But by the
start of the new year of 1823, still in Italy, Mary had begun writing once
again. Sometime during that year she began a story, now titled by its editor
“An Eighteenth Century Tale: A Fragment.”[1] It
takes place in Buckinghamshire, along the Thames between Marlow (where Mary had
lived with Bysshe) and Henley. In the opening paragraph, Mary describes the
bucolic wonders of the area and of the visitors who came to the lady’s home to amuse themselves and to enjoy the short
season of heat as pleasantly as they could.
One day,
relaxing under an umbrageous oak after a morning on the river, the lady’s
companions ask her to tell about the
strange events that had occurred in her life—if the remembrance would not distress her. She agrees—but only if
her guests will reciprocate.
Just this
far along (the first page of the two-page fragment) I’m reminded, of course, of
the “Frankenstein summer” of 1816 when Byron, Mary, Bysshe, Claire Clairmont,
and Dr. John Polidori gathered in Byron’s villa (Villa Diodati) above Lake
Geneva and heard its owner suggest they all write a ghost story.
Anyway, the
guests in Mary’s story all agree (after some discussion), and the lady declares
that she will begin—that I may set a good
example for the others. She proposes that they meet each day in the same
spot, devoting each day to the tale(s) of a different guest. (Reminders of
Scherezade, as well—though no execution looms.)
She begins,
saying that her parents had died before she was ten—and she remembers only her
mother. (Mary, of course, had no memories of her living mother, Mary
Wollstonecraft—just of her words on the page, words that Mary had read and would read repeatedly throughout her
life.)
She says
that she was brought up by an aunt who
had a tender affection for me. And then the story abruptly terminates,
mid-sentence: and she spared no pains in
teaching me the rudiments of all the fashionable ….
Who knows
why writers lay aside their work? There are all sort of reasons, of course,
ranging from the feeling/knowledge that the story is going nowhere to the bite
of a better idea. And there are reasons of physical and mental health. Perhaps
Mary had wished to have these stories deal in a fundamental way with her own
losses—but just could not proceed?
Editor
Charles E. Robinson says in his notes that he has been unable to determine if she finished the story, if she published it anonymously
somewhere, if ….[2]
Some
scholars believe that she’d perhaps dropped the story because she’d turned to
one that was flowing more fluently from her imagination and pen—“The Heir of
Mondolfo”—a story set in Italy, in countryside she knew well, near Naples.
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