SHELLEY'S MARY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 734, 7 August 1953, Page 12

SHELLEY'S MARY

MY BEST MARY, The Selected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, edited by Muriel Spark and Derek Stanford; Wingate. English price, 15/-. "HIS is a popular edition of the letters of Mary Shelley, and altogether it seems a Somewhat dubious enterprise. The letters of figures of the past are worth publishing only on two grounds. Either they are worth reading for themselves, like the letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle-or Richard Steele or Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; or they are worth publishing for the information they contain about the writer or his associates or the life of his times. If a man is a good letter writer, be he a major or minor figure, a popular edition with the

minimum of scholarly comment is more than worth while, But if the value of the letters lies in the information they contain their appeal is limited to the researcher in literary or social history. This present edition falls between two stools. The solid, fully documented and fully annotated edition of Mary Shelley’s letters appeared in 1944. If we want to get from her letters the great-deal of valuable information that Mary Shelley has to offer on her husband, and on Byron and‘ Leigh Hunt and the rest of the Italian-English circle in which the Romantic poets.moved, we go to Professor Jones’s excellent scholarly edition, with its index and other aids. If we want to read a set of letters just for plain enjoyment, then we do not go to Mary ‘Shelley. She is a solemn self-righteous female "swot" (a daughter of William Godwin could hardly be other), who writes her letters with a wooden spoon. Her early letters to Shelley-gét me eight yards of’ flannel, I need another bottle of laxative, Clara does not thrive on cow’s milk(while no doubt what most wives write _to most husbands) make deadly dull reading. Mary Shelley ‘was a .worthy woman, and all in all she had not much . of a life. She stuck by Shelley while he was alive and stuck by his memory when he died. She produced what is still the best edition of his poems., But, dear, oh dear! she was no letter writer.

I.A.

G.