An extract from Mary Shelley, a biography, by Miranda Seymour
Mary had been suffering acutely from her pregnancy throughout May, during which month she kept no journal and wrote no letters.
On 9 June 1822, she collapsed. Edward Williams, who was becoming steadily less sympathetic to her as the source of his friend Shelley's unhappiness, thought she was faking her symptoms. She had been "perfectly well" at breakfast, "alarmingly unwell" during the day and then "strangely better". The "strangely" is the clue to his thoughts: he did not believe in her illness.
A week later, although Williams omitted to record it, Mary almost died of a haemorrhage, and lost her fifth child. For seven hours, Claire [Mary's stepsister, Jane Clairmont, who called herself Claire], Jane [Jane Cleveland, the unofficial wife of Edward Williams] and Shelley struggled to keep her awake with brandy, vinegar, eau de Cologne and, when the doctor was held up, ice, to staunch the haemorrhaging. "Claire & Jane were afraid of using it," Mary remembered two months later, "but Shelley overruled them & by an unsparing application of it I was restored. They all thought & so did I at one time that I was about to die." Her husband's practicality had saved her life; still, it is hard not to wince at the word "unsparing".
The miscarriage occurred on 16 June; two days later, Shelley wrote to the Gisbornes [family friends] in England. He gave a good report of his own initiative and, after acknowledging that Mary was still weak, put his faith in sea-baths to restore her to health. It was hardly the moment at which to air his dissatisfaction with Mary as a wife, but the habit had become strong; he could not resist telling the Gisbornes how he longed for the friendship of "those who can feel, and understand me":
"Whether from proximity and the continuity of domestic intercourse, Mary does not . . . It is the curse of Tantalus, that a person possessing such excellent powers and so pure a mind as hers, should not excite the sympathy indispensable to their application to domestic life."
A drawing has survived from this period which has been conjectured to be of Mary Shelley. She had trained with artists and was thought to have some talent; it is, just conceivably, a self-portrait. The woman it shows looks both haunted and drained; her huge eyes and gaunt cheeks suggest someone who might feel that her life had become unbearable. It might very well represent Mary as she looked in the weeks following her miscarriage. "I am ill most of this time. Ill & then convalescent," was all she would say of herself in her journal.
It was during this period that Shelley's feelings towards her showed themselves most clearly, in the form of dreams. Recalling them for Mrs Gisborne in August, Mary thought that six days had passed between the miscarriage and the night when Shelley, asleep but screaming, burst into her bedroom: "he continued to scream which inspired me with such a panic that I jumped out of bed & ran across the hall to Mrs W's room where I fell through weakness, though I was so frightened that I got up again immediately."
Shelley, when woken, told them that his nightmare had begun with an image of the Williamses, bloodstained and with their bones starting through their skins, coming to warn him that the sea was flooding into the house. Shelley had seemed to wake up and to see that this was so when his dream changed: "he saw the figure of himself strangling me". It was this that had brought him running into her room, Mary explained, and yet, "fearful of frightening me he dared not approach the bed". To her, it must have seemed as though she was hideously reliving her own vision of Frankenstein as he wakes to see his newly animated creature standing beside him, ready, as he fearfully supposes, to do him harm. All this, she told Mrs Gisborne, had been "frightful enough, & talking it over the next morning he told me that he had had many visions lately - he had seen the figure of himself which met him as he walked on the terrace & said to him: "How long do you mean to be content?" To her correspondent, Mary dismissed these words as lacking any great significance: "certainly not prophetic of what has occurred". At the time, surely, she must have understood their import clearly enough; what could they have meant to her other than that Shelley's dream-double was expressing his weariness, his disillusion?
On 20 June, the Hunts [Leigh Hunt was an admirer of Shelley's] and their six children finally stepped on to Italian soil at the port of Genoa. Exhausted after the voyage, they were in no mood for news from Shelley of his wife's ailments; Marianne Hunt was "very ill herself - much more so than you imagine . . . " Hunt wrote reproachfully; "and as to myself, I have become, since you saw me, an elderly gentleman, with sunken cheeks . . ."
Shelley, overjoyed by the arrival of his friend in whatever condition of antiquity, was impatient for their reunion; so, for different reasons, was Hunt. "I have been so hard run that I was obliged to spend it in housekeeping," Shelley shamefacedly admitted when asked about £30 which Byron had promised to provide to the Hunts as a loan. On 24 June, Shelley and Williams rigged the sails of the Don Juan, stocked the cupboards with provisions and were about to set off for Genoa when Mary had a relapse. Her state of mind was probably a contributing factor; Shelley's nightmarish visions, her own weakness and the stupefying heat combined to create a state of feverish apprehension. The voyage was put off.
Hunt sent word that he was going to make his way down to Livorno on 28 June. He wanted to make himself known to Byron, in whose home at Pisa he had been promised rooms. Shelley decided to waste no more time. On 1 July, he set sail for Livorno himself, together with Williams, Captain Roberts and their boy-crew of one, Charles Vivian. "I could not endure that he should go," Mary wrote later to Mrs Gisborne, " - I called him back two or three times, I told him that if I did not see him soon I would go to Pisa with the child - I cried bitterly when he went away." Her only comfort was that he had promised to look for a house at Pugnano where they could spend the rest of the summer.
She wrote to him twice. One letter, according to Edward Williams, was "of the most gloomy kind"; its tone can be guessed from the near-hysterical letter which she sent via Shelley to Hunt, begging him to stay away from the Villa Magni ("it would be complete madness to come") and describing herself as a prisoner: "I wish I could break my chains & leave this dungeon." On 4 July, a loving note to Jane ("my dearest friend") arrived at the villa from Shelley, together with a brisk and businesslike letter for Mary. She must have felt ready to weep when she read it. He had not looked for houses at Pugnano. He could not say when he would return. The rest of the letter was taken up with news of their friends.
Dr Vacci had pronounced Marianne Hunt's illness to be grave (she lived until 1857); Hunt himself was cheerful but penniless. Byron, while willing to make a handsome gift of the copyright of his latest poem, "The Vision of Judgment", for the first number of their new magazine, was unlikely to be able to offer further support since he was preparing to follow Teresa's family into a second exile [Teresa Guicciolo was Byron's mistress]. Shelley ended by expressing his wish for the thing his wife most dreaded, a continued residence at the Villa Magni.
Four days later, despite uncertain weather conditions, Shelley, Williams and their boy sailor set out for Lerici from Livorno, carrying fifty pounds which Shelley had borrowed from Byron. The conditions have been variously described, but it seems clear that the Don Juan sailed into one of the sudden summer squalls for which this part of the coast was notorious. With no deck and sails which were difficult to bring down in a hurry, a sudden gust was all that was needed to swamp it. Reports came later that either one or two of the feluccas which regularly undertook the journey from Livorno to Genoa had seen the little boat struck by "baffling winds"; shouts to bring down the sails had been disregarded; at their next glance, the Don Juan had been engulfed.
By 11 July, a Thursday, the three women at the Villa Magni were growing anxious; only continuing bad weather kept Jane from having herself rowed to Livorno the following day. Friday was the day on which the week's post was delivered; it brought them a letter for Shelley from Hunt. Opening it, Mary saw that Hunt was asking for news of the travellers' safe return, having heard that the boat had left Livorno in a storm. The date of departure, 8 July, was named. "I trembled all over," Mary wrote in the long and harrowing account of the tragedy she sent to Mrs Gisborne in August. " - Jane read it - `Then it is all over!' she said. `No my dear Jane,' I cried, `It is not all over, but this suspense is dreadful' . . . " Although still so weak that she had not been out of the villa for over a fortnight, Mary agreed with Jane that they must leave at once; Claire remained. The two women reached Pisa at midnight; they went straight to the Palazzo Lanfranchi. The Hunts were in bed and, much to her relief, Mary was shown up to Byron's floor. Byron and Teresa could only confirm that the Don Juan had sailed on the previous Monday, in bad weather: "more they knew not." Horrified by Mary's exhausted appearance ("I looked more like a ghost than a woman - light seemed to emanate from my features," she reported them as having told her), Teresa begged the travellers to stay and rest.