One of the oddest stories in Mary Shelley's life ...
Mary
Diana Dods
On April 10,
1999, not long before I was heading off to Europe to chase Mary and the others,
I sat in the old Saywell’s drugstore (RIP), drinking coffee. And my journal
records: started reading B. Bennett’s
book about Diana Maria Dodds. (It seems I was still a little confused about
the name and title—even the spelling!)
We’ve met
Betty Bennett much earlier in this account. She was the premier Mary Shelley
scholar of her day (she died on August 8, 2006), the editor of the definitive
three-volume edition of Mary’s letters, author of numerous articles and other
books about Mary and her circle. And in 1991 she published Mary Diana Dods: A Gentleman and a Scholar, a book that told one of
the wilder stories that involved Mary Shelley.[1]
In September
1824 Mary, on a number of occasions, gathered with other literary folk at the
home of Dr. William Kitchiner. And there she met Mary Diana Dods, who wrote and
published under the names David Lindsay and Lord Dillon.
This is not
all that strange, of course. Women writers had a hard time breaking into the
literary world thoroughly dominated by men, and so determined women employed
all sorts of tactics—from publishing anonymously (as Mary did in the initial
1818 edition of Frankenstein; some
thought her husband had surely
written the novel). Others published under male pseudonyms. This continued
beyond Mary Shelley, of course: Mary Ann Evans—1819–1880, Mary Shelley’s junior
by more than twenty years—wrote as George Eliot, and even into our own day the
popular YA novelist a few decades ago, the author of The Outsiders and other enormously popular works, employed a
genderless name—S. E. Hinton. She is Susan Eloise Hinton, not the sort of name,
her publisher figured, that would lend credibility to her story about young
gangs. So S. E. she became.
My journal’s
a little vague, but it seems I didn’t take Betty’s book with me to Europe
(there are no mentions of it in my travel journal), and my home journal records
only that I finished it on May 15, more than a week after I returned. There are
only 269 pages of text, so I’m certain that’s what happened. Started it before
I left, finished it when I got home.
And what a
story it is!
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