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A Daring Deception
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19825 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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5 / 1991 |
1,843 Words |
| Author
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Audrey C. Foote
Audrey C. Foote is a book reviewer and translator who teaches
modern European literature. She lives in Washington, D.C. |
MARY DIANA DODS
A Gentleman and a Scholar
Bettly T. Bennett
New York: William Morrow, 1991
303 pp., $22.95
A year after Mary Shelley's return to England from Italy in 1824, she met two remarkable women, one beautiful and flighty, the other ugly but brilliant. "And during the next two and a half years, one of these women arranged false passports for her two confidantes, the second became an unwed mother, and the third became a man."
With that provocative preview, Betty T. Bennett, a dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the American University, concludes the prologue to an intriguing new book. It is a serendipitous spin-off from her previous major achievement: editing three volumes of the letters of Mary Shelley. Preparing that work for publication, Bennett tried to tie up a couple of loose ends, only to find those threads leading her into a maze, a mystery. And the most important clues were to be found in certain letters of Marry Shelley.
The daughter of the eighteenth-century feminist heroine Mary Wollstonecraft and the social philosopher William Godwin, Mary Shelley was more notorious than her freethinking parents, and she was to become more famous. Both nature and nurture made Mary notably precocious, even for those times. At age sixteen she eloped to Italy with Percy Bysshe Shelley. By twenty she had survived the scandal of the suicide of Shelley's wife, and she had already mourned the death of three infants. She had also written Frankenstein. But when the poet drowned in 1822, the grieving, destitute young widow had to return, for the sake of her last son, to chilly England and the grudging patronage of Shelley's aristocratic father. Despite her later achievements and assets--several more successful books, a wide social circle, a kind son, and a daughter-in-law who seems to have been a veritable Ruth in her devotion--it is impossible not to regard Mary Shelley's life from then on as anticlimactic.
But that life was not without moments of drama. Mary's name, parentage, first book, charm, and, probably also, her reputation procured her invitations to some of the most interesting salons of London. They also guaranteed her access to publishers, editors, and other writers, famous and obscure. But none was so obscure as a certain David Lyndsay for whom Mary interceded several times in notes to publishers. Bennett, in the last phases of
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