In Defence of Harriet Shelley eBook

Six?  There were seven; but in charity to the biographer the seventh ought not to be exposed.  Still, he hung it out himself, and not only hung it out, but thought it was a good point in Shelley’s favor.  For two years Shelley found sympathy and intellectual food and all that at home; there was enough for spiritual and mental support, but not enough for luxury; and so, at the end of the contented two years, this latter detail justifies him in going bag and baggage over to Cornelia Turner and supplying the rest of his need in the way of surplus sympathy and intellectual pie unlawfully.  By the same reasoning a man in merely comfortable circumstances may rob a bank without sin.

III

It is 1814, it is the 16th of March, Shelley has, written his letter, he has been in the Boinville paradise a month, his deserted wife is in her husbandless home.  Mischief had been wrought.  It is the biographer who concedes this.  We greatly need some light on Harriet’s side of the case now; we need to know how she enjoyed the month, but there is no way to inform ourselves; there seems to be a strange absence of documents and letters and diaries on that side.  Shelley kept a diary, the approaching Mary Godwin kept a diary, her father kept one, her half-sister by marriage, adoption, and the dispensation of God kept one, and the entire tribe and all its friends wrote and received letters, and the letters were kept and are producible when this biography needs them; but there are only three or four scraps of Harriet’s writing, and no diary.  Harriet wrote plenty of letters to her husband—­nobody knows where they are, I suppose; she wrote plenty of letters to other people—­apparently they have disappeared, too.  Peacock says she wrote good letters, but apparently interested people had sagacity enough to mislay them in time.  After all her industry she went down into her grave and lies silent there—­silent, when she has so much need to speak.  We can only wonder at this mystery, not account for it.

No, there is no way of finding out what Harriet’s state of feeling was during the month that Shelley was disporting himself in the Bracknell paradise.  We have to fall back upon conjecture, as our fabulist does when he has nothing more substantial to work with.  Then we easily conjecture that as the days dragged by Harriet’s heart grew heavier and heavier under its two burdens—­shame and resentment:  the shame of being pointed at and gossiped about as a deserted wife, and resentment against the woman who had beguiled her husband from her and now kept him in a disreputable captivity.  Deserted wives—­deserted whether for cause or without cause—­find small charity among the virtuous and the discreet.  We conjecture that one after another the neighbors ceased to call; that one after another they got to being “engaged” when Harriet called; that finally they one after the other cut her dead on the street; that after that she stayed in the house daytimes, and brooded over her sorrows, and nighttimes did the same, there being nothing else to do with the heavy hours and the silence and solitude and the dreary intervals which sleep should have charitably bridged, but didn’t.