In the
months following the publication of her penultimate novel, Lodore, in 1835, Mary had some health problems—and spent some time
visiting friends. Encouraged by the sales of Lodore, her publisher, Charles Ollier, urged her to write another
novel, and in early November, in a letter to a long-time family friend, Maria
Gisborne, she wrote (after praising Maria for her long relationship with her
husband, John), as I grow older I look
upon fidelity as the first of human virtues—& am going to write a novel to
display my opinion.[i]
But Mary was
also engaged in a very time-consuming project at the time—a project to bring in
some much needed money (Sir Timothy Shelley, Bysshe’s father, was still a bit of
a Scrooge). In 1833, two years before the appearance of Lodore, she agreed to write a series of brief biographies for
Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopedia. It was
a massive undertaking, and before it was over, she had published (in two
volumes) Lives of the Most Eminent
literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835–37) and (in
three volumes) Lives of the Most Eminent
Literary and Scientific Man of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1838–39).
Needless to
say, these volumes are not easy to find—at least not in the late 1990s and
early 2000s when I was trying to read everything Mary had written. Now—I just
this moment looked (March 27, 2017)—they are available online.[ii]
Of course.
But back in early
2000, I had to use interlibrary loan, acquiring the volumes from the Ohio State
Library, and in January that year I read them. I’ll confess I’d been dreading
the prospect. They were the last of Mary’s works that I read—and the thought of
volumes of encyclopedia entries about
people I’d (mostly) never heard of was, well, deadly.
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