As I discussed in the first blog post in this series about Percy Bysshe Shelley, he told his cousin and Lord Byron that he'd been pursued by a beautiful lady. Here is a synopsis from an early biography:
"According to the account which Shelley gave to Byron and Medwin, he re-encountered in Naples the married lady who had proffered her love to him in 1816. She... informed him of the persistent though hopeless affection with which she had tracked his footsteps." -- A Memoir of Shelley, by William Michael Rossetti, (1886)

   Whether or not there really was a mysterious lady, there was a mysterious baby girl.
Something—nobody knows what exactly—happened in Naples in the winter of 1818 concerning Shelley and a baby girl. There is some question about how much of the whole story Mary Shelley ever knew, and she later suppressed the few details that were available.
   During the winter of 1818/19 Shelley was living in Naples with his wife (Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein,) his wife's step-sister Claire, who was possibly pregnant, and a pregnant nursemaid. By the time he left Naples in February, he had taken financial responsibility for a new-born baby girl. 
   Until 1936, Shelley scholars had no information about the identity and even the confirmed existence of the little girl that Shelley referred to in a few surviving letters as his 'Neapolitan ward.'
   Academics surmised that this ward was a foundling whom Shelley impulsively adopted to soothe this wife after the loss of their daughter Clara. Throughout his life, Shelley had strong impulses to “rescue” girls, so buying or otherwise obtaining an attractive Italian infant would not have been out of character for him. However, the baby Elena Adelaide did not become part of the family and was left behind in Naples, where she was evidently left with a working-class Neapolitan family.
   The child remained “a vague wraith” (in the words of scholar Richard D. Altick) until Shelley biographer Newman Ivey White and an Italian professor combed through the Neapolitan archives and found a birth certificate for Elena Adelaide, listing Percy Bysshe Shelley as the father, and the mother as one “Marina Padurin.” We'll return to that name Marina Padurin later. There was also a baptism certificate, again stating that Percy Shelley was the father and the mother was his wife, Mary Godwin (which was, of course, Mary's maiden name). Also, sadly, there is a death certificate, for Elena Adelaide, like three other children associated with this family, died very young in Italy.

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  Shelley registered the child's birth and baptism with the authorities, and he did so the night before he left Naples with Mary and Claire, leaving the baby behind.
   The parentage of Elena Adelaide is a mystery, and there are several theories, but wide agreement that Mary Shelley was not the mother of the child. She wasn't pregnant that winter. There is no record of her giving birth, and obviously, she wouldn't leave Naples and leave her new-born child behind to be raised by a foster family. So, if the documents claimed that Mary Shelley was the mother, the documents are false. It is possible that Mary Shelley didn't even know about these documents. However, Mary's journal records that she and Shelley had a "most tremendous fuss" when they left Naples. That was Mary's euphemism for a fight.
     So who were Elena Adelaide's parents. Was Shelley really the father? Who was the mother?  Was it Claire? Was it the nurse-maid Elise? Was it the mysterious lady? 
   Next blog post, we'll take a closer look at the birth certificate.
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Ne​xt: A falsified birth certificate


[1] page 104, Richard D. Altick, The Scholar Adventurers, Ohio State University Press, 1987.

After traipsing around Italy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and her step-sister Claire Clairmont rented a villa in the spa town of Bagni di Lucca in the summer of 1818. They lived there with their little son, baby daughter, and some servants. This was a very young household: Mary Shelley was 20, her husband a few years older.
   In mid-August, Shelley and Claire abruptly left for Venice. Claire was anxious to see her little daughter Allegra, the result of a brief and one-sided fling with Lord Byron.
​   Claire had unhappily and unwillingly given custody of the baby to Byron. She was essentially destitute, he was rich; she was obscure, he was famous, she trusted he could give the child a better life and she was grateful he acknowledged paternity. Mary Shelley generously gave up her children’s Swiss nurse-maid so Allegra could have a familiar face taking care of her when she was sent to a father she'd never known.
   Shelley biographers state that Claire insisted on going to Venice because the Shelleys had received alarming letters from the nurse-maid, advising them that Byron had casually handed off Allegra to the British consul-general and his wife, while he was busy debauching himself all over Venice.
   Once in Venice, Shelley wrote to Mary and asked her: "Well tell me, dearest Mary, are you very lonely?.... What acquaintances have you made?”  In fact, the Shelleys deliberately hung back from making new acquaintances. They held Italians in contempt and didn't think much better of their fellow English tourists. The feeling was mutual: because the Shelleys were non-conformists and Shelley was an avowed atheist, respectable people shunned them. The modern equivalent would be socialist vegans setting up a small commune in some middle-class community, with rumours going around that they practised free love.
   Did Shelley ask Mary about new acquaintances because he was worried she was lonely in his absence, or was he worried that she might meet someone he didn’t want her to meet?

   Three days later, Shelley wrote to Mary Shelley again and told her to leave Bagni di Lucca and come to him immediately because Byron offered to let them live in his country villa in Este, and he would permit Allegra to come visit with them there. Mary complied, even though their baby girl was ill.
   Picture a six days' journey in a carriage, with no air-conditioning, on rough roads, in Italy in August with a very sick baby.
   Some historians have explained that Shelley needed to get Mary to Este in a hurry because Claire was desperate to spend time with baby Allegra, but Byron wouldn't let the child visit with Claire unless Mary Shelley was also in residence. But while Mary was making her arduous and miserable journey, Shelley admitted to Byron that Mary was not with him, as he had implied, rendering that hasty and miserable journey unnecessary.
  It's odd, anyway, that Mary's presence was so crucial because Byron thought the Shelleys were abysmally poor parents who half-starved their children. Would a week or more have made such a difference? Why was Shelley so insistent on hurrying?
    Poor baby Clara contracted dysentery. She survived the six day trip to Este, but was very weak.
   A few weeks later Shelley left Mary behind again and went to Padua with Claire, ostensibly in search of a good doctor for her. He wrote to Mary and ordered her to bring the baby to Padua. Then they went on to Venice, to consult Lord Byron's doctor. The baby did not survive the trip. She died in her mother's arms.
   What accounts for Shelley's urgent insistence that Mary come from Bagni di Lucca  immediately, despite little Clara being ill?
   I provide a new answer in my forthcoming novel, A Different Kind of Woman.​
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Next:  Who was Elena Adelaide?

​My first in a series of posts about Percy Bysshe Shelley examined a curious story that Shelley told several of his intimate friends: he claimed a beautiful lady threw herself at him in London and followed him through Europe. Shelley biographers take the tale with a giant grain of salt, and I make use of it in my forthcoming novel, A Different Kind of Woman.
   According to Shelley, the mysterious lady was the pursuer, it was she who adored him. This notion of being the one pursued recurs in Shelley's retrospective descriptions of the important relationships in his life. 
    One undeniable fact about Shelley was that he had a tendency to fall violently, passionately in love, and to persuade himself that the object of his adoration was the sum total of human perfection. As Paul Johnson wrote in Intellectuals: “Shelley's love was deep, sincere, passionate, and indeed everlasting, but it was always changing its object.”
   He was very fond of his first wife, the tragic Harriet Westbrook. “My wife is the partner of my thoughts and feelings,” he wrote in a letter to his mentor, William Godwin. Then he fell for Godwin's daughter. After he left Harriet he blamed her older sister for pressuring him into marriage.  
   Shelley claimed that Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, then 16, practically gave herself to him in front of her mother's grave. (William Powell Frith's 1877 portrait shows a demure, Victorian-style Mary).
   On the other hand, Mary's step-mother said Shelley burst into the Godwin home on Skinner Street with a gun and a bottle of laudanum, threatening to kill himself.
​   I hypothesize, therefore, if there really was a mysterious lady, it might have been Shelley who became enamoured of her, not the other way around, and when he confessed the story to his friend Medwin, he shifted all responsibility for the affair from him to her, as was his pattern.

     Mary Shelley's biographer Florence A. Thomas Marshall notes when Shelley’s infatuations faded, his love often turned to “a violent revulsion, almost amounting to loathing,” of the adored one.
​   In an early example, he repeatedly urged Elizabeth Hitchener, an older schoolmistress whom he barely knew, to come live with him and Harriet. She gave up her school—and her respectability—to move in with them. A few months later, he kicked her out. Thus poor Hitchener went from being “his soul” to being “an ugly, hermaphroditical beast of a woman.”
   Shelley also saw himself as something of a knight-errant, rescuing damsels in distress. So of course Teresa (Emilia) Viviani, a beautiful Italian girl being held in a convent prior to her arranged marriage, was like catnip to him. He paid tribute to her in his poem Epipsychidion. After his ardour for her cooled, he wrote, “The Epipsychidion I cannot look at; the person whom it celebrates was a cloud instead of a Juno..."

   To the chagrin of both his wives, Shelley continued his pattern of falling in love with other women after marriage. He couldn't or wouldn't comprehend why they might resent it.
​   The attitude of some of Shelley’s earlier biographers also makes for an interesting study. In 1951, Frederick L. Jones took quite a benign view of asking Mary to be a captive witness while her husband indulged his infatuation with their house guest Jane Williams: “Jane was by no means a remarkable woman, but she had just those qualities which Shelley felt the lack of so keenly in his own domestic life: steady amiability, pliancy, devotion to children and husband, and a fine womanly grace. She was in many respects a complement to Mary.” Further, says Jones, this infatuation produced some great poems.
   While Shelley continued to behave like a puerile adolescent in matters of the heart up until his death at age 29, his two wives were thrust into motherhood when they were seventeen. Harriet, and later Mary, had to repeatedly pack up and move house at Shelley’s behest. In September of 1818, this led to tragedy.

 Next post: “In the Deep Wide Sea of Misery”
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First post: “Shelley and the Mysterious Lady”

     A Different Kind of Woman, the final book of my Mansfield Trilogy is on its way! I’ll announce the publication date soon.
    My story blends actual events and real people with the characters from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and I'm excited (and a little bit nervous) about sending it out into the world!

    Leading up to the publication of A Different Kind of Woman, I’ll be posting some background information about the people and events in the novel. Here's the first of a series about the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who plays an important part in A Different Kind of Woman. There are some intriguing biographical mysteries around Shelley’s life which I have woven into my novel. ​​
​   Percy Bysshe Shelley is the archetype of the bohemian poet with his unruly flowing locks, and his open-necked collar. His disregard for social convention often caused him (and others) grief. For example, he was kicked out of Oxford for writing a pamphlet about atheism, he eloped at 19, and a few years later, left his first wife to elope with Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.
    As Shelley biographer Richard Holmes notes: “It was ironic that the result of [Shelley's] efforts to liberate himself and those around him from the trammels of morality and society” resulted in “an almost total entrapment in the complications of his daily existence.” 
    One of the complications of his life involved a mysterious woman. Or did she even exist?

   Thomas Medwin was a cousin and friend of the poet. In 1847, decades after Shelley’s death, Medwin revealed that Shelley once confided to him about a mysterious lovelorn lady. Shelley claimed he first met her in London, on the eve of his departure for Europe. This lady, “young, handsome and of noble connections.” threw herself at his feet, begging him to love her. Medwin even printed a detailed, florid dialogue between the mysterious lady and Shelley.
   Shelley claimed that the mysterious lady was willing to leave her husband and children for him, if he would love her as she loved him. Shelley told Medwin he thanked her but refused, owing to his commitment to Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, whom he later married.
   The story didn't end there: Shelley claimed the mysterious lady, unbeknownst to him, followed him through Europe, spied on him from a distance, and in the winter of 1818, revealed herself to him in Naples. There, in Naples, she died.
   Even though Shelley scholars hold Medwin's veracity in low esteem, it seems undeniable that Shelley must have told Medwin some version of this tale, because we know that Shelley also told Lord Byron about the mysterious lady.

   Many subsequent biographers have rejected this melodrama as being completely false. If it is false, we have then, a grown man privately telling his intimate friends that he was followed around Europe by a rich, high-born, beautiful woman. If it is partly false, we have the possibility that Shelley had a dalliance with a mysterious lady.
   Counsel for the defence might, at this juncture, mention that Shelley was addicted to laudanum and he sometimes hallucinated. His friends acknowledged his tendency to embellish events, but they usually stopped short of calling him an outright liar. He just got carried away with his poetic sensibilities so that he could not always distinguish fantasy from reality.
   I suggest that his friend Thomas Love Peacock's satirical novel Nightmare Abbey contains either an echo of the story, or is the origin of the story which Shelley adapted as truth. Peacock satirised Shelley in the novel as an idealistic writer named Scythrop who writes a pamphlet “which he thought would set the whole nation in a ferment; and he awaited the result in awful expectation, as a miner who has [lit the fuse] awaits the explosion of a rock. However, he listened and heard nothing.”
   Here, Peacock is poking affectionate fun at Shelley's real life disappointment over the lack of response to “Queen Mab,” his first epic poem in which he laid out his theory of mankind, government, war and peace, economics, marriage, vegetarianism, the universe and everything. While the poem later became influential with the radical working class, at the time of its publication, it did not spark his hoped-for revolution.

   To return to the plot of Nightmare Abbey, Shelley/Scythrop was disappointed by the poor sales of his pamphlet. But the work was read and admired by a beautiful young girl who ran away from home and sought refuge with Scythrop because “I had no friend to whom I could apply, and, in the midst of my difficulties, accident threw your pamphlet in my way. I saw that I had, at least, one kindred mind in this nation, and determined to apply to you.”
   Did Peacock's tale, published in 1818, inspire Shelley to fabricate a romance with a mysterious lady? It was supposedly Queen Mab which attracted the mysterious lady to offer herself to Shelley. Or, was there really a mysterious lady and did Shelley tell Peacock about her before he left England for Italy? What parts of the tale are true and what is embellished?
   Medwin thinks the mysterious lady was real and inspired some of Shelley's most heart-rending poetry, including “Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples.” Medwin wrote: “Shelley told me that his departure from Naples was precipitated by [the death of the mysterious lady].”
   In Shelley's version, he is the one pursued and the mysterious lady is the pursuer. He rejects her because of his loyalty to his wife. But is this part of the tale consistent with what we know about Shelley and his relationships with women? My next post will explore this question.

Post two: Shelley: Pursued or Pursuer?