When Mary Shelley died in 1851, she left behind a life that had already become myth in the making: the daughter of two radical philosophers, the teenage lover of a married poet, the widow who preserved her husband’s heart wrapped in silk, and the twenty-year-old author of a novel that would outlive nearly everyone who ever doubted her. She had spent her final years living quietly with her son, Percy Florence, and his wife, Jane, Lady Shelley, the two people who had cared for her most steadily in old age. It was to Jane, then, that the task of guarding Mary’s legacy fell.
Jane took that task seriously; perhaps too seriously. In 1882, more than thirty years after Mary’s death, Lady Shelley privately printed and distributed Shelley and Mary, a sprawling compilation of letters, journals, and reminiscences presented as an account of the Shelley circle. It was never sold in bookshops or widely reviewed in the press. Instead, it was quietly circulated among people Jane trusted, becoming something closer to a family scripture. The work opens not with Mary’s childhood or her mother’s death, but with her elopement at sixteen with the still-married Percy Bysshe Shelley, recast as a great romance rather than a scandal that shadowed Mary for the rest of her life.
The trouble is that Jane was not a neutral custodian of the truth. She had her own ideas about what the Shelley name should mean to history, and Shelley and Mary shows every sign of it: omissions, softened edges, a Mary Shelley scrubbed of her rougher and more difficult qualities and remade into a devoted wife draped in tragic elegance. Access to the volumes was tightly controlled. Although one person who was permitted to read them wrote a review, the work remained largely inaccessible to the public. When others subsequently wrote to that reviewer asking to borrow his copy, he had to explain that he had already returned the volumes and that no one else was permitted to read them. Jane’s account thus exerted its influence not through wide circulation, but through the authority of a carefully guarded family narrative.
Nicole Lobdell, an associate professor of English at Northwestern State University of Louisiana, has spent years pulling that inheritance apart. She has published and lectured widely on Mary Shelley’s life and work, and her current book project turns the lens directly onto Shelley and Mary itself, asking not just what Jane Shelley wrote about Mary, but why, and what it cost the woman being written about. In the conversation that follows, Lobdell walks us through the making of a myth: how a grieving daughter-in-law became the gatekeeper of one of literature’s most consequential lives, and what it takes, over a century later, to find the real Mary Shelley underneath.
Charles Carlini: What first drew you to Shelley and Mary (1882) as opposed to the many later biographies of Mary Shelley?
Nicole Lobdell: My first encounter with Shelley and Mary in 2022 was entirely by chance. I was at the Huntington Library in San Marino, CA, conducting research for another project when I decided to explore their rare book collection for materials related to Mary Shelley. I had been fascinated by Mary Shelley ever since reading Frankenstein (1818) in middle school, and I knew the Huntington housed a substantial collection of Shelley-related materials. As I browsed the rare book catalog, I came across the title Shelley and Mary, 3 vols., with the intriguing note, “only 12 printed.” Unfamiliar with the title, my curiosity was piqued. Upon seeing the volumes, I was surprised to discover they were edited and compiled by Jane, Lady Shelley, the daughter-in-law of Mary Shelley. I knew very little about the Shelleys’ only surviving child, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, and even less about his wife. This immediately made me want to learn more about these volumes and the woman behind them. I knew the first public book-length biography of Mary Shelley, Helen Moore’s Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, was published in 1886. However, Shelley and Mary was privately published four years earlier, in 1882, by a family member who had known and lived with Mary Shelley in her final years. I believed Shelley and Mary might therefore offer a fresh perspective on who Mary Shelley was.
Victorian biographies often differ from what contemporary readers might expect, as the genre was still evolving. These volumes comprise a collection of letters and journal entries not only by Mary Shelley but also by her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; her father, the writer and political philosopher William Godwin; other family members; and close friends, including the poet Lord Byron. Jane Shelley edited and arranged these letters and journals to create a linear narrative of the Shelleys’ life together, beginning with their elopement to France in 1814, continuing through Percy’s death in 1822 (which concludes volume two), and finally extending to the mid-1840s, a few years before Mary Shelley’s own death. While the volumes do contain short sections of printed commentary, the letters and journals remain the primary focus. The final volume is dedicated to Mary’s life after Percy’s death, an interesting choice that highlights Jane’s dedication to Mary as an individual.
Another reason the Shelley and Mary volumes interest me more than other early biographies is that, after their initial printing, Jane continued to edit each copy by hand. She inserted additional letters and documents in some copies and removed pages from others. She also added handwritten marginalia and notes, which vary widely in content, tone, and number depending on the copy. This leads me to believe the copies may have been tailored to specific recipients. I find these variations fascinating because they reveal that the narrative Lady Shelley was creating was under continual revision. While some of the notes and marginalia are meant for clarification, quite a few focus on defending Shelley, Mary, or both, against scandalous rumors.
CC: How did Lady Jane Shelley come to be the one who controlled Mary Shelley’s legacy, and why was she uniquely positioned—for better and worse—to shape it? You describe Jane as both a “beneficial” and “problematic” guardian of the Shelley legacy. Can you unpack that tension for us?
NL: Jane Shelley, born Jane Gibson in 1820, was illegitimate and one of nine children. In 1841, she married her first husband, the Hon. Charles Robert St. John, who died in 1844, leaving Jane a considerable sum of money and increased social standing. It is thought that sometime in 1845 or 1846, Jane met Mary Shelley and her son, Percy Florence, though the circumstances of that meeting are not entirely known. Some accounts say mutual friends introduced them, but by Jane’s own account, recorded in Talks with Lady Shelley by Maude Rolleston just a few years before Jane died, Mary Shelley came to meet her. It’s long been suggested that Mary had chosen Jane to be Percy Florence’s wife because she saw in Jane someone like herself: a young widow, a resilient woman, and someone very capable of managing everything, just as Mary had done for her son. Most accounts of Percy Florence suggest he was rather shy and withdrawn, with his mother being his closest friend, so it’s not hard to believe that Mary may have assisted in finding him a wife. Jane’s letters show her to be a determined, if not demanding, woman, and I imagine Percy Florence may have found comfort in knowing Jane could manage things for him. This is not to suggest, however, that he was not invested in the memory and legacy of his parents; he was, but Jane certainly took the lead.
We certainly owe Jane credit for preserving many letters and manuscripts, which she later donated to the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1893, inaugurating the Shelley collection there and endowing the Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford. However, Jane was a problematic guardian because we know she destroyed letters and documents that she believed cast the Shelley family in a negative light.
CC: In what specific ways do Shelley and Mary romanticize or idealize Mary’s life, starting with the elopement with Percy Bysshe Shelley?
NL: In Shelley and Mary, Jane is not an ethical editor. She heavily edits and alters documents to present a version of both Percy and Mary Shelley that is untrue to life. She erases any hint of immorality or scandal in their elopement, even suggesting that Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, had already been having an affair or even working as a prostitute. Shelley’s choice of Mary over Harriet, therefore, is presented as a moral one.
Many of Jane’s edits, which I find quite frustrating, erase Mary Shelley as a living and breathing woman. For example, in a fascinating letter from October 5, 1817, Mary writes to Percy, who is away in London, shortly after the birth of their third child, Clara. In it, Mary describes her difficulties with breastfeeding, the baby’s upset stomach from cow’s milk, and her own physical and spiritual weakness and fatigue. At the time of writing, Mary was just a few weeks postpartum, her son William was a toddler, her stepsister Claire Clairmont and Claire’s baby daughter Allegra (Byron’s child) were living with them, Percy was away, and she was simultaneously editing the proofs of Frankenstein. To me, this letter reveals Mary as a living, breathing woman and illustrates the realities of women’s lives at the time.
In Shelley and Mary, however, Jane edits all of this out. The letter is presented as showing Mary as a beatific wife and new mother simply awaiting her husband’s return. I find this erasure very frustrating because this saintly but unreal image of Mary Shelley was perpetuated for many years in later biographies and early scholarship of her work—an image of Mary Shelley living and breathing only for Percy Shelley. Many early public biographies end with Percy Shelley’s death, as if Mary Shelley ceased to exist then, when in reality, she lived for almost another thirty years. Shelley and Mary does not end with Percy Shelley’s death, which does set it apart in this regard, but the portrait of Mary Shelley as a Victorian “angel in the house”—an idealized feminine figure who sacrifices individual identity and needs to her husband and children—remains.
CC: Given that the book was privately printed rather than published for general audiences, who was its intended readership, and how did it still come to shape public perception for a century?
NL: There is some debate over whether or not Shelley and Mary was intended for public or private publication. The title page states, “For Private Circulation Only,” a restriction thought to be due to Lady Shelley’s inclusion of private letters belonging to Byron. At the time, these letters were in the possession of Lady Dorchester, Charlotte Carleton, daughter of John Cam Hobhouse, one of Byron’s closest friends and his literary executor. Lady Dorchester had inherited the collection and, like Lady Shelley, tightly controlled access to and publication of these documents. Byron’s letters had been loaned to Jane, likely with instructions not to publish them. However, as we see, they appear in Shelley and Mary. It is possible that Lady Shelley had intended public consumption for these volumes but was legally blocked by Lady Dorchester. In many surviving copies, letters belonging to Lady Dorchester are noted as such in the margins.
After printing, Lady Shelley loaned copies of Shelley and Mary to authorized writers for separate biographies of Percy and Mary Shelley. She selected Edward Dowden, a Shakespeare scholar and biographer of Robert Southey, for Shelley’s biography, and Florence Marshall, who had a musical background and had written a biography of Handel, for Mary’s. In their private letters, both Dowden and Marshall complained about Lady Shelley’s controlling nature, though Marshall seems to have experienced it far worse than Dowden. Lady Shelley gave Dowden a copy of Shelley and Mary outright (his copy is now at the British Library), but she limited Marshall’s access to the volumes and restricted what she could publish from them. Nevertheless, both Dowden’s The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1886) and Marshall’s The Life and Letters of Mary Shelley (1889) reprinted letters and journals from Shelley and Mary, effectively transmitting content from the private volumes into the public sphere. This transmission went a step further when Frederick L. Jones published the first scholarly edition of Mary Shelley’s letters in 1944. He reprinted letters directly from Shelley and Mary, identifying them as such, but treating them as complete and stable texts. He did not acknowledge—and possibly did not know—that the letters in Shelley and Mary were extensively edited and sometimes altered by Lady Shelley. Betty T. Bennett’s later magisterial edition of Mary Shelley’s letters, published between 1980 and 1988 and based on the original archival documents, corrected many discrepancies in Jones’s edition, but Bennett does not account for the variations among the surviving copies. Significantly, Jones and Bennett each owned a copy of Shelley and Mary. Thus, even though the volumes were published privately, their contents were not kept private. The material was printed and reprinted, finding its way into later Shelley biographies and scholarship.
CC: What do we know about the day-to-day relationship between Mary and Jane during those last three years they lived together, and how might that closeness have influenced Jane’s editorial choices?
NL: After Jane and Percy Florence’s marriage in 1848, Mary Shelley lived with them until her death in 1851. During this time, Jane and Mary formed a very close relationship, although detailed accounts of their daily activities are unavailable. Unfortunately, Jane’s letters and papers have not been collected or preserved in the same way as Mary’s, and Jane may have destroyed many of them before her death. I imagine Jane, who lost her own mother as a young girl, found a mother figure in Mary, and Mary, having lost both of her own daughters when they were very young, found a daughter in Jane.
By the time Jane married Percy Florence, Mary had already begun to experience headaches and other symptoms that may have indicated a brain tumor. For years, however, Mary had been organizing the letters and manuscripts of Percy Shelley, as well as those of her father, William Godwin, and her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, alongside her own papers. I believe Jane naturally assisted her with this work and continued it after Mary’s death.
CC: As an “unreliable narrator,” what kinds of omissions, exaggerations, or distortions do you see Jane making in her portrait of Mary, and what might she have been protecting or concealing?
NL: Jane’s omissions regarding Mary’s postpartum difficulties in the letter I mentioned earlier are indicative of the revisionist work she undertook in Shelley and Mary. In that work, Jane concludes the volumes precisely when we believe Mary Shelley began exhibiting symptoms of her illness. Thus, even there, Mary is not depicted as a flesh-and-blood person but as an eternal being.
Mary Shelley’s grave serves as an interesting example of the mythmaking Jane Shelley engaged in. According to Jane, it was Mary Shelley’s wish to be buried with her parents. Their graves, however, were in the churchyard of St. Pancras Old Church in London, an area now near King’s Cross and St. Pancras Railway Station. At the time of Mary Shelley’s death in 1851, the churchyard was run-down and neglected, and there were concerns that an extension of the Midland Railway line through the churchyard would cause further disruption. Concurrently, Jane and Percy Florence were completing their new home in Bournemouth on England’s southern coast, overlooking the ocean. Mary never lived in that home, but I imagine Jane could not bear the thought of burying Mary in a decrepit, distant London cemetery. Consequently, a few months after Mary Shelley’s death, Jane had the bodies of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin disinterred (leaving Godwin’s second wife, Mary Jane, behind) and transported them to Bournemouth. Initially, the rector at St. Peter’s church, where she wished to bury them, refused permission due to concerns about scandal. Jane then waited outside the gates with the bodies of Godwin and Wollstonecraft until the rector relented and allowed their burial.
CC: How did the version of Mary Shelley constructed in Shelley and Mary diverge from the woman revealed in her letters, journals, and other primary sources?
NL: Another notable omission, which I believe would surprise contemporary readers, is the exclusion of Frankenstein from the volumes. Today, one can consult Bennett’s collection of Mary Shelley’s letters and find several instances where Mary discusses her work on Frankenstein, or letters from others to Mary that mention the novel’s reception or popularity. However, Jane chose not to include these in the volumes. Even on the tombstone Jane designed, Mary is not listed as the author of Frankenstein.
The tomb monument, which now covers the graves of Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Percy Florence Shelley (d. 1889), and Jane Shelley (d. 1899), lists Godwin as the author of Political Justice and Wollstonecraft as the author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Mary Shelley, however, is listed only as their daughter and the widow of Percy Bysshe Shelley, with no mention of Frankenstein. In Jane’s portrayal, Mary Shelley is presented as a Victorian “angel in the house,” leaving no room for Mary Shelley the author.
CC: What finally began to erode Jane’s version of Mary Shelley in the public imagination, roughly a century after the book’s printing?
NL: I would say the simultaneous recovery of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley by feminist scholars and writers began in the 1960s and 1970s and continues today. Claire Tomalin’s biography, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), is a great example of the reclaiming of these women. Tomalin tells a wonderful story in an interview: when she began working on her biography of Wollstonecraft, no one knew who Mary Wollstonecraft was. “Mary who?” people would always say when she told them what she was working on. For a while, Tomalin simply called her biography, “Mary who?” I love this story because it so perfectly demonstrates the nature of recovery work. Anne Mellor’s Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters (1988) is groundbreaking for its intertwining of Shelley’s life and analysis of her writing, and Emily Sunstein’s Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (1989) is the comprehensive biography Mary Shelley deserves, remaining my favorite standalone biography of Mary Shelley. A great dual biography is Charlotte Gordon’s Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley (2015). I could not put this book down, and I recommend it to everyone.
Of course, earlier biographies of Mary Shelley are also essential reading, such as R. Glynn Grylls’s Mary Shelley: A Biography (1938), Muriel Spark’s Child of Light (1951), and Elizabeth Nitchie’s Mary Shelley (1954). I do think it is significant, however, that Mellor’s work appeared the same year Betty T. Bennett published the final volume of her edition. The momentum these publications created laid a new foundation not only for current scholarship but also for the further erosion of Jane’s version of Mary Shelley and for a public reimagining of Mary Shelley, giving us the more compelling, multi-dimensional historical figure and writer we know today.
CC: How has uncovering the story behind Shelley and Mary changed the way you read Mary Shelley’s own writing, including Frankenstein?
NL: I think in many ways, Shelley and Mary is like Frankenstein. It is composed of parts taken from different sources and stitched together to form a hulking, uneven creation. Shelley and Mary is 1,243 pages long; the Creature is 8 feet tall. Both stand out in a crowd. Like Frankenstein, Shelley and Mary reflects themes of power, control, authority, ambition, and unethical methodologies. Certainly, one could draw loose comparisons between Jane Shelley and Victor Frankenstein. They are both revisionists. They both tell the story they want others to remember and immortalize, not the story as it actually happened. We cannot take Victor at his word, nor should we take Jane at hers.
At the end of Frankenstein, we do not see the Creature die; we are only told that it has determined to end its life on its own terms. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that Jane does not show us Mary Shelley’s death at the end of Shelley and Mary either. In many ways, Mary Shelley, like her Creature, has never truly died in our imaginations. And we, like Walton, have told and retold the story that Jane created, adapting versions of Mary Shelley to fit our own desires and needs, enshrining her memory as we see fit, just as Jane did.
CC: If you could hand Mary Shelley a copy of Shelley and Mary today, what do you imagine she’d want to correct first?
NL: That is a tough question. I would hope that Mary Shelley would want to correct the erasure of herself as an author. I think Mary Shelley was quite proud of her work, especially Frankenstein and The Last Man, and her editorship of a posthumous edition of Shelley’s poetry. It is easy to look back in hindsight and recognize the impact that her writing and her work as an editor have had on literary history, literary scholarship, and popular culture. Frankenstein is a work that, like Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, we seem to know without having ever read because it is so ingrained in our imaginations—not only through adaptations and popular culture but also through discussions of science and ethics. With any new technology, like AI, we invariably ask if we are creating a “Frankenstein.” That is, are we creating something we cannot control and that could destroy us if it willed? That comparison is almost reflexive now, showing the depth to which Shelley’s work has been embedded in our cultural and social psyches. Whether she would like that idea or not, I cannot say, but I hope she would be proud to see the impact her writing and her own life have had on so many future generations.
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