Back in England, 1823, Mary begins earning her living with her pen ...
Posthumous
Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, June 1824
After Bysshe
drowned in the summer of 1822, Mary devoted herself to working on a full,
authoritative edition of his poems. No one was better suited for the task. For nearly
a decade she’d been in his life, and theirs was a literary partnership of the
best kind. He read her work in draft; she read his. (You can see his
suggestions for Frankenstein on the
extant manuscript—and he, recall, was the one who encouraged her to expand that
story into a novel.)
And, of
course, she also was intimately familiar with his handwriting, with the various
drafts of his poems (she knew which
was the most current), with the layout on the page he would have liked.
And so she
threw herself into the task, writing the preface, arranging for publication—dealing
with it all.
It was a
highly emotional preface that Mary wrote, despite her referring to him
throughout as “Mr. Shelley.” On the second page of it came this: He is to them [his intimates, including,
of course, Mary herself] as a bright
vision, whose radiant track, left behind in the memory, is worth all the
realities that society can afford.[1] She wrote, as
well, about his drowning, about the day the news arrived. The truth was at last known,—a truth that made our loved and lovely
Italy appear a tomb, its sky a pall. Every heart echoed the deep lament ….[2]
Her name—Mary
W. Shelley—appears below the preface, along with the date, June 1, 1824.
Some 309
copies sold in the first couple of months. And then … Sir Timothy Shelley
caught wind of the publication, and things very quickly changed.
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