ABSTRACT
In 1825, Mary Shelley became acquainted with three women who were to play consequential roles in her life: Isabella Robinson and Mary Diana Dods for a period became her dear friends (Bennett, Mary Diana Dods, p. 13); the third, Eliza Rennie Walker, a writer, would eventually play the role of chronicler. Rennie’s Traits indicates she met Mary Shelley at the house of the eccentric Dr William Kitchener (1775–1827). A physician and culinary expert, Kitchener hosted a salon in his London home every Tuesday night; among the luminaries he invited were Godwin, Mary Shelley, Mary Diana Dods, and a number of other friends and acquaintances of Mary Shelley. Rennies memoir provides a picture of Mary Shelley as if she had led a perfectly conventional life; it also, perhaps inadvertently, tells us about what was no doubt the most unconventional friendship of Mary Shelley’s life.
