Dr%20William%20Bowers: List of publications

This article describes, reconstructs, and analyses the contents of an unexamined manuscript notebook in the hand of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. The notebook is kept in the Brewer-Leigh Hunt Collection at the University of Iowa. A number of material and textual factors allow the use of the notebook to be dated from May 1820 and to June 1822, the time of the Shelleys’ residence at Pisa. The notebook contains transcriptions from Marco Lastri’s L’osservatore fiorentino (1821) and a translation of more than 250 lines of Homer’s Odyssey. It therefore reflects Mary Shelley’s two central literary occupations of her last years in Italy: her historical novel Valperga (1823) and her two-year study of Ancient Greek. Shelley’s Greek studies have received little critical attention, but this translation allows for a proper consideration of her method of language learning and can be usefully situated alongside a number of other Greek manuscripts in Shelley’s hand in the Bodleian Libraries, Oxford. The Lastri transcription and the Homer translation should lead to a reconsideration of the collaborative dynamics of the so-called ‘Pisan Circle’ by modifying our view of the coterie as one dominated by English men. New considerations of the roles of Maria Gisborne, Alexander Mavrocordato, and Mary Shelley herself are required, as is a better appreciation of the influence of Mary Shelley’s reading on Percy Shelley and Leigh Hunt.

This book examines the literary and friendship networks that were active in Britain for a 250 year period. Patterns in the nature of literary social circles emerge: they may centre upon a location, like Christ Church, or a person, like Aaron Hill; they may suffer stress when private relationships become public knowledge, as Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon shows; and they may model themselves on a preceding age, as the relationship between the Sidney circle and Lady Mary Wroth exemplifies. Despite these similarities, no two coteries are the same. The circles this volume examines even differ in their acceptance of their own status as a coterie: someone like Constance Fowler was certainly part of a strict familial coterie; the Scriblerians were a more informal set who were also members of other groups; and although Byron’s years of fame are regularly associated with Holland House, he often denied being of their party.