ABSTRACT
On 22 August 1824, two years after Shelley’s death, Mary Shelley wrote from London to Leigh Hunt who was still in Italy with his family (thinking of the distance between the two countries, she commented, ‘... it seems to me as if I wrote to Paradise from Purgatory’). As in many of her letters from the years immediately after Shelley’s death, financial concerns are uppermost. With Peacock’s help, she has, she says, begun a ‘Negociation’ with her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley. In return for ‘sacrificing a small part of my future expectations on the will’ (by which she means the money that will come to her on his death) ‘I shall ensure myself a sufficiency, for the present’ (Bennett, Letters, I, 444). There is, however, a condition – a condition with which she has no choice but to comply. ‘I have been obliged however as an indispensable preliminary, to suppress the Post. Poems – More than 300 copies had been sold so this is the less provoking, and I have been obliged to promise not to bring dear S’s name before the public again during Sir. T—’s life. There is no great harm in this, since he is above 70, & from choice I should not think of writing memoirs now’. She adds that, by the account that she has had from Sir Timothy’s lawyer, ‘Sir T. writhes under the fame of his incomparable son as if it were a most grievous injury done to him’.
