The Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Complete

The following biography was undertaken at the request of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley, and has been compiled from the MS. journals and letters in their possession, which were entrusted to me, without reserve, for this purpose.

The earlier portions of the journal having been placed also at Professor Dowden's disposal for his Life of Shelley, it will be found that in my first volume many passages indispensable to a life of Mary Shelley have already appeared, in one form or another, in Professor Dowden?s pages. This fact I have had to ignore, having indeed settled on the quotations necessary to my narrative before the Life of Shelley appeared. They are given without comment or dilution, just as they occur; where omissions are made it is in order to avoid repetition, or because the everyday entries refer to trivial circumstances uninteresting to the general reader.

Letters which have previously been published are shortened when they are only of moderate interest; unpublished letters are given complete wherever possible.

Those who hope to find in these pages much new circumstantial evidence on the vexed subject of Shelley?s separation from his first wife will be disappointed. No contemporary document now exists which puts the case beyond the reach of argument. Collateral evidence is not wanting, but even were this not beyond the scope of the present work it would be wrong on the strength of it to assert more than that Shelley himself felt certain of his wife?s unfaithfulness. Of that there is no doubt, nor of the fact that all such evidence as did afterwards transpire went to prove him more likely to have been right than wrong in his belief.