A rediscovered manuscript and lost children are the background to Maurice or The Fisher's Cot by Mary Shelley, which has been published for the first time by Viking/Penguin, 178 years after it was written. The introduction by Claire Tomalin tells of the discovery of the manuscript last year in a Tuscan villa whose owners are descendants of friends of the Shelleys.
"The publication is a pointer to the increased interest in women's role," says Claire Tomalin when we visit the Roman cemetery for non-Catholics where the ashes of Percy Bysshe Shelley lie, as well as the graves of his son William, who died in the city at the age of four, John Keats, the biographer Edward Trelawny and the painter Joseph Severn. The place illustrates Lord Byron's reference to Italy's "fatal charm" and Tomalin calls the cemetery - over-run by well-fed cats who benefit from an association founded for them in London - "her favourite place in her favourite city".
As then biographer of Mary Shelley's mother, the early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and several 19th-century literary figures, Tomalin was called to authenticate the manuscript found in an old packing case. The story, which now occupies 39 printed pages, was written in 1820 for Laurette, the 11-year-old daughter of the Irish Lady Margaret Mountcashel, a close friend of the Shelleys in Pisa.
The villa owners descend from Lady Mountcashel, whose very unwilling governess, in Mitchelstown, Co Tipperary, had been Mary Wollstonecraft. The house where she lived with the King family has been destroyed, and there is no memory of her in the house in Merrion Square where she spent a winter; Mary Shelley's story for Laurette is almost the only reminder that Wollstonecraft was in Ireland at all. Laurette herself was later to become a novelist, writing in Italian.
Mary Shelley used three voices to tell the story of a delicate boy who was stolen from his wealthy parents at the age of two, fled from his new masters and found refuge with a kindly fisherman and his wife, who both died. He was saved from destitution when his father found him. It is a tale of things turning out well, even for the good-hearted and fragile; but sadness underlies its serenity.
"There's a melancholy tone," says Tomalin as we sit opposite the grave marker of William Shelley. "At the time she wrote Maurice, after five years of marriage, Mary knew all Shelley's shortcomings. Even sadder was the death of their first three children. In the Shelley-Lady Mountcashel circle, there were 14 children in all who had been lost to their parents in one way or another. Shelley himself had lost access to the two children by his first wife, Harriet, when he left her for Mary. Mary's step-sister Claire Clairmont was trying unsuccessfully to obtain Byron's consent for access to their daughter, Allegra. Lady Mountcashel had lost access to the five children she had by her first husband when she left him."
"Mary had much to grieve over and probably reasons for remorse," Tomalin continues. "Life had hit her over the head from the moment her mother died, 11 days after her birth. She had a formidable imagination but seems to have been slightly chilly."
After a First in English at Cambridge in 1954, Tomalin wrote to the BBC seeking a job and mentioning that she was bilingual (her father was French). "Miss Delavenay," came the response, "it is not our policy to take women in our training scheme." She found a job with a publisher, Jonathan Cape, married a journalist, Nick Tomalin, and gradually discovered that, although charming, he was vagrant and played the field. They were on the point of divorcing many times and she learnt to care for her large family on her own.
She moved from publishing to journalism, first on The Evening Standard, then to The New Statesman in 1967 as assistant literary editor. There she published an essay on Mary Wollstonecraft based on her letters; publishers asked her to extend it to a booklength biography. While she was doing so, her fifth child was two, and seriously ill - she also heard that her husband had been killed while covering the Yom Kippur War in 1973.
Aided by the emerging women's movement, the biography (The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecroft) was a success and she returned to The New Statesman as literary editor, a position she held with The Sunday Times for the first half of the 1980s. She married the playwright Michael Frayn in 1995.
"The Sunday Times was bigger," she recalls, "but less efficient and less interesting. Instead of fostering new talent the editor was obsessed with getting famous people to review books, which does not guarantee liveliness. I had many fights, for instance, against slavish attention to worthless best sellers. Rupert Murdoch intervened in one of the squabbles to say that `no one reads book pages anyway'."
The new trends in biography? "One is the greater interest in seeing history through the viewpoint of women. Another is that some biographers, such as my friend Richard Holmes, identify with their subjects. But I'm of the school which looks at subjects from the outside, even though I am less censorious than when I began."
Her detective-like research has produced biographies not only of Mary Wollstonecraft but of Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley and His World), Katherine Mansfield (Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life), Nelly Ternan (The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens) and, most recently, Jane Austen: A Life, which has just been issued in paperback. She has begun work on a biography of Samuel Pepys.
"Let's look," she says, "for the grave of Fenimore Cooper's grand-niece - it's near Shelley's ashes. She was in love with Henry James. When she died in Venice he took her clothes out on the lagoon to `bury' them there but when he threw them overboard, of course, they floated instead of sinking." Another example of Italy's fatal charm - which can, as Mary Shelley knew only too well, have a grisly side. Indeed, when young William Shelley's grave was opened it was found to contain not a child's bones but those of an adult.
Maurice of The Fisher's Cot is published by Viking with the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association
