Mary Shelley

Shortly after Mary Shelley's widow returned to England from Italy in 18-23, Crabb Robinson met her at Godwin's house. "She looks elegant and sickly and young," he reported. "One would not suppose she was the author of 'Frankenstein.'"

Certainly there was nothing in Mary Shelley's physical appearance to remind an observer of monsters and presumptuous scientists. She was of middle stature with sloping shoulders, slender, even thin as a girl. The portraits of her whether at nineteen or at forty-four show the same features: the gray eyes, the broad, high forehead -her "great tablet of a forehead," as Hunt called it - and the fair hair, "of a sunny and burnished brightness," falling "like a golden network round her face and throat" or braided high on the crown of her head. The portraits bear out the never too reliable evidence of Medwin and Thornton Hunt that she grew better looking as she grew older.

Mary Shelley, however, thought her beautiful from the very start. "White, bright, and clear," as Christy Baxter remembered her, she must have been when he fell in love with her, a slender girl of sixteen, her fairness and poise standing out against the dark moodiness of Claire Clairmont and the gentle shyness of Fanny Imlay, and contrasting with the rosy bloom of Harriet. Her outward serenity must have soothed his inner turmoil over the domestic crisis which was separating him from Harriet. "Gentle and good and mild thou art," he told her in a poem written soon after she admitted her love for him. When separated from her he longed for a sight of her "redeeming eyes" and found consolation in her letters: "So soothing so powerful and quiet are your expressions that it is almost like folding you to my heart." Shelley's life was full of storms, and he was constantly needing green isles of serenity. "Love far more than hatred," he wrote to Mary in August of 1821, "has been to me, except as you have been its object, the source of all sort [sic] of mischief." When Mary Shelley herself was torn by storms, he found rest in the quietness of Jane Williams with her guitar music: "a sort of spirit of embodied peace in our circle of tempests"- until in the crowded joint kitchen of Casa Magni she began to long for her own saucepans.

The young Mary Shelley he saw as clothed in the radiance of her mother's glory, endowed by her father with an immortal name. They had endowed her with more than beauty or reflected glory or a name. It was her mind and understanding and her heritage of liberal ideas as much as her physical charm that convinced Mary Shelley that he had found "an inestimable treasure." He was lost in admiration, he said, of her subtle and exquisitely fashioned intelligence, unequalled among women. "And I possess this treasure!" Hers was an understanding "made clear by a spirit that sees into the truth of things, free from vulgar superstition."

Mary Shelley was not alone in feeling the attraction of Mary's personality. She enjoyed the warm, affectionate friendship of people as diverse as Leigh Hunt and Maria Gisborne. She was no insignificant part of the groups of friends in Florence , Rome , and Pisa during Shelley's lifetime. To John Howard Payne in 1825 she was "a being so beyond all others, that, even though her qualities are certainly 'images' of what is promised in 'heaven above' I can kneel down and worship them without dreading the visitation upon idolatry." In her he saw the "union of superior intellectual endowments with simplicity, fervour, and elevation and purity of character."