In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

e p i l o g u e On Percy’s Case It shows too that a father is not to be trusted for natural instincts toward his o√spring. Mary Shelley, ‘‘Rousseau,’’ French Lives When I was twenty the one true Free spirit I had heard of was Shelley . . . Shelley, who, I learned later . . . Galway Kinnell, ‘‘Shelley’’ In the entire history of Western literary biography there is no worse nightmare son-in-law or family relation than Percy Bysshe Shelley.∞ Bad enough that this promising protégé quickly turned his attentions from his mentor to all three of the young daughters in the Godwin household and then absconded to the Continent with two of them in the middle of one July night, impregnated one and kept his intentions toward the other su≈ciently unclear for her never to return for any period to the parental household; and did this while married to another woman, with whom he had fathered one child and conceived another, whom he also invited to join the threesome on the Continent. He then went on to become one of only two fathers in the history of Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century to be refused custody rights to his biological children by the Court of the Chancery (when his first wife, Harriet Westbrook, committed suicide).≤ The grounds for this denial was a radicalism of thought that also estranged his titled wealthy father, financial access to whom was the primary reason that mentor Godwin had welcomed Shelley into the household in the first place. Once he was denied custody of the children, he never saw or even tried to see them again. Nor was his repeat performance as father or husband of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley much of an 258 England’s First Family of Writers improvement, for wife Mary later held him responsible for the death of at least one of their children, the birth of at least one who was definitely not hers, found herself constantly enjoined to welcome as bosom-sister a series of young women with whom her husband was infatuated, while also packing and moving the household a dizzying number of times. Nor can we make major claims for him as financial provider, flight from debt being one of the chief impulses behind all this movement. As a family relation Percy Shelley was a nightmare also because, shortly after his death, he eclipsed the life/writings and reputations of all his surrounding family members, an eclipse that holds to this day. The situation has improved markedly since the late 1980s, with the rise in interest in Mary Shelley, especially the ‘‘other Mary Shelley,’’ and renewed attention to the extensive writings of Godwin and Wollstonecraft. Still, the literary record is clear that, by the early Victorian period, Percy Shelley’s reputation, never solidified in his lifetime, was on the rise and that part of its ascent involved an intentional and inadvertent demotion of the other three.≥ Mary Shelley initiated the process in her devotion to editing and disseminating his works but also in desiring to be written out of the biographical record and by herself facilitating (not simply by publishing) his defense of poetry over against prose.∂ The priority ascribed to Percy Shelley ever after is largely a reflection of (this creation of) the pre-eminence of poetry, lyricism, and imagination in canonical romanticism—of which Shelley has often been the exemplar or representative case. But this epilogue explores how the priority is also the product of conscious and unconscious attempts to evaluate his life/writings apart from his positions on and embeddedness within this family and their writings, so that one has a better chance of granting them pride of place. For to focus on Shelley’s writings on family and performance as a family man prompts repeated charges that his life/writings are immoral, libertine, adolescent , perverse. To situate them within this writing family occasions the far less frequent, but more productive, claim that his life/writings are derivative. Though not its ostensible goal, the process of disconnecting Percy from family is visible in a reception history that is remarkable for intertwining literary history and family values. For starters, the tone and vehement sidestaking of this history are instructive, one critic characterizing the history of his reception as a ‘‘shouting match,’’ another noting that a ‘‘discouraging amount of the writing on Shelley at all periods has been polemical: violently for or against,’’ as if the Shelley...

Share