Introduction

The editor came across the unpublished texts included in this volume
as early as 1905. Perhaps he ought to apologize for delaying their
appearance in print. The fact is he has long been afraid of overrating
their intrinsic value. But as the great Shelley centenary year has
come, perhaps this little monument of his wife's collaboration may
take its modest place among the tributes which will be paid to his
memory. For Mary Shelley's mythological dramas can at least claim to
be the proper setting for some of the most beautiful lyrics of the
poet, which so far have been read in undue isolation. And even as a
literary sign of those times, as an example of that classical
renaissance which the romantic period fostered, they may not be
altogether negligible.

These biographical and literary points have been dealt with in an
introduction for which the kindest help was long ago received from the
late Dr. Garnett and the late Lord Abinger. Sir Walter Raleigh was
also among the first to give both encouragement and guidance. My
friends M. Emile Pons and Mr. Roger Ingpen have read the book in
manuscript. The authorities of the Bodleian Library and of the
Clarendon Press have been as generously helpful as is their well-known
wont. To all the editor wishes to record his acknowledgements and
thanks.

STRASBOURG.

INTRODUCTION.

I.

'The compositions published in Mrs. Shelley's lifetime afford but an
inadequate conception of the intense sensibility and mental vigour of
this extraordinary woman.'

Thus wrote Dr. Garnett, in 1862 (Preface to his _Relics of Shelley_).
The words of praise may have sounded unexpectedly warm at that date.
Perhaps the present volume will make the reader more willing to
subscribe, or less inclined to demur.

Mary Godwin in her younger days certainly possessed a fair share of
that nimbleness of invention which generally characterizes women of
letters. Her favourite pastime as a child, she herself testifies,
[Footnote: Preface to the 1831 edition of _Frankenstein_.] had been to
write stories. And a dearer pleasure had been--to use her own
characteristic abstract and elongated way of putting it--'the
following up trains of thought which had for their subject the
formation of a succession of imaginary incidents'. All readers of
Shelley's life remember how later on, as a girl of nineteen--and a two
years' wife--she was present, 'a devout but nearly silent listener',
at the long symposia held by her husband and Byron in Switzerland
(June 1816), and how the pondering over 'German horrors', and a common
resolve to perpetrate ghost stories of their own, led her to imagine
that most unwomanly of all feminine romances, _Frankenstein._ The
paradoxical