to the ends of the word...: The Gothic Short Stories of Mary Shelley

Sunday 30 August 2020

The Gothic Short Stories of Mary Shelley

A review of two volumes published by Hesperus Press

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797 – 1851) is best known for Frankenstein and, to a lesser extent, her end-of-days novel The Last Man. However, apart from other novels, she also wrote short stories, often with a supernatural or fantastic theme. I discovered Shelley’s shorter fiction a few years back, through two paperback volumes published by Hesperus Classics which I had read within a few months of each other.

The first collection is entitled Transformation. The title-piece describes the narrator's Faustian pact with a devilish dwarf and is rich in Gothic tropes. The Mortal Immortal features a hapless protagonist who drinks an elixir of life and eventually discovers that immortality is more of a bane than a blessing. Decades later, this story would inspire Iginio Ugo Tarchetti’s The Elixir of Immortality, which he described as “in imitation of the English”, but is actually a near-plagiarized version of Shelley’s work.

The Evil Eye is a tale of warring tribes and family feuds set in the Balkans. Despite its title, its subject is not overtly supernatural but, in its exoticism and unexpected plot twists it recalls respectively the "Oriental Gothic" and the then budding genre of "sensation literature". All three stories are finely crafted and reveal an active imagination at work.

Whereas the first collection emphasizes the eclecticism of Shelley's fantastic fiction, from the diablerie of the title tale to the proto-scifi of The Mortal Immortal, all the five stories in The Pilgrims fall squarely within the classic Gothic genre, sharing such familiar tropes as decaying castles/towers, family feuds, mistaken identities, lovelorn maidens, forbidding atmospheric conditions (storms, mists and rain keep the weatherman busy) and protagonists prone to fainting at every unexpected twist of the plot. The first three stories – The Pilgrims, The Dream and The False Rhyme also share a medieval, chivalric setting and deliberately archaic dialogue which makes them come across as the literary equivalent of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

But there are deeper concerns at work here than just the telling of a good tale. As novelist Kamila Shamsie points out in her insightful foreword, all the stories share a theme very close to Shelley's heart - the uncomfortable triangle between father, daughter and lover. It is only natural to draw a parallel with the life-story of the author herself - young Mary had incurred the wrath of a father she greatly loved when she eloped with poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. With this context in mind, it is hard not to be moved by these works, particularly the poignant The Mourner which brings this volume to an emotionally shattering close.