There is an enduring literary mystery around Percy Bysshe Shelley and a baby girl born in Naples in the winter of 1818/19. The date on the birth certificate – December 27 – does not agree with the age given on her death certificate. 
   On both documents, the father of the child is given as Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley took financial responsibility for little Elena Adelaide even though she never lived with Percy and his wife Mary.
   The birth certificate, retrieved from the Neapolitan archives in the 1930’s, is reproduced here. You can just make out the name "Elena Adelaide" at the bottom in this image with an elaborately drawn "E" and "A" and "d"

 ​   Unfortunately the writing in this reproduction, taken from N.I. White's 1940 biography of Shelley, is very faint, but we are told that the mother's name is given as “Marina Padurin.’ You can see the large swoop-down of the letter "M" on the fourth line from the bottom.
  Ivan Roe, writing in 1955, said that “Godwin” has been misread as “Padurin,” “a slip resulting from unfamiliarity with the Italian script used in the certificate."   
  Yet subsequently, many biographers have reported that the name is given as “Marina (or Maria or Mary) Padurin.” Padurin is a Russian surname and no-one has suggested a Shelley connection to this name.
​    Even though it is agreed that Mary Godwin Shelley could not be the mother of Elena Adelaide and may even have been kept in the dark about Shelley claiming paternity for the child, many scholars have assumed that Shelley intended to give his wife's maiden name for the birth certificate.  

   Mary Shelley biographer Emily W. Sunstein suggests “Padurin” should be “Paterin,” which is the name given to an obscure medieval Christian sect that Mary Shelley was researching around that time, planning to use them in one of her novels. 
   I have my own fanciful explanation, which I think is as plausible as claiming that Padurin is a phonetic rendering of Godwin. “Padurin” should be “Pandurin,” a combination of Pandemos and Uranus, a combination of the different types of love described by Plato, which Shelley had been studying and translating the previous year. Only one letter is missing. Shelley had a lifelong habit of bestowing nicknames on his friends and family members.
   However, it must be acknowledged that there is also a baptism certificate which apparently lists the mother as "Mary Godwin." Shelley took the baby to the church in the Parish of St. Joseph where she was baptised, presumably as a Catholic. The baptism certificate says the baby was "lawfully begotten," that is, Elena Adelaide is the daughter of Percy Shelley and his wife, which we know cannot be true, at least as far as Mary is concerned. The baby was baptised on February 27th, the same day that Percy Shelley went to the registrar and registered the birth.
   Elena Adelaide was listed as being fifteen months and twelve days old when she died on June 9th, 1820, which would place her birth at the end of February, and Shelley registered her birth at the end of February, but said she was born on December 27th. Did he, in addition to lying about the mother, lie about her date of birth?
   James Bieri suggests that “Shelley possibly selected December 27 as the child's birth date in order to conceal association with its actual mother.” A child due in February would have been conceived in the summer, when Shelley spent some time apart from his wife. A child born in December would have been conceived the previous spring, which would have been an alibi for Shelley, because he was living with his wife at the time.
   We know from their journals that a doctor came to the Shelley’s house to see Claire on December 27th and that she had been having unspecified health problems through the previous fall.
   And Richard Holmes points to a reference to December 27th as an important date in Shelley’s tragic verse play, The Cenci, a date singled out with “transparent bitterness.” The evil Count gloats as he announces the death of two of his rebellious sons:

    All in the self-same hour of the same night
    Which shows that heaven has special care for me
    I beg those friends who love me, that they mark
    The day a feast upon their calendars.
    It was the twenty-seventh of December.
 
   It is as though the date has special dark significance for Shelley.
   And again, the number "27" is reported as the mother’s age on the birth certificate. Neither Mary Shelley, nor her sister Claire Clairmont, nor the nursemaid Elise, who was pregnant that winter, were 27 years old.  Perhaps Elena Adelaide's real mother, whoever she was, was 27 years old.

   Next: Who was Elena Adelaide's mother?  I have a candidate in my upcoming novel, A Different Kind of Woman.

(PS, warning, the true story of Beatrice Cenci is very tragic, so don't read about her if you don't want to feel very sad.)

Previous posts in this series:
Shelley and the Mysterious Lady
Shelley: Pursued or Pursuer?
In the Deep Wide Sea of Misery
Who was Elena Adelaide?

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.

  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
​. 
[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.​

​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, a 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”
​
First post: “Shelley and the Mysterious Lady”