It’s easy to
imagine a Romantic portrait making the most of young Mary Godwin’s
ethereal pallor: unfortunate that we often catch her in the decidedly
un-ethereal process of throwing up. In the next scene she lies exhausted
by seasickness and fear on board a small wooden sailing vessel. The
boat is being dwarfed by storm waves that swell under and around it in
the moonlight. The time is just before midnight, and a crossing that the
sailors promised would be “only two hours’ sail from the shore” has
already been going on for more than six. The horizon is “red and
stormy”; there are vivid flashes of lightning.
Mary is only 16, and she is running away
with Percy Bysshe Shelley, a man five years her senior who is not merely
already married but the father of a young child. It’s July 28, 1814,
and they’re in the middle of the English Channel, and of a summer storm
that has come on with the night:
Suddenly
a thunder squall struck the sail and the waves rushed into the boat;
even the sailors believed that our situation was perilous; the wind had
now changed, and we drove before a wind, that came in violent gusts.
The crossing the lovers are attempting,
between Dover and Calais, is a mere 23 nautical miles. When they left
Dover at six in the evening on what was not only the hottest day of the
year but “a hotter day than has been known in this climate for many
years,” “the evening was most beautiful; the sands slowly receded; we
felt safe; there was little wind, the sails flapped in the flagging
breeze.” But, like many straits, the Channel is concentrated into
ferocious currents and susceptible to sudden storms. It’s also markedly
tidal, and the 12 or more hours this crossing takes pass through a
complete cycle from one low tide to the next.
Eventually, at around 4:20 am, amid
heavy wind and continuing lightning, a stormy dawn breaks over the
laboring boat. Luckily, because the sailors “succeeded in reefing the
sail,” the wind finally drives them “upon the sands” of Calais, where
“suddenly the broad sun rose over France.” This is a striking image of
rebirth: of near-death and the transfiguring experience of survival. But
though taken from Mary’s Journal, it’s actually written by Percy. Mary herself won’t write in what is the earliest surviving volume of her Journal until over a week later.
She will, though, rewrite this account
within the next three years, when she publishes an account of the
journey on which she and Percy have embarked, her History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, of
1817. At this point—when she ghosts him as he has already ghosted
her—the young lovers’ voices overlap each other, like their limbs piled
on each other’s in exhaustion or sleep. Which is just how Percy portrays
the crossing. In his account Mary lies all night between his knees, as
he holds her head on his chest. “She did not speak or look,” and he
believes she “did not know our danger.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/the-treacherous-start-to-mary-and-percy-shelleys-marriage/
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