Some final words about Mary's play Midas and the writing that ensued ...
A couple of
hundred pages ago, I mentioned that Mary’s father, William Godwin, had
published a novel in 1799 not long after the death of his wife, Mary
Wollstonecraft Godwin, in September 1797. St
Leon, you’ll recall, tells the story of a man who learns both the secret of
eternal earthly life and of the “philosopher’s stone”—a way to transform base
metal into gold. That pretty much fixes him for this sublunary life! It’s from
a strange, dying old man that he learns these things, by the way—an old man who
swears St Leon to secrecy about the art
of multiplying gold, and the power of living for ever.[1]
If you’re
wondering why the old man didn’t keep himself alive via the same technique. Well,
Godwin explains it: The health of the
stranger visibly declined; but this was a circumstance which he evidently
regarded with complacency.[2] The old man is tormented by the losses he has
suffered—the deaths of loved ones especially. And he just does not want to live
any longer in a world where those loved ones do not exist. (St Leon will grow to
understand this.)
Of course,
his eternal youth complicates St Leon’s love and family life. (His
seventeen-year-old son would run away—as Godwin’s daughter, Mary, did in 1814; did
he remember the St Leon episode when
he discovered Mary’s absence?) And St Leon’s wife, Marguerite, is incredulous
about the story he tells about how he’s suddenly acquired so much money. I
commented earlier about how Godwin wrote about the death of Marguerite with a
passion and poignancy that surely approached his own when his own wife died.
Anyway, the
relevance here: Mary’s short play Midas is clearly based on her father’s children’s book Pantheon. We know as well that Mary repeatedly read her parents’
books, so she also knew the story of St Leon, the man who, to some degree, shared
Midas’ gift—and problems.
After Bysshe
Shelley drowned in the summer of 1822, Mary was initially too distraught to do any
writing. Lord Byron aided her by giving her some copying work to do. Making “fair
copies” was a tedious necessity in the pre-Xerox and word-processing era: Writers
would have to rewrite entire novels (in their most legible penmanship)—often twice
(once for a prospective publisher, once for themselves); wealthy writers (like
Byron) could hire scriveners to do the drudgery for them. Mary—who had a very
legible hand—did good work for Byron, and she’d done fair copies for her
husband’s verse, as well—not to mention her own novels and other work.
But by the
start of the new year of 1823, still in Italy, Mary had begun writing once
again.
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