Ada Dwyer Russell. After her parents’ deaths, Amy invited Ada to live with her in their baronial mansion in a manner that caused several to compare them to the Paris-bound duo Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
Indeed, they had the same relational dynamic, with former actress Russell playing Toklas’s role as cook, nurse, and companion. Ada was no mere muse, however; the two worked together and sparked each other’s creativity. Amy even talked about hanging up a shingle outside her family mansion, Sevenels, saying, “Lowell & Russell, Makers of Fine Poems.”
Amy Lowell also pursued her poetic vision by traveling to meet others and sought out Ezra Pound, Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, H. D., Robert Frost, and John Gould Fletcher, with whom she forged lasting friendships. The success of her imagist masterpieces Can Grande’s Castle and Pictures of the Floating World prompted Ezra Pound, ostensibly the founder of that movement, to start calling the radical new style “Amygism.” In 1925, she wrote What O’Clock, which won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry after her death that year from a cerebral hemorrhage.
Little cramped words scrawling all over the paper
Like draggled fly’s legs
What can you tell me of the flaring moon?
Through the oak leaves?
Amy Lowell, from “The Letter”
MARY SHELLEY Gothic greatness
Nearly everyone in Mary Shelley’s life was a writer. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was one of the first feminist writers and thinkers; her father, William Godwin, wrote philosophical theory. Their home in England was a regular gathering place for the radical elite; Charles Lamb and Samuel Coleridge were among their regular visitors. Politically, her parents were revolutionaries who disapproved of marriage, but still went through with the legalities to legitimize Mary upon her birth in 1797. Mary Wollstonecraft died eleven days after the baby was born, and Godwin fell apart, neglecting his daughter terribly, perhaps even blaming her for his beloved wife’s death. He later remarried and let relatives, nannies, and his new wife take whatever care of Mary they chose. Mary recalled learning to write by tracing her mother’s name on her gravestone at her father’s urging.
At seventeen, Mary met the married playboy poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and ran away with him to Europe, returning after a few weeks to London as he was drowning in debt. By 1816, the couple had a more secure financial footing and headed for the continent again, this time to Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, to a party with Shelley’s friend Lord Byron. A bout of ghost stories told around the fire as a distraction from an unusually cold summer inspired nineteen-year-old Mary to pick up a pen. Written in one year, Frankenstein is now hailed as the first Gothic novel as well as a seminal work of science fiction.
In 1818, Frankenstein was published, and Mary and Percy Shelley returned to London and married after the death of his wife. What proved to be a watershed year for the pair because of the publication of her book was an extremely difficult one; Mary’s half-sister Fanny and Percy Shelley’s wife both committed suicide. Their marriage was met with extreme disapproval, and the newlyweds fled to Italy to escape the controversy. Mary had three children; all but one, a son, died. Mother and son survived husband and father when in 1822, an exiled Shelley and fellow rebel poets drowned in the Bay of Spezia in Italy.
His young widow and surviving son were left behind, virtually destitute. Mary managed to scratch out a living to support her father and two-year-old child, but she was an outcast from society. Mary wrote other romances, including The Lost Man, Lodore, and Valperga, but none reached the level of success or acclaim of her first. She idolized her late husband and memorialized him in her fiction, in addition to editing the first volume of his poetry in 1839. Mary Shelley died in 1851 of a brain tumor. Now, more than 150 years after her death, the book she wrote at the age of nineteen continues to inform, inspire, and amaze.
My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me.
Mary Shelley, from Frankenstein
MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT feminist firecracker
Though her life was troubled and turbulent, Mary has gone down in history as a major contributor to feminist literature. Her works, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1793), are lucid and forward-thinking and are touchstones in gender studies. Born in 1759, Wollstonecraft worked for a London publisher, James Johnson, which bolstered her independence, but she left for Paris in order to see the French Revolution for herself. As a cover, she passed herself off as the daughter of American captain Gilbert Imlay, with whom she became involved, producing a daughter, Fanny. The affair broke up, and a brokenhearted Mary tried unsuccessfully to kill herself; ironically, her daughter Fanny would later succeed at suicide. She went back to London and her old publishing job in 1795. James Johnson had become involved with an extremist political group comprised of Thomas Paine, William Wordsworth, William Godwin, Thomas Holcraft, and William Blake. Mary and Godwin fell in love, and she became pregnant with her daughter Mary, who later attained enduring fame under her married name, Mary Shelley.
MODERN DUOS
At the turn of the twentieth century, Erica Jong’s daughter Molly has taken up her pen and shows no fear of flying, while siblings Eliza and Susan Minot are authoring critically acclaimed novels and nonfiction. To their mutual enjoyment, they are witnessing the shock of readers and listeners who marvel at how “different” they are, as people and as writers.
DOROTHY WORDSWORTH “wild lights in her eyes”
Beloved poet William Wordsworth was one of his sister’s biggest admirers and she his “dearest friend” during his life. She was the only girl of the five children born to the Dorsetshire family. When their mother passed away in 1778, when Dorothy was seven, relatives raised her away from her four brothers.
But despite being raised apart, William and Dorothy were extremely close. William, two years older than his sister, inherited some money of his own when he turned twenty-six and bought an English country cottage just for the two of them. William’s destiny as a poet was already unfolding. Dorothy, to aid her brother and amuse him, began to keep a series of journals that not only reveal the lives of important literary figures but also have a purity and merit all their own. The portraits of their daily existence alone are priceless, but her machinations to inspire and “preserve” her brother as a poet are also remarkable. Today scholars pore over the journals for their wealth of information about the poet.
When William met and married Mary Hutchinson, at first Dorothy felt betrayed and abandoned. Eventually, her loyalty and love won out, and she pitched in to care for his children, for whom she wrote her own poetry, including “Peaceful Is Our Valley.” The valley in which they lived, rhapsodized over by brother William, was peaceful indeed, an idyllic place visited often by friends William Hazlitt, Robert Southey, Charles Lamb, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Coleridge, and Robinson. De Quincey penned reminiscences about his visits to the cottage, where he was shocked by what he perceived as Dorothy stepping outside a proper feminine role: “The exclusive character of her reading, and the utter want of pretension, and of all that looks like bluestockingisms.”
Later writers, including Virginia Woolf, puzzled over her life. Was she stifled by the towering talent of her brother and held back by her gender? A closer look at her diaries and the beautifully sculpted entries there reveal one thing certainly: she was a happy person and one with nature and her own nature.
