The Women in Shelley’s Life : LOVE’S CHILDREN <i> By Judith Chernaik</i> , <i> (Alfred. A. Knopf: $20; 229 pp.) : </i>

Branded a dangerous subversive in his lifetime, transformed after his death into the ethereal, almost angelic, victim of a harsh, cruel world; posthumously praised as perhaps the greatest lyric poet in English, but also damned as a confused enthusiast incapable of generating a concrete image or formulating a coherent thought, Percy Bysshe Shelley has continued to be a controversial and elusive figure well into the second century that has elapsed since his birth in 1792.

When Shelley drowned in a boating accident in the Gulf of Spezia in 1822, just a month short of his 30th birthday, his young widow, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, began the process that would culminate in the Victorian phenomenon of “Shelley worship.” But while exquisite lyrics with an aura of intense spirituality appealed to many of his Victorian admirers, it was Shelley’s revolutionary ardor, outspoken atheism and questing heart that struck a responsive chord in iconoclastic free-thinkers like Swinburne, Hardy, Shaw and D. H. Lawrence. British neo-conservative Paul Johnson recently paid Shelley the dubious tribute of including him in his rogues’ gallery of left-wing “Intellectuals” whose utopian ideas and personal irresponsibility wreaked havoc on everyone around them. And, reacting in a different way against the prettified image of Shelley the “ineffectual angel” (Matthew Arnold’s view of him), one of Shelley’s recent biographers, Richard Holmes, presents what could be called an overcompensatory portrait of a macho Shelley responsible for practically every illegitimate child born within five miles of him.

In “Love’s Children,” novelist and critic Judith Chernaik, who is editing the forthcoming definitive edition of Shelley’s letters, resorts to fiction as a means of recapturing--or trying to recapture--biographical truth. A native New Yorker who has lived in London since 1972, Chernaik has chosen to tell this story from the viewpoints of four women in Shelley’s life. Harriet Westbrook, his first wife and the mother of two of his children, declined Shelley’s invitation to continue to live in his household as a beloved “sister” after the poet found that he had fallen in love with Mary Wollstonecraft. Seventeen-year-old Mary was the brilliant and gifted daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and the courageous, pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died after giving birth to her. Although Shelley and Mary eloped in 1814, they were not able to marry until after Harriet’s death--a suicide--in 1816.

From the moment they decided to run off together, Mary and Shelley had the dubiously welcome company of Mary’s impetuous stepsister Clare Clairmont, who continued, off and on, to form part of their menage for some years to come. In the spring of 1816, Clare (at that point still known by her birth-name of Jane) introduced herself to the dashing and notorious Lord Byron, and managed to become pregnant by him (hardly a difficult task, in view of his promiscuity). Clare was, by all accounts, a hardy extrovert, and it would seem that she was almost as anxious to leave the unpleasant atmosphere of the Godwin household as she was to pursue new adventures with her sister, Shelley and Byron. Mary’s older half-sister Fanny, Mary Wollstonecraft’s child by an American sea captain, a gentle, self-effacing, melancholy young woman, remained behind, and committed suicide just about a month before Harriet Westbrook did.

Chernaik’s novel focuses on the years 1816 and 1817, telling the story through a series of invented journals and letters in which these four women record their experiences and reveal their secret fears, hopes, thoughts and suspicions. It opens in the summer of 1816, when Shelley, Mary, their 6-month-old son Will and the secretly pregnant Clare have gone to Geneva in pursuit of Byron.

It was during this visit that Byron and Shelley became friends and that Mary got the idea for her novel “Frankenstein.” Byron had considerable respect for the intellectual Mary but little use for the ebullient Miss Clairmont and only slightly more interest in his child-to-be. Chernaik shows Clare convincing herself that some “small corner” of Byron’s heart is hers: “He accuses me of being insensitive,” she admits, “but then he enjoys teasing me. ‘Out of my sight, woman!’ he roars, but a minute later I am nestling by his side. . . . “ She realizes that her slavish infatuation with Byron contradicts her belief in “freedom, equality, independence,” but she finds herself reveling in her self-abasement: “I do not feel demeaned . . . on the contrary, I feel privileged above other women, and men too, who would give their soul to be in my place.”

The novel breathes some life into the shadowy figure of the unfortunate Fanny by vividly portraying the terrible strain she was under, forced to act as a go-between by Godwin, who kept demanding money from Shelley while refusing to speak to the errant unwed couple. Harriet--both in her own words and in the words that Chernaik invents for her--is a poignant figure. Chernaik’s portrait of Mary--proud, sometimes smug, capable of passionate devotion but plagued by a growing tendency toward coldness--does justice to her complex character. “My Beloved has not changed, but I am a different person now,” she reflects, “no longer a shy young girl, but a matron (ugly word!). . . . Now I take issue with everyone, have no patience with speculative nonsense . . . and my opinion of men has undergone considerable change. I see weakness where I believed there was strength.”

Although Chernaik presents Shelley through the eyes of the women in his life and fully depicts the unhappiness his actions caused, “Love’s Children” is not a feminist attack on a man who “exploited” women. It is a thoughtful, clear-eyed look at Shelley and his circle that also succeeds in conveying a sense of the enchanting qualities that made this gentle, yet volatile man so capable of evoking love and affection.

Some aspects of Chernaik’s blend of fact and fiction must give us pause, however. For one thing, she describes Mary’s mysterious flirtation with Shelley’s old college friend Hogg as if Hogg’s invitation to form a free-love triangle were only just being made in the summer of 1817, when in fact the subject (as Mary’s coy letters to Hogg in 1815 suggest) had already come up two years earlier. Still more disquietingly, this “novel” includes actual historical documents mixed in with invented ones, with no way for the reader who is not a Shelley scholar to tell the difference. Much as one may applaud and enjoy Chernaik’s venture into fiction to imagine what the truth might have been, one cannot finally condone the blurring of the line between real and fake documents to give fiction--however convincingly lifelike--a false aura of fact.