Washington Irving decided it was time to
leave England (was Mary’s evident ardor a reason?), and he headed for France
& Spain. By August 14—just four days after seeing the plays with Mary—he
was in France. Safe.
I wonder, of course, what Mary
thought of his swift departure. (Her journals and letters are silent.) She was clearly interested in him: a literary
man, charming, celebrated, respectable.
His status would have greatly attracted her, for she was still suffering (and
would continue to do so throughout the rest of her life) from the blows to her reputation
earned after her elopement with the already married Bysshe Shelley just a
decade earlier. Did she see Irving as a savior of sorts?
And did he sail for France
because he read all of this in her eyes? He was
a very conventional man in many ways, and an association with Mary
Shelley—despite her accomplishments, her beauty (acknowledged by all), her
brilliance, her patent interest in him—could
have had no enduring benefits for him—and would probably have sullied his own
reputation.
But the story was not over. On June
25, 1825, Payne, walking Mary home from tea at the Godwins’, declared his love.
She replied with the words that have crushed every young man’s heart since the
first cavewoman uttered them: Let’s just
be friends.
That was bad enough. But then
she expressed her continuing interest in Irving.[1]
I try to picture this:
confessing my love, getting the let’s-just-be-friends
reply, then (a breath or so later), hearing my beloved ask me to hook her up
with a friend of mine. I’m pretty
sure I would not have taken that
well, not at all.
But Payne—cut from sturdier
cloth than I—proceeded to do just that:
acquaint Washington Irving with Mary’s continuing … interest in him.
[1] Betty Bennett summarizes
this story in her three-volume The Letters
of Mary Shelley, vol. 1, 493n.
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