BLUNDEN ON HARRIET SHELLEY BLUNDEN (Edmund, 1896-1974, Poet & Critic)

Exceptional Autograph Letter Signed to Miss Catherine Maclean saying that it was "exceedingly kind of you to write about the lecture on M. Lamb. At about 5 minutes before it was to begin I doubted if I should get to it myself, for a fog descended on the Euston region as dense as I ever knew and the Hall seemed undiscoverable. i hope you are past the heavy cold which at least saved you from that dilemma. And best thanks for your generous reception of Shelley(will all errors and errata.) I hope to improve the book one day, having in particular much curious information to add. Incidentally I think it certain that Harriet Shelley only left her father's house right at the end, and that the failure of a letter from her to reach Mme de Boinville was the immediate reason for her unhappy decision. Maybe the whole affair was more deeply operant in Shelley's later life, even to the end, than I was thinking when the book was written ..." ending about a "merry pamphlet Blackwood's prose and verse on the Londoners would make! the nimble villains ...", 1 side 8vo., with original autograph envelope, 'The Times' headed paper, Printing House Square, 16th March

Harriet Westwood (1795-1816) was the first wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the highly successful owner of a coffee house in Grosvenor Square and intended for his children to move up in the world. Harriet was sent to a fine girls' school in Clapham where she became a friend of the twelve-year old Hellen Shelley, the younger sister of Percy Bysshe. There can be little doubt that Harriet's father and especially her older sister Eliza (at 30 twice Harriet's age) encouraged the intimacy between the adolescent couple, though when they ran off to Scotland to be married just weeks after Harriet's sixteenth and his nineteenth birthday in 1811, her family expressed considerable surprise. The response of the Shelley household was consternation.
Harriet was intelligent, well-read, and charming, though obviously very young, and for a time she involved herself wholeheartedly in her husband's various literary and political projects. But Eliza's residence with them within months of their elopement caused continual friction, and by the fall of 1813 Shelley was gone from home for long periods. Still, in March 1814 the two were remarried in a London church so as to legitimate their union according to English law and provide legal protection to their daughter Ianthe, born in June 1813. At this point, although it appears that the couple intended to live in separate circumstances, Harriet again became pregnant (her son Charles was born on 30 November). Thus when Shelley and Mary Godwin were thrown together in May of 1814, he was all but separated emotionally from his wife.
By July, when Shelley and Mary eloped, Harriet's unhappy, though not impossible, situation seemed clear. Her financial situation was comfortable but she was clearly unhappy. She returned to her father's house, but found it overly constraining so in late summer of 1816 she took lodgings nearby, in Knightsbridge, clearly to shield her family from a pregnancy out of wedlock. In late November or early December, having written a despondent farewell addressed to her father, her sister, and her husband, she walked the short distance from her lodgings to Hyde Park and drowned herself in the Serpentine River. At the time of her death she was just twenty-one years old.
During his years in Oxford, Blunden published extensively: several collections of poetry and prose works on Charles Lamb; Edward Gibbon; Keats's publisher; Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley: A Life Story) and and Thomas Hardy. He returned to full-time writing in 1944, becoming assistant editor of The Times Literary Supplement. In 1947, he returned to Japan as a member of the British liaison mission in Tokyo.

Item Date:  1947

Stock No:  39467      £325

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