Mrs. Shelley Plain

MARY SHELLEY (275 pp.)--Eileen Bigland --Appleton -Century -Crofts ($4.95).

At 16 she ran away with the most attractive young poet of the day, heir to a baronetcy and already married and a father. At 19 she wrote one of the great horror stories of all time, Frankenstein. For eight years the young couple--married after the suicide of the poet's first wife--skittered across France, Switzerland and Italy, keeping company with the brightest minds and most advanced spirits of English letters. When the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, died in a storm at sea at 29, his friends held a cremation ceremony on the beach, and one of them snatched the young heart from the flames. His widow, Mary, then 25, devoted her remaining years to the poet's memory.

Mary Shelley came by her headstrong ways naturally. Her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, was a brilliant champion of women's rights and social revolution. Her father, William Godwin, was also one of the morning stars of reason and reform in the last years of the 18th century. Both advocated free love and reluctantly ignored their teaching to marry just five months before their daughter's birth. Yet from the day of her elopement, Mary Shelley suffered continual persecution not only from Shelley's family, but also from her own father, whose contempt for convention stopped abruptly at his own threshold.

The Eccentrics. With egotism their first article of faith, most of the Romantics were diary keepers; with the telephone yet to be invented, they were great letter writers. The letters and the diaries are Biographer Bigland's chief sources. Thus the reader can get detailed information on who was calling on the Shelleys in Pisa and who was snubbing them in Rome. Of the atmosphere in Europe that perhaps called the poets into being and that was certainly given a whole new range of colors by them, there is little in this genteel biography. In her account, Author Bigland has cruelly caged two skylarks and they do not sing.

Yet these were brilliant people, and occasionally they flash free of the author's clutch, as when "Monk" Lewis, master of the supernatural, jolts Shelley by ruling him out of a ghost-story session because Shelley is an atheist; or when Shelley's friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg, hopes to seduce Mary while Shelley is away from home; or when Shelley gets a swimming lesson and plunges straight to the bottom, tempted by death and an answer to the Great Mystery. Despite such antics, Mary's father, husband and friends were schooled--and schooled her--to put intellect above all else. When her first daughter, a premature baby, died, she noted in her diary: "Find my baby dead. Send for Hogg. Talk. A miserable day. In the evening read The Fall of the Jesuits."

The Leeches. The story above all others that makes the book worthwhile is the money story. Before the big foundations were founded and before universities handed out lectureships to writers, most poetic achievement involved two persons, the poet and the patron. But Shelley and Byron both pulled a switch on the historic arrangement. In their circle of literary liberals, they had all the talent and they had all the cash. Percy Bysshe Shelley was heir to -L-6,000 a year and thus a natural target for any advanced thinker down on his luck--including Editor-Author Leigh Hunt and Mary's father; William Godwin's outraged rebel's respectability never stopped him from sponging on Shelley.

Intentionally or not, Biographer Big-land has written an expose of advanced thought in Shelley's England. In the Movement, her record shows more finance than romance and proves again that those who set out to rid society of hypocrisy usually have plenty of their own in case they succeed.

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