ABSTRACT
Lady Jane Shelley, wife of Shelley’s son Sir Percy Shelley, is the one author of passages in this anthology who never met Shelley – but then she wrote as a family representative rather than as an individual. The tide page of her volume of Memorials declares it to have been ‘Edited by Lady Shelley’. The reader was asked to believe that she was not the inventor of a narrative, but merely the publisher of evidence (‘From Authentic Sources’). The book was presented as an authorised collection of data about the poet – a family document, rather than the creation of a particular writer. And there was some truth in this. Sir Percy Shelley, who had inherited the baronetcy from his grandfather in 1844, was certainly concerned about his father’s reputation, and had indicated his dissatisfaction with the version of Shelley’s life given by his old university friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg – a version that he had himself sponsored (see headnote in this volume to Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley). Yet, equally certainly, Sir Percy did not have the wherewithal to produce his own account (‘no aim – no exertion – no ambition’, admitted his otherwise doting mother in a letter to Claire Clairmont: Bennett, Letters, III, p. 83). He reserved his energies mostly for yachting and amateur dramatics, and trusted to his wife to build a proper version of the Shelley legend.
