Accidentally found unpublished letters of the author of the famous novel "Frankenstein" Mary Shelley, written between 1831 and 1849, reveal a woman who boldly and successfully sought and received favors from friends, full of pride and concern for her teenage son, prone to small pleasures, writes the British " Guardian".
The letters were discovered quite by chance by romanticism expert Nora Kruk from the University of Cambridge, looking for information about some lesser-known authors from the 13th century. On the website of the Essex County Archives, Crook stumbled upon a text titled "Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft to Shelley." When she clicked, she discovered 1831 letters dated between 1849, nine years after the death of her husband, the poet Percy Bysh Shelley, and XNUMX, when she was already suffering from health problems related to a brain tumor that she would lose her battle with two years later.
"I knew right away that the letters were never published," Kruk said. In one of the earlier letters, Mary remembers the headdress she wore at the coronation of William IV in 1831. ('He was so lovely – diamonds and gold-stitched cloth, so pleasing to the eye'), while later letters, written in an increasingly uncertain hand, are shorter and disconnected, full of apologies for frequent forgetting and loss of strength.
Some of them still have her, so far unknown, seal. The letters were addressed to Horace Smith, a close friend of her late husband whose family she became close to after his death, and to his daughter Eliza.
"It is known that they were friends, but the letters complete the puzzle, confirming some assumptions of experts that could not be verified before," Kruk points out.
Mary uses the letters to extract favors from Smith - asking him to edit a manuscript as well as permission and permission to publish letters in which her late husband expresses hostile attitudes towards religion (Smith agreed in both cases).
The most touching part of the letters is the pride in her son Percy, the only survivor of the four children. Although she is happy because "Percy is growing up to be a very decent man", who is "developing tastes and talents reminiscent of his father", Mary is "desperate because he is not taller".
The letters also reveal how her health is deteriorating, while they do not even touch on her most famous novel, Frankenstein.
The letters will soon see the light of day in the American publication "Keats-Shelley Journal".
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