Her tale “The
Heir of Mondolfo” told of a young man named Ludovico, son of a territorial noble.[1]
Ludovico has no apparent skills or interests (he hates reading). One
day—hunting—he comes across a remote cottage, where he sees a young woman,
Viola. To say he’s smitten is a bit of an understatement: She might have been mistaken for the angel of
heaven waiting to receive and guide the departing soul to eternal rest ….[2]
Soon, people
begin to notice that Ludovico is changing—for the better. He and Viola secretly
marry, have a child. This does not make Daddy happy when he learns of it. He
arranges to have the wife and child kidnapped and shipped off to Spain so that
Ludovico can marry someone more … appropriate. She escapes in a storm, but
Ludovico believes she and their child have been lost at sea. He decides he
might as well kill himself. And off in the woods, about to Do the Deed, he
notices, sleeping nearby … Guess Who?
Well, the
families reconcile, and Daddy does not
repine that the violet girl should be the mother of the Heir of Mondolfo.[3]
Once again,
Mary’s own life pulses through the arteries of one of her stories. She knew
about the fracture of families. When she’d run off with Bysshe in 1814, her
father froze, hard, and had refused all communication with her for two years.
(Not until she married the recently widowed Bysshe did he thaw.)
And now? Sir
Timothy Shelley, Bysshe’s father, was horrified by their relationship, a union
that had gone against all he had believed in. As we will see, he came to blame
Mary for his son’s death and for the rest of his long life (he would live some
twenty years beyond the composition of Mary’s tale, dying on April 24, 1844, at
the age of 90, an almost unthinkable age at the time) he refused all direct
contact with her. All communications between them came through a third party.
He was deeply frustrated because Bysshe and Mary did have a legitimate living child, Percy Florence Shelley, and English
inheritance laws recognized PFS as the heir to the Shelley estate. (Though, as
we shall see, the Shelleys managed to find every loophole in the law—and to
dance gleefully through it.)
Mary’s story
about the heir of Mondolfo was not published until 1877, long after Mary and
all the other principals in her story were dead. The story’s editor, Charles
Robinson, notes that the manuscript appeared among the papers of Leigh Hunt,
family friend and prolific writer. It’s possible Mary had sent it to him for
suggestions. And he had filed and forgotten it.
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