One other odd note or two or three before I summarize a
bit of Mary’s final novel, Falkner. The family of novelist
William Faulkner (1897–1962) had originally spelled its name “Falkner.” It was
William himself who changed the spelling in 1918 when he filled out an
application for (and acquired) a job at the Winchester Repeating Arms Company.[1] When my wife, Joyce, and I traveled to see and
photograph Faulkner sites in Mississippi in the summer of 2004 (I was teaching As I Lay Dying each year to my high
school juniors), we noticed that the many family graves we saw all said “Falkner.”
Except his and his wife’s. So … the coincidence: Mary’s father writes Faulkener; she writes Falkner. All three spellings of the word
derive from falconer.
 |
| in Ripley, MS |
Mary’s novel begins in a little village she
calls Treby (fictional) in coastal Cornwall—and, of course, I think of the
scenic village there, setting for a British TV series I’ve loved, Doc Martin. But let’s not digress too much!
A little girl spends her days at the
cemetery near the grave of her mother, and readers might recall that Mary’s
father used to take little Mary herself to the St. Pancras churchyard, where
lay the remains of her mother, Mary
Wollstonecraft. In biographies of Mary Shelley, you can read how Godwin helped
teach little Mary to read by tracing the words on her mother’s gravestone—and,
later,in 1814, how Mary and young (married!) Bysshe Shelley would go there to
be … alone. Some have even said that they first had sex there. Surely not!
Bysshe himself has contributed to
speculation about this possibility. In a long letter to his university friend
Thomas Jefferson Hogg, he wrote on October 4, 1814, of the moment when Mary had
confessed her love to him (he was already consumed by her): No expressions can
convey the remotest conception of the manner in which she dispelled my delusions. The sublime & rapturous
moment when she confessed herself mine, who had so long been her’s [sic] in
secret cannot be painted to mortal imaginations—Let it suffice to you, who are
my friend to know & to rejoice that she is mine ….[2] There
is a rather chaste oil painting of the moment, a painting done by William
Powell Frith, The Lover’s Seat
(1877). Both lovers are fully clothed at the moment!
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