The Kindness of Liberals : Of the life and correspondence of Mary Shelley : SELECTED LETTERS OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY, <i> Edited by Betty T. Bennett (The Johns Hopkins University Press: $19.95; 480 pp.)</i>

A radical English reformer, and widower of the eminently nonconforming feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin was shocked when their 17-year-old daughter, Mary, eloped in 1814 with a married man. He refused to receive them. It was only when Percy Bysshe Shelley’s wife, Harriet, regularized matters by drowning herself in the Serpentine that he relented. Magnanimously, he agreed to the lovers’ marrying, and went on to ask his son-in-law for money.

Between the Godwin-Wollstonecraft-William Blake generation and that of the Shelley circle, there was a break somewhat like the one between aging American radicals from the ‘30s and their ‘60s flower-children. There was a hippie touch to the Shelleys, Byron and their followers. There was also--because Byron was a lord and Shelley was gentry, and both had money and arrogance--a touch of the Brat Pack.

After Shelley drowned in the Gulf of Spezia and Byron died of a fever in Greece, Mary was left to descend from timeless sublimities to daily squalors. It was, in fact, only a few years after their elopement--and one magical Lake Geneva summer with Shelley, Byron and her sister, Claire, who was Byron’s lover--that things began to darken. Two children died not long after the Shelley-Byron pack settled in Italy. Shelley’s health was precarious. There were infidelities including, perhaps, an affair with Claire; and all kinds of emotional drama.

As early as 1817 Mary was recalling the Lake Geneva idyll (it was there that she began writing “Frankenstein”) with anguish. “Why is not life a continued moment where hours and days are not counted--but as it is a succession of events happen--the moment of enjoyment lives only in memory and when we die where are we?” she wrote her husband. If for Shelley time stained eternity “like a dome of many-colored glass,” for Mary the endless days of the rest of her life were shards of darker and darker hues.

Back in London two years after the drowning, lonely and struggling to support herself, Mary wrote to Edward Trelawny, a close friend at the time: “The eight years that I passed with our lost Shelley does not appear a dream, for my present existence is more like that--surely his state is not more changed than mine. When I first came to England, change of scene, the seeing old friends and the excitement with which the uncertainty of my situation inspired me, made me, though not happy, yet pass the day unrepining. But now each hour seems to add a load of intolerable melancholy.”

Melancholy alternating with anger are the leading notes in many of the letters published in this selection, an abridgment of the three-volume edition edited by Betty T. Bennett. Bennett has included her copious and illuminating footnotes, and the introduction she wrote for the longer version.

Mary Shelley was not a natural letter-writer. She writes sentiments, often eloquent ones; and she writes concrete needs, disasters and appeals, often touching ones. What she lacks is intimacy and a taste for communicating particular things. She is better at vision than observation; the letters give a sense of her feelings but not of herself; they convey what others have done or failed to do but not much sense of who these others are.

All her life she was plagued with accusations of coldness. They were made by former friends. (As some people have a talent for friends, Mary Shelley had a talent for former friends.) She denied it passionately, but passion is not really the opposite of coldness.

On the other hand, she had much reason to be cold; and when the coldness gives way to naked anguish she writes with great power. Bennett is certainly right in distinguishing the difficulties of an unconventional woman fighting to write and to live in a man’s world. Even before there was much bruising she had to contend with Sir Walter Scott’s review of “Frankenstein.” It was admiring, and that was the trouble: He assumed that Shelley must have written it. Mary couldn’t afford to be angry with the master, but there is sharp if concealed irony in her ostensibly mouse-like rejoinder (in the early letters she refers to herself several times as “mouse” or “dormouse.”). “Frankenstein,” she wrote, was certainly hers; it was far too “juvenile” to be Shelley’s.

Caught up in her husband’s lofty west wind, she was blown about Italy, bearing--and losing--one baby after another. The letter telling of Shelley’s disappearance, her anguished efforts to find out what had happened, the growing evidence that he was lost and the discovery of his body is vividly and movingly written. After his death she was penniless. His father refused to see her, initially withheld any financial assistance, and finally settled on the most meager of allowances--on condition that she not publish anything about Shelley during his own lifetime. “Sir Tim,” she wrote in a wonderfully penetrating phrase, “writhes under the fame of his incomparable son as if it were a most grievous injury done him--and so, perhaps it will prove.”

She settled in bleak London quarters to earn money with her pen: novels, short stories, essays, travel books and potted collections of literary lives. “It is pleasant writing enough,” she comments of her Grub Street routine, “sparing ones imagination yet occupying one and supplying in some degree the needful which is so very needful.” Earlier, she had announced her resolution to survive her bereavement and fight to support herself and her cherished son Percy:

“Life must run its course, I will not as formerly be at pains of decorating its banks--it runs to the sea of repose.” To Byron, she wrote: “I am cold moonshine.”

In this selection, there is correspondence with several men who were romantically interested in her--Prosper Merimee, among others--though not with one or two others where the interest was hers. The strongest passion revealed, which certainly verges on the romantic, is for her close friend Jane Williams. There is a powerfully voiced bitterness when she learns that Williams has “betrayed” her by denouncing her to friends as selfish and cold.

Some of her most painful experiences were at the hands of former members of the Shelley circle: men who denounced her for betraying his lofty memory by editing contentious passages from some of his poems; or, in the case of the previously devoted Trelawny, for making friends with a circle of women whom he deemed intellectually and politically unworthy of her husband’s radical legacy. A legacy is a hard thing to live on--particularly when it brings no cash. Her reply is both fierce and affecting:

“You may pick and choose those from whom you deign to receive kindness--You are a Man at a feast--Champagne and comfits your diet--& you naturally scoff at me and my dry crust in a corner--often have you scoffed and sneered at all the aliment of kindness or society that fate has afforded me.” As for her, she writes: “The only persons who deigned to share those melancholy hours, and afford me the balm of affection were those dear girls whom you chose so long to abuse.” And finally: “One thing I will add--if I have ever found kindness it has not been from liberals.”