Lives of The Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men - Mary Shelley's Contributions

Mary Shelley's Contributions

Written during the last productive decade of Mary Shelley's career, her contributions fill about three-quarters of these five volumes and reveal her to be a professional woman of letters. They demonstrate her knowledge of several languages and historical research covering several centuries, her ability to tell a gripping biographical narrative, and her interest in the burgeoning field of feminist historiography. She "wrote with many books to hand – reading (or rereading) some, consulting others, cross-referring, interweaving abridged and paraphrased source material with her own comment". Shelley combined secondary sources with memoir and anecdote and included her own judgments, a biographical style made popular by the 18th-century critic Samuel Johnson in his Lives of the Poets (1779–81). She describes this technique in her "Life of Metastasio":

It is from passages such as these, interspersed in his letters, that we can collect the peculiar character of the man – his difference from others – and the mechanism of being that rendered him the individual that he was. Such, dr Johnson remarks, is the true end of biography, and he recommends the bringing forward of minute, yet characteristic details, as essential to this style of history; to follow which precept has been the aim and desire of the writer of these pages.

William Godwin's theories of biographical writing significantly influenced Shelley's style. Her father believed that biography could tell the history of a culture as well as serve a pedagogical function. Shelley felt that her nonfiction works were better than her fiction, writing in 1843 to publisher Edward Moxon: "I should prefer quieter work, to be gathered from other works—such as my lives for the Cyclopedia—& which I think I do much better than romancing."

The 18th century had seen a new kind of history emerge, with works such as David Hume's History of England (1754–63). Frustrated with traditional histories that highlighted only military and monarchical history, Hume and others emphasised commerce, the arts, and society. Combined with the rise of sensibility at the end of the 18th century, this "produced an unprecedented historical interest in the social, the inward, and particularly the realm of affect". These topics and this style explicitly invited women into the discussion of history as both readers and writers. However, since this new history often subordinated the private sphere to the public, women writers took it upon themselves to bring "sentimental and private elements" to the centre of historical study. In this way, they argued for the political relevance of women, claiming, for example, that women's sympathy for those who suffered enabled them to speak for marginalised groups, such as slaves or the poor.

Shelley practised this early form of feminist historiography. Biographical writing was, in her words, supposed to "form as it were a school in which to study the philosophy of history" and to teach "lessons". These "lessons" consisted, most frequently and importantly, of criticisms of male-dominated institutions, such as primogeniture. She also praises societies that are progressive with regard to gender relations—she wrote, for example, "No slur was cast by the Italians on feminine accomplishments ... Where abstruse learning was a fashion among men, they were glad to find in their friends of the other sex, minds educated to share their pursuits".

Shelley was particularly interested in tying private, domestic history to public, political history. She emphasises romance, the family, sympathy, and compassion in the lives of the people she writes about. This is particularly true in her essays on Petrarch and Vincenzo Monti. Her belief that these domestic influences would improve society, and that women could be at the forefront of them, ties her approach to that of other early feminist historians such as Mary Hays and Anna Jameson. Shelley argues that women possess a "distinctive virtue" in their ability to sympathise with others and should use this ability to improve society. She castigates Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, for abandoning his children at a foundling hospital, decrying the "masculine egotism" associated with his philosophy—a criticism similar to the one she makes of Victor Frankenstein in Frankenstein (1818).

Unlike most of her novels, which had a print run of only several hundred copies, the Lives's print run of about 4,000 for each volume became, in the words of one scholar, "one of her most influential political interventions". However, Shelley's biographies have not been fully appreciated until recently. The Lives were not reprinted until 2002, and little study has been made of them because of a critical tradition that "dismiss the Lives as hack work churned out rapidly in order to pay off debts".