The mystery of Harriet Shelley ...

... did she drown herself - or was she pushed?

 

Poor Harriet was the much maligned first wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley who plucked her from her respectable school for young ladies in Clapham (where she was a fellow boarder with his sister) at the tender age of 16 and ran off north with her to get married.

 

She was a spirited soul, as her few surviving letters show, who indulged her young husband's idealistic fads, handing out revolutionary leaflets and transcribing his manuscripts. And having babies. And putting up with his selfish crushes on other women.

 

But she suffered a proper dumping when he eventually came into the orbit of the philosopher William Godwin and his daughter Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin. The story goes that, highly pregnant with her third child (whose father may or may not have been Shelley or an army officer), she walked into the Serpentine one November day in 1816 and drowned herself, aged 21.

 

Little is known about poor Harriet beyond her tragic end. There is no portrait and only a few letters to show she ever existed. She had brought disgrace on her own family and was living in lodgings at the time of her death, though her father, a well-to-do merchant, provided her with money. Her existence seems to have been well and truly suppressed by Shelley, Godwin and his daughter, a fact which has outraged some and prompted support from some notable supporters down the centuries, most notably Mark Twain who wrote a sizzling essay, In Defence of Harriet Shelley.

 

More recently she has become the subject of a conspiracy theory which places William Godwin in the frame as murderer.

 

Godwin spent most of his life in debt and buttonholing people for "loans". Shelley provided him with generous funds to keep him and his dire bookselling business afloat. The theory goes that Shelley looked as if he was going to return to his wife (they had had a second official marriage) and Godwin, seeing his income under serious threat, managed somehow to do away with Harriet. It is a very strange thing that her suicide note, which many claim to be a forgery given that it is not in her hand, was found among Godwin's papers after his death.

 

Did Mary Shelley, who hated Harriet with a vengeance, know about or even collude in the crime and did some trace of it - or rather her or her father's guilt - subsequently find its way into her masterpiece, Frankenstein?

Who knows?

That is the fascination of conspiracy theories.

 

In the meantime I was between Writers' Houses and concocted an imaginary portrait of poor Harriet Westbrook Shelley.

Working on Wordsworth

It's coming together at last.

I was still faffing around in a fairly directionless manner, abandoning the board and going back to my doodle book.

 Then I found these four tranquil lines from a longer poem by Wordsworth called To Sleep:

A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by

One after one; the sound of rain, and bees

Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,

Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky ...

Then I found a couple of full page Dolce & Gabanna ads in some magazines I bought at the car boot sale on Saturday .... allowing me some big pieces for smooth fields in just the right Lake Districty shade ...

 Another day or two and plenty of foliage should do it.

I want to keep it looking rough-hewn.

The Dove and Olive, Grasmere

The Dove and Olive was the name of William Wordsworth's seventeenth century cottage during its time as an inn. Some also refer to it as The Dove and Olive Bough. By the time the Wordsworths (brother and sister) moved in on December 20 1799, it had been empty for several years and was known as Dove Cottage.

Here, on the edge of Grasmere lake, William and Dorothy - and eventually William's wife Mary - spent eight idyllic years of "plain living and high thinking".

It was the beginning of English Romanticism and here was written Wordsworth's greatest poetry.

Here endeth the lesson.

And here starteth the collage.

I made the mistake of laying down papers and playing around with them on the hideously bright Mediterranean blue cartridge paper currently covering my drawing board.

THAT IS NOT THE BACKGROUND!!!

I always start off with the windows.

The windows are the eyes to a building's soul.

To badly misquote somebody or other.

The left hand window was finished. Or so I thought. It is now binned. For being too neat.

The windows (and everything else) will be pretty much as you see the rest here: rough hewn and sort of geological. To echo the rugged Lake District. No good giving this home a delicate refined look. It is an honest seventeeth century cottage set in a landscape fashioned by glaciers rather than man.

I lived in a primitive, thick-walled seventeenth century cottage in the north once. Massive thick walls and little in the way of refinement - and that was the twentieth century. So I feel a kinship and am keeping the feel of the thing primitive and "plain living". Earthy. No mod cons. Part of the landscape.

Anyway, more later ...

The enigmatic Miss Kent

Another imaginary portrait of one of the women of the Romantic circle who oiled the wheels that allowed the men to take centre stage (now there's a mixture of metaphors)...

Bess Kent was the sister-in-law of radical journalist and poet Leigh Hunt. He was introduced to the Kent sisters by a mutual friend who knew the 11-year-old Bess was keen to meet him after reading one of his essays in a political journal. Hunt fell for and eventually married the sexy older sister but the triangular relationship lasted for many years and rumours of incest dogged poor Bess who was undoubtedly in love with Hunt.

The more intellectual and social Bess acted as amenuensis, administrator and hostess while her harrassed and indolent sister produced a brood of unruly children and eventually sank into invalidism and ultimately alcoholism. Bess herself had a legendary temper, a sometime opium dependency and made several attempts on her own life.

But once the Hunts had left for Italy she appears to have blossomed, becoming an independent woman, writing botanical books  - her Flora Domestica, or, the portable flower-garden: with directions for the treatment of plants in pots and illustrations from the works of the poets was a popular hit and the first gardening book of its kind - and carrying on a long friendship by letter (they never met) with the poet John Clare.
Few of her letters survive and she never sat for her portrait.

Mad, bad and difficult to decide ...

... on how to go about portraying Newstead Abbey, Lord Byron's gothic pile in Nottinghamshire. Which I have decided to do.
Having collaged the homes of his fellow Romantic Poets, Keats and Shelley, I feel I can't leave out Byron though his place is nothing if not a real rambler of a building and hard to get a handle on.

Byron wasn't born at Newstead Abbey but grew up there with his querulous mother and the dilapidated  building and its history obviously had an enormous and lasting influence on his life and work.

"Eternally romantic and beautiful, like a smaller version of the great cathedrals of Wells or Salisbury, the great west front of Newstead Abbey stands as one of the most perfect examples of thirteenth century monastic architecture. The Abbey has a long history, but it is the spirit of the sixth Lord Byron which pervades the place today ..."

During the course of one of his not infrequent cash flow problems Byron ordered his servants to dig up floors looking for treasure reputedly buried by monks centuries before, but all they found were a number of stone coffins full of bones. He had a drinking cup made from one of the skulls.

The building is said to be home to any number of ghosts, including a nebulous black shape with staring eyes, a white lady and The Black Friar - this last immortalised by Byron in his poem Don Juan - the appearance of which was believed to portend bad luck for the family that had usurped the monastic order's home ...

All in all I think a large helping of Gothic Romance with a bit of spectral horror a la Fuseli is called for for this one ... but I am determined to introduce Boatswain into the picture somehow, Byron's beloved huge Newfoundland dog who has a magnificent tomb at the Abbey.
Animals were one of his lifelong passions.

And apropos of dogs, here is a tiny collage I did the other day:

It really is tiny, playing card size, based on a previous collage of Fanny Keats's dog Carlo. Another poetic pet. Just playing around, in between pictures, with leftover scraps I am too miserly to throw away.
Right, off to do some more research and review my stash of suitable papers ...