FREE BOOKS

Author's List




PREV.   NEXT  
|<   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106  
107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   >>   >|  
rt a wife at a time when she is about to become a mother. It seems ungenerous, again, when a man has an income of L1,000 a year to make an annual allowance of only L200 to a deserted wife and her two children. Shelley, however, had not married Harriet for love. A nineteen-year-old boy, he had run away with a seventeen-year-old girl in order to save her from the imagined tyranny of her father. At the end of three years Harriet had lost interest in him. Besides this, she had an intolerable elder sister whom Shelley hated. Harriet's sister, it is suggested, influenced her in the direction of a taste for bonnet-shops instead of supporting Shelley's exhortations to her that she should cultivate her mind. "Harriet," says Mr. Ingpen in _Shelley in England_, "foolishly allowed herself to be influenced by her sister, under whose advice she probably acted when, some months earlier, she prevailed upon Shelley to provide her with a carriage, silver plate and expensive clothes." We cannot help sympathizing a little with Harriet. At the same time, she was making a breach with Shelley inevitable. She wished him to remain her husband and to pay for her bonnets, but she did not wish even to pretend to "live up to him" any longer. As Mr. Ingpen says, "it was love, not matrimony," for which Shelley yearned. "Marriage," Shelley had once written, echoing Godwin, "is hateful, detestable. A kind of ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine its energies." Having lived for years in a theory of "anti-matrimonialism," he now saw himself doomed to one of those conventional marriages which had always seemed to him a denial of the holy spirit of love. This, too, at a time when he had found in Mary Godwin a woman belonging to the same intellectual and spiritual race as himself--a woman whom he loved as the great lovers in all the centuries have loved. Shelley himself expressed the situation in a few characteristic words to Thomas Love Peacock: "Everyone who knows me," he said, "must know that the partner of my life should be one who can feel poetry and understand philosophy. Harriet is a noble animal, but she can do neither." "It always appeared to me," said Peacock, "that you were very fond of Harriet." Shelley replied: "But you did not know how I hated her sister." And so Harriet's marriage-lines were, torn up, as people say nowadays, like a scrap of pap
PREV.   NEXT  
|<   82   83   84   85   86   87   88   89   90   91   92   93   94   95   96   97   98   99   100   101   102   103   104   105   106  
107   108   109   110   111   112   113   114   115   116   117   118   119   120   121   122   123   124   125   126   127   128   129   130   131   >>   >|  



Top keywords:

Shelley

 

Harriet

 

sister

 
Peacock
 
Godwin
 

Ingpen

 
influenced
 

matrimonialism

 

theory

 

people


marriages
 

marriage

 

denial

 

conventional

 

Having

 
doomed
 

forged

 

disgust

 

seizes

 
sickening

ineffable

 
detestable
 

nowadays

 

confine

 

prejudice

 

despotic

 

unrequired

 
fetter
 

energies

 

animal


hateful

 

characteristic

 

expressed

 

situation

 

Thomas

 

partner

 

poetry

 

Everyone

 

philosophy

 

understand


centuries

 

belonging

 

intellectual

 

spiritual

 

lovers

 

appeared

 
replied
 

spirit

 

making

 

tyranny