which alone could
have interpenetrated the mass and fused its diverse ingredients into a satisfying whole. Of
the later novels, The Last Man excepted, it is needless to speak, save for the autobiographic
interest with which Professor Dowden’s fortunate discovery has informed the hitherto
slighted pages of Lodore. But The Last Man demands great attention, for it is not only a
work of far higher merit than commonly admitted, but of all her works the most
characteristic of the authoress, the most representative of Mary Shelley in the character of
pining widowhood which it was her destiny to support for the remainder of her life. It is an
idealized version of her sorrows and sufferings, made to contribute a note to the strain
which celebrates the final dissolution of the world.
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