Mary Shelley
Editorial work

"The qualities that struck anyone newly introduced to Shelley, were, first, a gentle and cordial goodness that animated his intercourse with warm affection, and helpful sympathy. The other, the eagerness and ardour with which he was attached to the cause of human happiness and improvement."

— Mary Shelley, "Preface", Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley

Soon after Percy Shelley's death, Mary Shelley determined to write his biography. In a letter of 17 November 1822, she announced: "I shall write his life—& thus occupy myself in the only manner from which I can derive consolation." However, her father-in-law, Sir Timothy Shelley, effectively banned her from doing so. Mary began her fostering of Percy's poetic reputation in 1824 with the publication of his Posthumous Poems. In 1839, while she was working on the Lives, she prepared a new edition of his poetry, which became, in the words of literary scholar Susan J. Wolfson, "the canonizing event" in the history of her husband's reputation. The following year, Mary Shelley edited a volume of her husband's essays, letters, translations, and fragments, and throughout the 1830s, she introduced his poetry to a wider audience by publishing assorted works in the annual The Keepsake.

Evading Sir Timothy's ban on a biography, Mary Shelley often included in these editions her own annotations and reflections on her husband's life and work. "I am to justify his ways," she had declared in 1824; "I am to make him beloved to all posterity." It was this goal, argues Blumberg, that led her to present Percy's work to the public in the "most popular form possible". To tailor his works for a Victorian audience, she cast Percy Shelley as a lyrical rather than a political poet. As Mary Favret writes, "the disembodied Percy identifies the spirit of poetry itself". Mary glossed Percy's political radicalism as a form of sentimentalism, arguing that his republicanism arose from sympathy for those who were suffering. She inserted romantic anecdotes of his benevolence, domesticity, and love of the natural world. Portraying herself as Percy's "practical muse", she also noted how she had suggested revisions as he wrote.

Despite the emotions stirred by this task, Mary Shelley arguably proved herself in many respects a professional and scholarly editor. Working from Percy's messy, sometimes indecipherable, notebooks, she attempted to form a chronology for his writings, and she included poems, such as Epipsychidion, addressed to Emilia Viviani, which she would rather have left out. She was forced, however, into several compromises, and, as Blumberg notes, "modern critics have found fault with the edition and claim variously that she miscopied, misinterpreted, purposely obscured, and attempted to turn the poet into something he was not". According to Wolfson, Donald Reiman, a modern editor of Percy Bysshe Shelley's works, still refers to Mary Shelley's editions, while acknowledging that her editing style belongs "to an age of editing when the aim was not to establish accurate texts and scholarly apparatus but to present a full record of a writer's career for the general reader". In principle, Mary Shelley believed in publishing every last word of her husband's work; but she found herself obliged to omit certain passages, either by pressure from her publisher, Edward Moxon, or in deference to public propriety. For example, she removed the atheistic passages from Queen Mab for the first edition. After she restored them in the second edition, Moxon was prosecuted and convicted of blasphemous libel, though the prosecution was brought out of principle by the Chartist publisher Henry Hetherington, and no punishment was sought. Mary Shelley's omissions provoked criticism, often stinging, from members of Percy Shelley's former circle, and reviewers accused her of, among other things, indiscriminate inclusions. Her notes have nevertheless remained an essential source for the study of Percy Shelley's work. As Bennett explains, "biographers and critics agree that Mary Shelley's commitment to bring Shelley the notice she believed his works merited was the single, major force that established Shelley's reputation during a period when he almost certainly would have faded from public view".
change_case:english_lowercase