a turbulent moon-ridden girl

Mary Shelley’s dressing case

Shelley kept relics of the ones she loved—collecting their hair in folded paper packets and treasuring the objects they used daily. Some of these are still in this case, such as this packet with Byron’s hair. The bracelet pictured here was made from Shelley’s own hair, cut from her corpse. Not here is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s heart, which Edward Trelawny claims he snatched from the fire cremating P.B. Shelley’s remains on the beach at Viareggio. According to family lore, the heart was given to Mary, who stored it in a copy of Adonais, the elegy Percy Bysshe wrote on the death of Keats. Some say she kept this book in her portable desk. I don’t know where her portable desk is, but the heart is said to have been buried with their son and the copy of Adonais is at the Bodleian, as is this dressing case.

“Not everything is fleeting. Some feelings are deep.”

W, July 2007.

Dickie’s Breakfast, 1917-1918