Shelley drowned in a storm on July 8, 1822, in the bay of Spezzia. His body washed ashore about ten days later and was cremated on the beach in the presence of Mary; the poet, critic, and essayist Leigh Hunt; Edward John Trelawny, a friend of the Shelleys’ from Cornwall; and Byron, who asked for the skull. Hunt, remembering how Byron had treated the skull of a Franciscan monk found in a Spanish abbey—he made it into an ashtray—declined to see the great Romantic poet’s skull thus treated, and refused. Trelawny snatched Shelley’s heart from the funeral pyre, causing permanent damage to his hand, and gave it to Mary, who carried it in her purse, some say, for the rest of her life. She buried Shelley’s ashes in Rome and returned to England.

Valperga was published in 1823 and, in the following year, the Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley, which Mary edited. In the next few years she briefly considered two essentially loveless marriages to Americans—the actor-dramatist John Howard Payne and the writer Washington Irving—but ultimately rejected both men. In 1826 she published The Last Man, a tragic-ironic novel in the Gothic tradition that fused fantasy and realism and whose three central characters are based loosely on herself, Shelley, and Byron. She contracted smallpox in 1828.

The Fortunes of Perkin Warbeck, a historical novel, was published in 1830, and in 1831, she revised Frankenstein for republication. Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia commissioned a series of biographical and critical essays on Italian, French, and Spanish writers in 1832 that were published separately as Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain & Portugal (1835) and Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of France (1838). A semiautobiographical novel, Lodore, was published in 1835.

Her last novel, Falkner, partially an attempt to absolve Shelley of charges of causing Harriet’s suicide, was published in 1837; its eponymous hero was based on Trelawny. She released Shelley’s Poetical Works and Letters in 1839. Thereafter she underwent periods of severe illness, with recoveries spent on the Continent with her son, Percy, and his friends. Her last book was Rambles in Germany and Italy. She died on February 21, 1851, in London after a series of strokes, and was buried in Bournemouth.

THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD

Maya Angelou

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Daniel J. Boorstin

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A. S. Byatt

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Caleb Carr

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Christopher Cerf

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Ron Chernow

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Shelby Foote

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Stephen Jay Gould

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Vartan Gregorian

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Charles Johnson

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Jon Krakauer

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Edmund Morris

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Joyce Carol Oates

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Elaine Pagels

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John Richardson

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Salman Rushdie

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Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

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Carolyn See

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William Styron

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Gore Vidal

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The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson

Jack London, The Call of the Wild, White Fang, & To Build a Fire

Theodore Roosevelt, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman & The Wilderness Hunter

Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons