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CLAIRE SHERIDAN Anti-Social Sociability: Mary Shelley and the Posthumous “Pisa Gang” T his article draws on recent criticism of romantic biography, as well as scholarly attention to Romantic sociability and Romantic after­ lives, to revise our understanding ofhow Percy Shelley’s literary reputation was shaped and preserved by his friends immediately after his death. Julian North’s 2009 book on biography in the Romantic period, The Domestication of Genius, makes a crucial reassessment of the role of biogra­ phy in our understanding of the Romantic poets.1 In her discussion of Mary Shelley, North is especially attentive to Shelley’s affinity, developed in the biographies she wrote for Dionysius Lardner in Lives ofEminent Men, with the radical implications of biography as exemplified in Lives by Wil­ liam Godwin and Mary Hays. Nevertheless, North’s chapter on Mary Shelley also elides Mary’s complex relationship with solitude. This elision is a consequence of North’s argument that Mary Shelley’s biographical per­ sona is a sociable and feminine one, in contradistinction to Percy Shelley as an unsociable, masculine subject. While North characterizes Mary Shelley as being sociable in her role of posthumous, eyewitness biographer, I am struck by Mary’s paradoxical claims for solitude, of having outlived the so­ ciability of coterie, of being last. What I aim to do in this essay is consider Mary Shelley’s commemoraI . Julian North, The Domestication ofCenius: Biography and the Romantic Poet (Oxford: Ox­ ford University Press, 2009). North’s reading of Mary Shelley as Shelley’s biographer builds on previous accounts by Susan Wolfson, Mary Favret, and Michael O’Neill on the same sub­ ject. See Wolfson, “Editorial Privilege: Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley’s Audiences,” in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, eds. Audrey A. Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther H. Schor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 39—72; Favret, “Mary Shelley’s Sympathy and Irony: The Editor and Her Corpus,” in The Other Mary Shelley, 17—38; O’Neill, “‘Trying to Make It as Good as 1 Can’: Mary Shelley’s Editing of P. B. Shelley’s Poetry and Prose,” in Mary Shelley in Her Times, eds. Betty. T. Bennett and Stuart Curran (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 185—97. SiR, 52 (Fall 2013) 415 416 CLAIRE SHERIDAN tive work in relation to the contending memorializing activities of her friends and acquaintances. Previous interpretations ofMary Shelley as biog­ rapher have yet to do this. The critical point has still not been made explic­ itly that the content of the various “eyewitness” memoirs of Percy Shelley is mutually determined.2 Not only do claims for authority in certain mem­ oirs relate directly to similar claims in others, but the whole tone of some of these biographical works is related to behind-the-scenes tugs-of-war over the issue of who has the right to write about the shared past. This level of personal competition frequently results in claims to be the last of the coterie, claims that are a denial of the past as a shared one. Assertions of a unique status occur simultaneously with other identical assertions. The “Pisa gang” In 1873, Edward John Trelawny, the Byronic “adventurer” who had been one of the Shelleys’ close associates in Italy in 1821—22, wrote to Claire Clairmont: “Jane and you and I are the last of the Pisa gang.”3 The word “gang,” suggesting a roguish element to the group he is identifying in ret­ rospect, is a choice typical of Trelawny, whose celebrity was based on his piratical pretensions. “Gang” is also an appropriate denomination for some elements of the network that pertained at Pisa from January 1820, which encompassed Byron’s “Pistol Club,”4 5 and members of the revolutionary Carbonari, who were resisting Austrian rule in Italy. But the “gang” at Pisa can also be characterized in other ways. Betty T. Bennett has described “an international circle of British, Greek, and Italian friends.”3 In addition to the Shelleys, Byron, and Trelawny, this included, at various times, Claire Clairmont, Byron’s Italian mistress Teresa Guiccioli, her father and brother (the Garnbas), Percy Shelley’s cousin Thomas Medwin, his friends Jane and Edward Williams, the Greek...

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