12 - Mary Shelley, editor

Summary

Readers “divided into two classes”

“I am to justify his ways; I am to make him beloved to all posterity,” pledged Mary Shelley as her late husband's editor, aware that many thought her an unworthy mate. She proved herself with considerable labor: Posthumous Poems in 1824; two editions of Poetical Works in 1839; a volume of essays, letters, translations, and fragments the next year; and across the 1830s, the development of a mainstream audience with the literary remains she placed in the Keepsake, one of the gift-book annuals. The 1839 Works was the canonizing event, the “first stone of a monument due to Shelley's genius, his sufferings, and his virtues” (PW I Preface XVI). This monument was, in no small part, a reconstruction: a plan to rationalize and mediate a poetry of “mystic subtlety” or “huntings after the obscure” (xiii), and a plea of “extenuation” for “whatever faults” the poet had (viii), especially atheism and sedition. In giving “the productions of a sublime genius to the world, with all the correctness possible” (vii), more was involved than redemptive service to the poet: justifying the poet's ways to man, the editor also meant to redeem her worth to him. Across her volumes, she emerges as a uniquely privileged mediator, the intimate who is the poet's ideal, best reader. For this office, she had ready resources: her intimacy with the poet from 1814 on, her literate sympathy for his poetry and, not the least, her possession of much of his unpublished work.