From the letters of Percy and Mary Shelley

Letters and journals written two hundred years ago are the raw material I'm using to create my new graphic novel. Let's go back to June 1822, when Mary and Percy were living in the bay of La Spezia

Sometimes while working at my comic book I feel like I’m digging underground, trying to save someone. I’m not really rescuing anyone, of course, but it is true that I’m trying to bring again to light words and stories from two hundred years ago. The raw material I work with are letters and journals that are now probably read only by a small group of academics. But these letters are so rich, so full of wonders, and they were written by some of the greatest writers ever lived! And I think they are a great way to feel a connection with authors who risk to appear very distant to us now.

Let’s take the letters written by Mary and Percy Shelley. In their correspondence, their writing style is more direct, more modern I would dare to say, compared to their novels and poetry. It’s easier to relate to them: suddenly we realize how very young they were, still in their twenties. Let’s take a specific event occurred to Mary Shelley in June 1822, while she and her Percy were living in San Terenzio, Lerici, in a villa on the shores of the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Mary was only 24 years old then but she had already gave birth to four children. Only one of them - Percy Florence - was still alive. Clara Everina and William had died short after the Shelley’s arrival in Italy, in 1818 and 1819. Then the couple finally had two years of relative peace: they settled in Pisa and found the time to work on their poems and novels. Mary’s health was shaken by these losses and she was often ill or affected by “ill spirits”. In June 1822, however, Mary was in the third month of a new pregnancy, when she had a miscarriage. Just a month later, in July 1822, Percy died in a shipwreck in the bay of La Spezia. So in my graphic novel Mary’s miscarriage marks the end of a period of calm and works as a premonition of Percy’s death.

This is how Percy describes the event in his letters.

Poor Mary who sends you a thousand loves has been seriously ill, She is still too unwell to rise from the sofa, and must take great care of herself for some time.

Mary will write soon ; at present she suffers greatly from excess of weakness, produced by a severe miscarriage, from which she is now slowly recovering. Her situation for some hours was alarming, and as she was totally destitute of medical assistance, I took the most decisive resolutions, by dint of making her sit in ice, I succeeded in checking the hemorrhage and the fainting fits, so that when the physician arrived all danger was over, and he had nothing to do but to applaud me for my boldness. She is now doing well, and the sea-baths will soon restore her.

And this is how I translated Percy’s letter into comics:

Mary herself would recall the events in a letter written some weeks later (I’ve drawn this letter too, but I can’t show everything here, you will have to wait for the book to be printed!).

On the 8th of June (I think it was) I was threatened with a miscarriage, & after a week of great ill health on sunday the 16th this took place at eight in the morning. I was so ill that for seven hours I lay nearly lifeless - kept from fainting by brandy, vinegar eau de Cologne &c - at length ice was brought to our solitude - it came before the doctor so Clare & Jane¹ were afraid of using it but Shelley overuled them & by an unsparing application of it I was restored. They all thought & so did I at one time that I was about to die - I hardly wish that I had, my own Shelley could never have lived without me, the sense of eternal misfortune would have pressed to heavily upon him, & what would have become of my poor babe?

Mary’s letter continue with a sketch of Villa Magni. I’m always thrilled when I find a drawing like this, it’s like gold to me (I redrawn it because the original is very small). We learn from it that Percy and Mary did not share the same bedroom.

I must describe our house to you. The floor on which we lived was thus

1 Is a terrace that went the whole length of our house & was precipitous to the sea.

2 the large dining hall.

3 a private staircase.

4 my bedroom.

5 Mrs William’s bedroom.

6 Shelleys.

7 the entrance from the great staircase.

I love how different artists who visited Italy connect through the centuries. 113 years later, in 1933, Virginia Woolf was taking a sort of pilgrimage in San Terenzio, during one of her frequent voyages in Italy. I’m currently working on this entry from her journal:

[Shelley] chose a harbour; a bay; & his home, with a balcony, on which Mary stood, looks out across the sea. Sloping sail boats were coming in this morning - a windy little town, of hign pink & yellow Southern houses, not much changed I suppose; very full of the breaking of waves, very much open to the sea; & the rather desolate house standing with the sea just in front. Shelley, I suppose, bathed, walked sat on the beach here; and Mary & Mrs Williams had their coffee on the balcony. I daresay the clothes & the people were much the same.

Shelley’s house waiting by the sea, & Shelley not coming, & Mary & Mrs Williams watching from the balcony & then Trelawny coming from Pisa & burning the body on the shore² - thats in my mind.

1. Claire Clairmont was Mary’s stepsister; Jane Cleveland Williams and her husband Edgar Williams shared Villa Magni with the Shelleys.

2. John Edgar Trelawny was a friend of the Shelleys: he took upon himself all the matters regarding the funeral of Percy, including his burial in the Protestant cemetery in Rome, where the poet currently rests. Later Trelawny wrote about those events in his book Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (1858).