Licentia Historica: History and Romance in Mary Shelley’s Valperga

ABSTRACT

The consistent presence of historical narratives within Mary Shelley’s oeuvre is remarkable: she composed several short stories and two novels set in the Middle Ages, not to mention the biographical profiles of eminent literary figures of the past she penned for Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Far from suggesting either the author’s escapist intentions or her mere adherence to the literary fashion of the time (popularized by Walter Scott), this essay sets out to investigate the crucial role and the responsibility Mary Shelley attached to history. Alert to William Godwin’s treatises − in particular, his short essay ‘Of History and Romance’ − Mary Shelley firmly believed that, through the knowledge of the past, one could develop ‘a sagacity that can penetrate into the depths of futurity’. By focusing on Valperga, this article examines the writer’s strategic employment of history as an effective instrument to reflect on current-day problems.

KEYWORDS:

• History
• Romance
• Mary Shelley
• Valperga
• William Godwin

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Mary Shelley was the most prolific contributor to Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain and Portugal (1835–37), as well as being the only woman. She is credited with the authorship of the following biographies (among others), published anonymously: Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Filicaja, Alfieri, Monti, and Foscolo.

² Deidre Lynch, ‘Historical Novelist,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther H. Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 135–50 (p. 136). As Lynch recalls, until recently, it was widely believed that ‘her historical turn’ had been motivated by the urge to ‘ease her re-entry into the respectable sector of the literary field’, after her extravagant and transgressive debut novel.

³ Joseph W. Lew, ‘God’s Sister: History and Ideology in Valperga,’ in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A Fisch, Anne K. Mellor and Esther H. Schor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 159–81 (p. 160). Elsewhere in the essay, Lew describes Valperga as an ‘unjustly maligned novel’ (160).

⁴ Mary Shelley to Maria Gisborne, 30 June 1821, The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, vol. I, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944), 145.

⁵ P.B. Shelley to Charles Ollier, 25 September 1821, Letters of P.B. Shelley, Containing Material Never Before Collected, vol. II, ed. Roger Ingpen (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1914), 914.

⁶ P.B. Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, 8 November 1820, Ibid., 831. For a complete list of Mary Shelley’s sources see Nora Crook’s ‘Introductory Note’ to The Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley, vol. 3, ed. Nora Crook (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), xi-vii (p. xi-ii).

⁷ Rieko Suzuki, ‘Romantic Prometheanism, History and Historicism: P.B. Shelley’s “The Triumph of Life,” Mary Shelley’s Valperga, and Robert Browning’s Sordello’ (PhD Thesis, University of Manchester, 2003), 93n.

⁸ Katherine Richardson Powers, ‘The Influence of William Godwin on the Novels of Mary Shelley’ (PhD Thesis, University of Tennessee, 1972), 54.

⁹ Ibid.

¹⁰ Stuart Curran, ‘Valperga,’ in The Cambridge Companion to Mary Shelley, ed. Esther H. Schor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 103–15 (p. 106).

¹¹ William Godwin to P.B. Shelley, 8 June, 1818, in Shelley Memorials: From Authentic Sources, ed. Jane Gibson Shelley (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1859), 97. In the end, Godwin decided to pursue his own project and, in 1828, he ‘triumphantly completed’ it, after many years of tireless labour. Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (New York: Grove Press, 2000), 403.

¹² P.B. Shelley to John and Maria Gisborne, 30 June 1820, Letters of P.B. Shelley, 789.

¹³ Pamela Clemit, ‘Mary Shelley and William Godwin: A Literary-Political Partnership, 1826–36,’ Women’s Writing 6, no. 3 (1999): 287. Especially after P.B. Shelley’s demise, Godwin ‘provided Mary Shelley with vital literary encouragement and support in her efforts to earn a living’ (286). Conversely, in Katherine C. Hill-Miller’s view, Mary was unwillingly compelled ‘to play the maternal role to her suffering father by soothing his sorrows and supporting him in his financial and emotional needs’ (‘My Hideous Progeny’. Mary Shelley, William Godwin and the Father-Daughter Relationship (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 52).

¹⁴ Obviously, he was also involved with his own projects at the same time; for a detailed chronology of Godwin’s editorial interventions in Mary Shelley’s text, see Nora Crook, ‘Introductory Note,’ xii.

¹⁵ Mrs. Julian Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, vol. II (London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1889), 52.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ William Godwin to Mary Shelley, 14 February 1823, quoted in Jane Blumberg, Mary Shelley’s Early Novels. ‘This Child of Imagination and Misery’ (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), 81. As only seventeen random pages of the original manuscript (or maybe of an earlier draft) are extant, it is impossible to properly ascertain the extent of Godwin’s revisions. According to Betty T. Bennett and Nora Crook, his editing was limited to cutting out some lengthy descriptions of battles, while in Mary Poovey’s and Katherine C. Hill-Miller’s view, the text was extensively modified. Betty T. Bennett, ‘The Political Philosophy of Mary Shelley’s Historical Novels: Valperga and Perkin Warbeck,’ in The Evidence of the Imagination: Studies of Interactions between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, ed. Donald H. Reiman, Michael C. Jaye, and Betty T. Bennett (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 354–71 (p. 362); Nora Crook, ‘Introductory Note,’ xiii; Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 146; and Katherine C. Hill-Miller, ‘My Hideous Progeny,’ 45.

¹⁸ Colin Carman, The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys: Eros and Environment (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 133.

¹⁹ Godwin’s essay was eventually published in 1987. Julie A. Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 145.

²⁰ All quotations are taken from https://web.english.upenn.edu/~mgamer/Etexts/godwin.history.html (accessed February 15, 2023).

²¹ This is the definition of historical romance Godwin provides: ‘a composition in which, with a scanty substratum of facts and dates, the writer interweaves a number of happy, ingenious and instructive inventions, blending them into one continuous and indiscernible mass’. Godwin believed that purely historical reconstructions of the past were, in any event, partial, as they mirrored the beliefs and the perceptions of the chronicler. In ‘Of History and Romance’, therefore, he also mentions ‘the falsehood and impossibility of history’ and the almost paradoxical ‘reality of romance’.

²² Mary Shelley, Valperga: Or, the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 5.

²³ Conversely, according to Stuart Curran, Mary Shelley ‘denigrates’ Machiavelli’s historical reconstruction by downgrading it to a ‘mere ‘romance’. James P. Carson concurs, by underlining ‘Shelley’s disparagement’ of her source through the term ‘romance’. Curran, ‘Valperga’, 103. James P. Carson, ’“A Sigh of Many Hearts”: History, Humanity, and Popular Culture in Valperga,’ in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein, ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank and Gregory O’Dea (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1997), 167–92 (p. 172).

²⁴ Shelley, Valperga, 6. As Bennett noticed, ‘in a sense, this [sentence] announces her intention to change the facts for her own purposes’. Bennett, ‘The Political Philosophy,’ 357.

²⁵ Both Mary and Percy Shelley did not spare words of criticism against the Italian populace, who passively accepted and, in some cases, even welcomed the tyrant. Percy labelled them ‘idiots and slaves’ while, in a letter to Maria Gisborne, Mary commented that their ‘English blood, would, I am afraid boil over at such insolence’, as the troops were brandishing their naked swords to ease the emperor’s passage through the crowd. Ingpen, Letters of P.B. Shelley, vol. I, 687. Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, eds., The Journals of Mary Shelley (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 256n.

²⁶ Mary Shelley, ‘Valerius, the Reanimated Roman,’ in Mary Shelley: Collected Tales and Stories, ed. Charles E. Robinson (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 332–44, 397.

²⁷ Emily W. Sunstein, Mary Shelley, Romance and Reality (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 232.

²⁸ P.B. Shelley to Charles Ollier, 25 September 1821. Ingpen, Letters of P.B. Shelley, vol. II, 914.

²⁹ John Gibson Lockhart, ‘Valperga’, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine XIII (January-June 1823): 284. As Leanne Maunu has pointed out, when Percy and Mary Shelley travelled through France in 1814, they witnessed ‘the damage that a tyrant – one like Napoleon and Castruccio – could bring to a large region’. A parallel may be established between war-torn France (during and after the Napoleonic Wars) and war-torn Italy, both in the fourteenth-century and in the Shelleys’ time (‘The Connecting Threads of War, Torture, and Pain in Mary Shelley’s Valperga,’ European Romantic Review 24, no. 4 (2010): 454–5).

³⁰ Mary Shelley, Valperga, 53, 242.

³¹ Ibid., 242. As Lilla Maria Crisafulli has remarked, music (especially Gioacchino Rossini’s operas) was viewed by nineteenth-century Italians as ‘a powerful means for unity and liberation’ (‘Mary Shelley’s Valperga and Women’s Historical Revisionism,’ in Italomania(s): Italy and the English Speaking World from Chaucer to Seamus Heaney, ed. Giuseppe Galigani (Florence: Mauro Pagliai Editore), 99–110 (p. 99).

³² Mary Shelley, Valperga, 225. For additional allusions to the Italian Risorgimento in Valperga see Elisabetta Marino, Mary Shelley e l’Italia: il viaggio, il Risorgimento, la questione femminile (Florence: Le Lettere, 2011), 88–95.

³³ To get rid of his unwanted wife, in 1820, the future monarch appointed the so-called Milan Commission to produce evidence of her supposed unfaithfulness while she resided in Italy. Ordinary people sided with the wronged princess, as an icon of resistance to injustice and despotism.

³⁴ Violence against violence in The Cenci, forgiveness and non-violent resistance in Prometheus Unbound, irony and mockery in Swellfoot the Tyrant.

³⁵ Ann M. Franke Wake, ‘Women in the Active Voice: Recovering Female History in Mary Shelley’s Valperga and Perkin Warbeck,’ in Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley after Frankenstein, ed. Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank and Gregory O’Dea (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1997), 235–59 (p. 243).

³⁶ Further on in the novel, Euthanasia reiterates that she received her castle ‘from [her] mother’s hands’. Mary Shelley, Valperga, 282.

³⁷ Ibid., 110.

³⁸ Ibid.

³⁹ Given her father’s blindness, she had begun to read out loud to him from his collection of classics. Interestingly, a blind father and a dutiful daughter, who acts as if she were his eyes, are also featured in P.B. Shelley’s unfinished short story, ‘The Coliseum’ (1818). In this case, the intellectual gap between young Helen and her wise father is striking.

⁴⁰ Mary Shelley, Valperga, 22.

⁴¹ Ibid., 109. Here, Mary Shelley meaningfully uses the term history, thus blurring the boundary between general and individual, history and romance.

⁴² Ibid., 111–2.

⁴³ Ibid., 113. In ‘Valerius, the Reanimated Roman’, Mary Shelley conveyed a similar opinion through the character of Isabell, an Englishwoman: ‘It seems to me that, if I were overtaken by the greatest misfortunes, I should be half consoled by the recollection of having dwelt in Rome’ (342).

⁴⁴ Mary Shelley, Valperga, 244.

⁴⁵ Ibid., 250. Elsewhere in the novel, she depicts herself as a ‘child and nursling’ of nature. Ibid., 108.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 94.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 101.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 29.

⁴⁹ Daniel E. White, ‘Mary Shelley’s Valperga: Italy and the Revision of Romantic Aesthetics,’ in Mary Shelley’s Fictions: From Frankenstein to Falkner, ed. Michael Eberle-Sinatra (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), 75–94 (p. 84).

⁵⁰ Rieko Suzuki, ‘Romantic Prometheanism,’ 128.

⁵¹ Mary Shelley, Valperga, 33.

⁵² Ibid., 35.

⁵³ Ibid, 68. Later on in the story, when he is about to become Prince of Lucca, Castruccio shows how well he had assimilated Pepi’s lesson: ‘He now fully subscribed to all the articles of Pepi’s political creed, and thought fraud and secret murder fair play, when it thinned the ranks of the enemy.’ Ibid., 259.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 231. See also Castruccio’s assertion ‘be mine’, in the third and conclusive volume of Valperga. Ibid., 324.

⁵⁵ Ibid., 240–1. Her statement is repeated twice.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 241.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 73–4.

⁵⁸ Jane Blumberg, Mary Shelley’s Early Novels, 76.

⁵⁹ Theresa M. Kelly, ‘Romantic Temporality, Contingency, and Mary Shelley,’ ELH 75, no. 3 (2008): 643.

⁶⁰ Daniel E. White, ‘Mary Shelley’s Valperga,’ 84.

⁶¹ Ibid.

⁶² This term has been coined by Mary Louise Pratt to describe ‘idealized worlds of female autonomy, empowerment, and pleasure’. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 163.

⁶³ Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 210.

⁶⁴ Ibid.

⁶⁵ Mary Shelley, Valperga, 393.

⁶⁶ Ibid., 440.

⁶⁷ Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (London: Penguin, 2014), 101.

⁶⁸ Colin Carman, The Radical Ecology of the Shelleys, 137.

⁶⁹ Mary Shelley would use the same tactics in The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck; the male protagonist, the abusive Perkin, is also portrayed as childless for similar reasons, contrary to historical facts.

⁷⁰ Mary Shelley, Valperga, 428.

⁷¹ Ibid., 436.

⁷² Mary Shelley to John Murray, 8 September 1830, The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, vol. II, 35.

⁷³ Barbara Jane O’Sullivan, ‘Beatrice in Valperga: A New Cassandra,’ in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor and Esther H. Schor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 140–48 (p. 151).

⁷⁴ ‘I am not a person of Opinions. I have said elsewhere that human beings differ greatly in this – some have a passion for reforming the world: others do not cling to particular opinions.’ Paula R. Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, eds., The Journals, 553. Conversely, her parents and P.B. Shelley were viewed by the author as full-fledged social reformers.

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Elisabetta Marino

Elisabetta Marino is Associate Professor English literature at the University of Rome Tor Vergata. She is the author of four monographs: a volume on the figure of Tamerlane in British and American literature (2000); an introduction to British Bangladeshi literature (2005); a study on the relationship between Mary Shelley and Italy (2011); an analysis of the Romantic dramas on mythological subjects (2016). Between 2001 and 2023 she has edited/co-edited fifteen collections of essays. In 2022, she translated Parkwater, a Victorian novel by Ellen Wood, for the first time into Italian. She has published extensively on the English Romantic writers (especially Mary Shelley and P.B. Shelley), Indian diasporic literature, travel literature, and Italian American literature.