Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851)
Manuscript of the poem “The Choice”
ca. early May–July 1823
The Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle
Manuscript of the poem, “The Choice”
Transcript below
NORA CROOK: Most people know of Mary Shelley as the author of Frankenstein and they really don’t think of her as a poet.
NEIL GAIMAN: Professor Nora Crook is co-editor of the Johns Hopkins edition of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, specializing in the poems Mary Shelley edited after her husband’s death.
CROOK: Writing poetry was not something that came to her easily, but when it came, she wrote some very beautiful works. This is the only long poem she ever wrote, and it’s called “The Choice.”
GAIMAN: The manuscript of “The Choice” is six pages long in total. Mary Shelley wrote it in 1823, reflecting on her years in Italy, just before her reluctant return to London—the only place she stood a chance of making enough money to support herself and her three-year-old son.
CROOK: I’d like to focus for a moment on this name: “The Choice.” What is “the choice”? “The Choice,” it begins: “My Choice!—My choice, alas! was had and gone / With the red gleam of last autumnal sun . . . My choice, my life, my hope together fled . . . .”
And “the choice” is her choice of lover and husband, Percy Shelley. But it’s also her choice to live in Italy, where he had lived, where her children had lived and died, where all these memories were stored. And it’s a choice she couldn’t have. The choice was being denied her.
GAIMAN: The poem expresses Mary Shelley’s grief, but it also articulates a hope for future happiness, even if that happiness may be rooted in nostalgia.
CROOK: “Since I must live, how would I pass the day, / How meet with fewest tears the morning's ray, / How sleep with calmest dreams, how find delights, / As fire-flies gleam through interlunar nights?”
Just reading it, it came over me just how far that opening portion is shot through with images of light and shade, and the varying of the moods. The image of the fireflies was such a feature of the Tuscan summer, and the Shelleys always looked out for when the fireflies would appear. And Percy Shelley’s final poem, which is lost, was about fireflies . . . .
End of Transcript
Prof. Crook is Professor Emeritus of English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England. Her many scholarly publications include the eight-volume ‘Novels and Selected Works of Mary Shelley’ (Pickering, 1996), for which she served as General Editor.
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