La Questione Romantica: Mary Shelley – Special Issue in memory of Betty T. Bennett (editoriale)

This number is dedicated to the memory of Betty T. Bennett (1935-2006), scholar and Italophile, by two who had the privilege of knowing and collaborating with her: Lilla Maria Crisafulli and Nora Crook. She was the acknowledged international doyenne of Mary Shelley scholars. More than anyone else (though she was not alone), she displaced the dominant image of Mary Shelley (1797-1851) as a one-book author and reclusive mourning widow, replacing it with a complex, resilient, woman of letters at the centre of the cultural life of her times. As Graham Allen puts it in his article, “Betty T. Bennett has permanently altered our sense of Mary Shelley as a writer and an intellectual”. Our Saggi for this number are therefore all related in one way or another to Mary Shelley, to whom Betty devoted most of her great scholarly energies, and whom she called “a metaphor for an age and an era, a way to understand our own”.
Betty was a New Yorker who liked to say that her “special world” of the imagination as a child was Coney Island fun-fair. She was educated in New York, Stony Brook. Left a young widow and mother of two sons in 1967, she had already developed a strong sense of empathy with Mary Shelley, but it was at Stony Brook that this empathy took an academic turn, when it came to her that Frankenstein was a highly political and serious work (a relatively novel idea in 1973). The opposition that she encounteredin trying to place the novel on her syllabus made her determined to explore Mary Shelley’s private life and public career through editing her letters.
Years of strenuous research followed; she edited a fine anthology, British War Poetry in The Age of Romanticism 1793-1815 (1976) – which can be seen online at http://romantic.arhu.umd.edu/editions/warpoetry/  – and wrote a pioneering essay on Mary Shelley’s political philosophy (1978). Her three pale-blue, indispensable volumes of Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley appeared between 1980 and 1988, and were quickly recognised as a landmark. She was meticulous, she distilled a myriad fact into clear and precise notes; her efforts more than doubled the number of known lettersand filled in many biographical blanks. Among her discoveries was that Mary Shelley had enabled a friend, an unmarried mother, to elope with a passport to France as as the “wife” of a transvestite lesbian writer. The extraordinary tale is told in Betty’s engrossing Mary Diana Dads: a Gentleman and a Scholar (1991). To pursue the story required intuitive daring, but Betty always held intuition in check with an austere regard evidence. She did not publish the story until absolutely satisfied that her case was water-tight. Such scrupulousness was typical of her hatred of irresponsible speculation, and indeed of all shoddy scolarshlarship, as one of us (Nora Crook) can particularly confirm from experience, having, as General Editor of The novels and Selected writing of Mary Shelley (1996), come to know etty through this project (Betty being the Consulting Editor).
As a full-time academic, Betty was an energetic Dean of school, first at Patt Institute, Brooklyn (1979-1985), and from 1985 onwards at American University, Washington, becoming Dinstinguished Professor there (1997). She is remembered as a rigorous and dynamic teacher. In the 1960s she had been part of New York’s avant-garde poetry scene, and she now taught poetry through organized readings – “poetry slams”. She adored the theatre, and wrote a witty and actable Frankenstein play. She was a great friend of Keats-Shelley house in Rome. She enjoyed the summer music festival in Barga in the Garfagnana, a town on the route of Shelley’s journey to San Pellegrino in Alpe in August 1820 during the period that Mary Shelley was reasearching the background of her political novel Valperga in Lucca. She co-convened with Stuart Curran two two major Keats-Shelley Society of America conferences in New York to mark bicentenaries of the Shelleys (1992, 1997). From the second of these, “Mary Shelley in her times”, came a joint-edited and much-cited eponymous collection (2000). Struck by cancer, which she always called “the intruder”, she bravely fought it for five years, dyingwith her last project still unfinished. This was a literary biography of Mary Shelley, behind which lay original material collected over thirty years, a tragic loss. But her career as a whole is not one of unfulfilled promise but one of triumphant achievement.
No single journal number could do justice to this multi-feceted personality, or to her combination of gravitas, vitality, and stylishness. But our contributors pay homage to the emphasis Betty gave to collaboration, contextualization, primary reasearch, textual scolarship, and editing letters. Stuart Curran and Charles E. Robinson, who open this number, were among Betty’s oldest and closest friends, colleagues, and co-editors. Both take as their underlying theme that of Romantic collaboration: Curran revisits Mary Shelley’s first published work, the co-authored History of A Six Weeks’ Tour (1817), demonstrating how she mingles her own voice with those of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and her parents William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Robinson reveals and appraises, more thorougly than anyone before him, including his younger self, the degree to which the Shelleys collaborated in writing Frankenstein. The present essay contains many observations and formulations that he did not have room to include in the introduction to his recent The Original Frankenstein (2008), a work of high textual scolarship presented in an accesible form.
Betty was a familiar figure at international conferences in England and Italy, countries that she loved, and would have revelled in the international NASSR – Centro Interdisciplinare di Studi Romantici conference of March 2008 in Bologna, where the contributions of Joel Faflak and Reiko Suzuki were originally delivered as papers. Faflak discusses the novella Matilda as a challenge to early nineteenth century concepts of normalcy and the duty of striving to be happy, while Suzuki points out the tantilizing affinities between Valperga (1823) and Robert Browning’s Sordello (1840), both displacements of pro-Risorgimento commitments.
Three articles on letters follow: Graham Allen analyzes Mary Shelley’s most famous letter, the one written to her friend Mrs Gisborne from Pisa in the aftermath of Shelley’s drowning, and theorizes how we might deal with it as biography, but without succumbing to “biographism”. Lisa Vargo uses unpublished letters of Frances Wright, Mary Shelley’s friend and founder the utopian community of Nashoba, to scrutinize the often-repeated charge that Mary Shelley often deserted the public sphere during the 1830s, ascribing to her, instead, a redefinitionof the “private” and “public”. Fittingly, in our closing essay, Pamela Clemit publishes for the first time transcripts of the surviving letters of Laura Galloni to Mary Shelley in 1847-1850. Mary Shelley’s attempt to secure publication of the work of her young friend is the last known literary work to engage her. Cristina Dazzi, representative of the Dazzi family, descendents of Lady Mountcashell, pupil of Wollstonecraft, friend of Mary Shelley, and mother of Laura, has kindly commented on these letters, supplying some information from the family archive. It will be remembered that it was within the Cini-Dazzi residence that in 1997 Cristina Dazzi found Mary Shelley’s lost story Maurice, written for Laura in 1820.
Betty followed the footsteps of Mary Shelley in every sense, and crossed the Atlantic as often as she could. On one occasion she was the guest of Cristina and Andrea Dazzi at San Marcello Pistoiese. On several occasions she was invited by her friends, Lord and Lady Abinger, to their country residence, Clees Hall in Suffolk. She was given privileged access to their inheritance of Godwin and Shelley manuscripts and printed books, some of which she helped to deposit at the Bodleian Library. She was relieved in 2004 when the news broke that the Abinger Collection would not be broken permanently with the rest of the Bodleian Shelley manuscripts. It is thus a happy coincidence (or is it coincidental?) that three above-mentioned contributors (Robinson, Vargo, Clemit) offer the results of their own manuscript editing from the Bodleian MS. Shelley