Shelley's Ghost

Lady Shelley often felt the presence of departed spirits. ‘When I am sitting quiet I am sometimes conscious of a heavy feeling, a kind of stupor’, she told her friend Maud Brooke. ‘I take my pen and then my hand seems led over the paper. I do not know what I do, but I often draw, and then between the drawings afterwards I see a name. Often it is the name of someone close to me.’ A quire of paper in the archive appears to contain examples of Lady Shelley’s automatic writing, which record messages from her first husband and from Mary Shelley. One reads: ‘Dear Love Never pray me to come to you but I charitably wait for our meeting and have an earnest and lively faith in Redeeming Goodness my own girl may you be guarded MWS.’ The pages shown here contain a portrait faintly inscribed 'Mary', and a reassuring message from Mary about Thomas Love Peacock, who had been publicly opposing Lady Shelley’s views of Shelley’s separation from his first wife.

Don’t mind Mr Peacock he wont live another year you will get more letters more Papers by waiting dear Janey – Mary Shelley.

Lady Shelley; (bequest, 1899) Shelley Scarlett (later 5th Baron Abinger) and/or Robert Scarlett (later 6th Baron Abinger); (bequest, 1917) Robert Scarlett, 6th Baron Abinger; (bequest, 1927) Hugh Scarlett, 7th Baron Abinger; (bequest, 1943) James Scarlett, 8th Baron Abinger; (bequest, 2002) James Scarlett, 9th Baron Abinger; (purchase, 2004) Bodleian.

Maud Brooke, Talks with Lady Shelley (London: 1925), pp. 102-3.

See references in full