Biography

In the ‘Author's Introduction’ to her novel,The Last Man(1826), Mary Shelley recounts her exploration, with a companion, of the ‘ruined temples, baths, and classic spots’ (1) in the vicinity of Naples and Baiae in 1818. The central locale of this narrative is the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, of Virgilian fame, in which, pressing onwards through passages untrodden by their superstitious guides, Shelley and her partner discover an inner cavern strewn about with leaves bearing writing in diverse ancient and modern languages – leaves that, once translated and (re)arranged, form the firsthand account of the apocalyptic events that constitutes the novel proper. Mary and Percy had explored the environs of Naples and Baiae in December 1818, and even visited a sibylline cavern, though – as Percy would tell Peacock in a contemporaneous letter – it was ‘not Virgil's Sibyl’ (Shelley 1914, vol. 2: 656). If the ‘sibylline leaves’ are an even more blatant authorial invention, then like Carlyle's ‘editors’ inSartor Resartus(1833) who are faced with Professor Teufelsdröckh's heterogeneous bags of literary remains, Shelley's ‘Author's Introduction’ dramatizes the choices faced by the biographer in editing ‘raw’ materials into a life‐narrative: ‘I present the public with the latest discoveries in the slight Sibylline pages. Scattered and unconnected as they were, I have been obliged to add links, and model the work into a consistent form’ (Shelley 1965: 3–4). As a reader of biography, as a biographer in her own respect (having just edited and written biographically rich introductions to Percy's poems, not to mention the shortLivesof Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese authors she would contribute to Lardner'sCabinet Cyclopaediaa decade later), and as a novelist who had already experimented with fictional biography(Valperga[1823] is subtitledThe Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca), Shelley knew that the shape and reception of such work depended as much upon the biographer's handling of materials as upon the materials themselves. She also knew that there were any number of ways one could ‘add links’ to and impose form upon the records of a life, and that such considerations constituted the central axes of debates concerning biographical method during a time of rapid expansion in the market for all forms of life‐writing.