Shelley's epistolary personae

Abstract

Shelley’s letters have been used to support or discredit arguments about his ideology, biography, or poetry, but few scholarly studies have focused on the letters themselves. This thesis offers the first full-length critical exploration of Shelley's letters.

Like his poetry and prose, Shelley’s letters demonstrate his keen awareness of audience: Shelley assumes multiple epistolary identities to engage his correspondents. This study concentrates on the epistolary personae Shelley adopts in letters to six of his closest friends: Thomas Jefferson Hogg, Elizabeth Hitchener, Thomas Peacock, William Godwin, Leigh Hunt, and Lord Byron. It identifies these personae, examines how they change throughout the course of the friendships, and shows how certain core personae are nuanced according to the correspondent. Stephen Behrendt views such nuancing as consciously manipulative, whereas this study sees it as an almost instinctive process rooted in Shelley’s intensely empathetic imagination.

The thesis finds that Shelley also uses four main strategies to forge epistolary connections: levelling (elevating or diminishing himself or his correspondent), mirroring (emphasizing the similarities between himself and his correspondent), juxtaposing (defining himself against his correspondent), and projecting (transferring his own circumstances onto his correspondent).

It is also suggested that the adoption of personae helped Shelley work out his own identities over time. In early letters, he tries on the flamboyant personae of madman, visionary poet, and radical. In the letters from Switzerland and Marlow, he adopts the personae of country squire, recluse, invalid, man of business, family man, classicist, mentor, and traveller: roles that reflect the rapid development of his personal and professional lives. In the Italian letters, Shelley modifies his established personae and assumes new ones, such as the expatriate and the man of taste. The chronological approach facilitates an understanding of how Shelley’s personae develop and whether certain personae are especially characteristic of particular periods in Shelley’s life.

The thesis also comments more briefly on the relation between public and private epistolary selves; the dynamics of artifice versus immediacy and presence versus absence; the effect on epistolary personae of letter-writing conventions and the material aspects of letters; and, finally, the therapeutic function of letter writing.