I finished reading Mary’s final book on August
12, 1997. I’m just now taking a look at my journal/diary to see what I was
doing that day. It seems it was a somewhat busy time, I find. We had an
inspection of our home in Aurora that day—we were about to sell it. I was
preparing to teach (part-time) in the fall at Hiram College—its Weekend College
program, aimed at older students, people working; my course, required for all,
was called Writing in the Liberal Arts (I); there was a II later in the year.
All I wrote in my journal about Mary Shelley that day was that I finished
typing my notes on Rambles, notes
that reached twenty-eight single-spaced pages. And the next day I began reading
her father’s great novel Caleb Williams
(1794).
I’m a bit surprised that I had nothing to say
about completing Mary’s final book. But it was fairly early in my research, and
I was moving on to read the works of her father, her mother (Mary
Wollstonecraft), her husband, her friends (Byron, Coleridge, et al.). I didn’t
realize at the time—not in the summer of 1997 (twenty years ago as I type
this!)—that I had reached what should have been a very emotional milestone in
my work.
I wonder now if Mary knew that this was the
end of something. By this time (the early 1840s) she was no longer writing much
in her journal. Very few entries remain from these years—a tiny handful. And the
final extended one—from February 26, 1841—is deeply moving, sad to read. This
sentence, for example, continues to dampen my eyes: That I might live—as once I lived—hoping—loving—aspiring enjoying—[1] And, of course, as I advance in years, decline
in health, I find that my rages against the dying of the light in many ways
harmonize with Mary’s.
Her few surviving letters about the book display
a lack of confidence about it. Writing to long-time friend Leigh Hunt in the
summer of 1844 (the date is not certain), she says I am really frightened when I think that you are reading my book
critically—It seems to me such a wretched piece of work—written much of it in a
state of pain that makes me look at its pages now as if written in a dream. … I
fear I shall be very much ashamed of it—[2]
But—as we shall see—despite her health,
despite her insecurities, she clung fiercely to her intellectual life. Until
she simply no longer could.
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