#02 | Last Worlds, Golden Light: Echoes of Mary Shelley, Quiet Rooms, and the Art of Embracing Autumn’s Shadows

Anabel Hafstad
Oct 28, 2024
32 min read

Updated: Oct 29, 2024

Emanuel de Witte, Interior with a Woman, ca. 1665-1670, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Sometime between 1670 and 1675, a woman receives a letter. She reads it quietly, sitting down, with her eyebrows raised and a somber expression on her face. The room in which this woman sits is cast in darkness, but warm light floods through the large, grid-paned windows and gathers in a luminous pool on the checkerboard floor.

Outside lies the Amsterdam or Delft of the 17th century, bathed in the golden sunshine of what I believe to be an autumn day. When I look closer I see — under her shining white bonnet — the woman’s lips pressed together into a thin line.

Spoiler Alert. This article discusses the following texts:

How to Be a Renaissance Woman, Jill Burke (2023)
Women in the Picture, Catherine McCormack (2021)
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, Katherine May (2020)
In Search of Mary Shelley, Fiona Sampson (2018)
Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, Lyndall Gordon (2005)
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (poem in Leaves of Grass), Walt Whitman (1855)
The Last Man, Mary Shelley (1826)
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818)
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)

Enjoy ✨

Sensitive Themes. This article contains the following potential triggers:

Death and Loss
Medical Trauma
War and Violence
Pandemics
Body Preservation and Death Masks

Please take care of yourself while reading.

It’s a fall day again, but 354 years later. The light outside is again soft and golden.

I am at the Nasjonalmuseet in Oslo, strolling aimlessly through room after room, gallery after gallery.

I used to be drawn to landscapes, but in recent years I have started feeling oddly attracted to portraits of people who once lived, many hundreds of years ago.

Last Christmas, someone who knows me well gifted me a membership card that lets me visit the museum for free. So sometimes now, I go to the museum — alone — and simply visit people who have long since vanished.

I like spending time with them.

I especially like to visit the rich people from the pompous baroque and rococo periods, because these were clearly people who had lost it and went absolutely (hilariously) nuts on the white facial powder, luxurious velvety fabrics, and bizarrely towering wigs.

They of course went equally berserk on anything they touched — churches, vases, chandeliers, bedpans, really anything at all.

For this very reason, the baroque and rococo periods used to be an artistic era that was inaccessible to me. I guess I simply felt the period was entirely unrelatable, and so were its people.

Now I gaze into their eyes — stylized, surely, but sometimes surprisingly photorealistic eyes — and I think: look at you, human. You were here once. You existed.

At birth, you were given a fresh body. You grew, you had a childhood and a youth. You lived in your body for quite a while. In it, you developed a sense of humor, a sense of beauty and fashion, a sense of love.

Tell me what your life was like. Tell me what your favorite scent was — was it baked bread? A freshly laundered duvet? The perfume of your child’s hair?

Tell me of the worst days in your life, and the happiest ones.

I look at them and wonder who these people really were. I imagine (foolishly so) that I’m able to read their personalities and histories from the facial expressions the painter has given them.

I find their company both comforting and mystifying at the same time.

And then there is the woman with the letter.

Hundreds of years after her — debatable — existence, we still have her face. I doubt she expected this.

But the memory of her still exists: she is a tiny fragment of a smallish painting hanging — without much commentary — in a giant concrete monster of a museum, hundreds of kilometers North of where she once lived and breathed.

We’ll never learn the news she’s been given that day, and we’ll never learn the story of her heartbreak.

An Autumn Day Centuries Ago

Pieter Janssen’s The Letter Carrier (1670-1675)

The Letter Carrier, Pieter Janssens Elinga (between 1670 and 1675)

Strange things your younger self never expected your older self to say: ‘I’m afraid I can’t do any social engagements after 8pm.’

And: ‘Can somebody recommend a good pension fund?’

Or: ‘Folks, I seem to have developed a thing for Dutch Golden Age paintings.’

As for the Dutch Golden Age paintings: I love them with the limited capabilities of an untrained mind. I am not an art historian. I see what I see, and what someone has pointed out to me — usually a writer who is also an art historian.

Beyond the obligatory school knowledge — this is expressionism, this is impressionism, this is the Romantic period; Van Gogh cut off his ear and painted sunflowers, and Picasso did a jumble of shapes — I’ve gathered most of the deeper knowledge I now have about art history from two relatively recent and highly recommendable books:

How to Be a Renaissance Woman by Jill Burke (2023), and Women in the Picture by Catherine McCormack (2021).

What I can (without instructions) glean from the painting with the woman and her letter is that this scene isn’t actually about her.

The title of the painting is The Letter Carrier.

There are, in fact, two more people depicted in the room with her. To the left, a female servant rushes in with a jug of water (or wine?) and a glass.

This reminds me of the piece of advice commonly given when someone — a child, usually — is upset: offer them a glass of water.

(Or wine.)

Standing with his back turned to the viewer, a second figure stands between the viewer and the woman reading the letter.

This is the letter carrier: the messenger. Long, white hair flows across his shoulders. He wears breeches and a loose, knee-long jacket.

He is the harbinger of bad news.

Why does he deserve the title of the painting? Why is he supposed to be the focus of our attention?

We do not even see his face. He has rushed past us and now stands rooted still, with his hat respectfully tucked under his left arm, waiting for the woman to finish reading.

Perhaps he knows her, perhaps he knows she is getting terrible news. Perhaps he therefore feels a sense of dread, of partial responsibility for the change this letter brings into her life — the beginning of an end.

Or the end of a beginning.

I find the letter carrier considerably less intriguing than the woman receiving the letter, or the female servant. I would like to know more about them. About their relationship.

Were the woman receiving the letter and her servant close to each other?

Would they be close enough to embrace each other after receiving some devastating news?

But the letter carrier is whom and what the painter has decided to highlight.

Or else someone — someone with the power to name paintings — has decided to force our attention upon him.

Well, I refuse.

Pieter Janssens Elinga — The Painter Who ‘Probably’ Died

Being who I am, I come home from Oslo's national museum and then I obsess.

The scene — its quiet, subdued domesticity, its unspoken but implied story — comes back to me in flashes as I go about my days.

Outside, leaves turn red against an October sky. Inside, on my laptop, I eventually decide that I need to find the painting, so I search the museum’s website and… find it.

I look at it again. And again.

I zoom in.

I need to know why these brush strokes, performed more than three centuries ago, won’t let me go today.

I register the name of the painter: Pieter Janssens Elinga. I have never heard of him. Nor have, evidently, very many other people.

In truth, Elinga is the kind of painter whose bio would have, just a few years ago, sent me straight aboard the snooze cruise.

(This was before the beginning of my secret obsession with the Dutch Golden Age and floral still lifes from the 1600s).

Wikipedia tells me that Peter Janssens Elinga was:

‘a Dutch Golden Age painter, mainly of domestic interior scenes with a strong emphasis on the rectangular geometrical elements of windows, floor tiling paintings, and other elements, [...]. He also painted still lifes.’

Floor tiling paintings? Geometrical elements of windows? Still lifes?

(Again, I have in the meantime developed a surprisingly strong interest in some of these things, and will probably elaborate on them with relish in a future issue of Quiet Pages).

Not much else seems to be known about Elinga.

It is established that, at one point, he changed his last name, presumably from Janssens to Elinga — but no reason is given. I would certainly like to know the reason. I’m sure there’s a juicy story there. But like the letters, this is not a story that I’ll be able to unearth from the oblivion of past immemorial.

There is generally a good amount of ‘probably’ in Elinga’s disappointingly short Wikipedia entry. The degree of uncertainty with regards to this person’s life heightens my own awareness of the ephemerality of all our lives.

Pieter Janssens Elinga ‘was born in Bruges as the son of Gisbrecht Janssens,’ the entry says, ‘who probably taught him to paint.’

‘He moved to Amsterdam,’ the article continues, ‘where he probably died.’

At least that is what we must assume, because Amsterdam is where he ‘is last registered alive,’ when he pays the poll tax in 1657, which sounds depressing.

After that, the painter slash musician glides off into relative obscurity — until the 21st century.

The currently second Google result for ‘Pieter Janssens’ will take you straight to his Linkedin profile, where it turns out Janssens has not in fact died: he has instead become the CEO of ‘iO’.

iO describes itself as ‘a blended agency, tearing down the walls between the agency, technology and consulting worlds’.

This, to me, initially sounds about as intriguing as Elinga’s Wikipedia description as a painter of ‘rectangular geometrical elements’ such as windows and ‘floor tiling.’

But I am happy Elinga has found a new calling.

And I have a great many questions for him, now that I know he is still around.

Elinga Has His Women Reading — and Sweeping

When I look through the collected works attributed to Janssens today, I notice that the letter carrier shows up, I believe, in at least one other painting; almost as if he had casually walked from one frame into the next.

He reappears — again with his back to the viewer — when looking through the light-flooded door frame to the top left of a painting that is called “Interior with Painter, Woman Reading and Maid Sweeping” (1665-1670).

Interior with Painter, Woman Reading and Maid Sweeping, Peter Janssens Elinga ( ca. 1665 – 1670)

This painting, it must be mentioned, obviously bears another title that would send my younger self running over the hills with the looming threat of lethal boredom.

But now I find myself trying to understand the elements that once seemed beautiful and important enough to lead a man named Pieter Janssens Elinga to paint them, over and over again.

There is often the letter-carrier, obviously someone (whether real or not) who walked in and out of a household which, in itself, also reappears repeatedly throughout Janssen’s paintings — albeit always in slightly altered layouts.

In ‘Interior with Seated Figures’ (titles seem to have been a weakness), it is possible that we even get to see the messenger’s face. With his impressive mane of blond curls, he looks quite friendly and approachable.

He sits at a table, but his head tilts forward, peeking out from behind a woman with — you guessed it — another letter in her hands. The messenger seems to be waving at us.

It is a friendly wave to you and me, from a man who may (in some form or another) have lived 354 years ago.

Interior with Seated Figures, Peter Janssens Elinga

Alternatively, he seems to be mistaking us for servants, attempting to order a jug of water, or wine.

He’ll have to wait.

This man features often in Elinga’s paintings, leading me to assume that a person like him once existed, was a well-known presence to the painter, and frequented these or similar rooms in someone’s actual (though likely very idealized) household, many years ago.

And always, there’s a door that leads to another room. Sometimes, that same door doesn’t open to a room at all but to a hallway. Or it leads to an entirely new room, different from the one you first saw.

This is a house of wealth and magically appearing rooms, like Hogwarts, but set in the Dutch 1600s.

Yet always, there is a light-flooded room, and there are high ceilings, and mirrors, and a set of loosely assembled furniture (often the same chairs, rearranged in a different fashion).

Sometimes, there is enough space in these rooms for there to be a four-poster bed draped in heavy red curtains — a 17th century thing of genius intended to provide privacy, warmth, and ‘protection from drafts’ (a forgotten invention which I hope will be picked up again in my lifetime).

Sometimes the room has shrunk and the bed of my dreams is gone, the paintings on the walls have been exchanged for others.

But there is, always — always! — that stunning black-and-white checkered marble floor, in some geometrical variation or other. I now see why Elinga was known, and appreciated, for his exploration of ‘rectangular geometrical elements.’

Elinga works mesmerizingly with angles, mirrors, reflections, light.

Light from three-hundred-years ago floods through the windows from above at low angles, painting the patterns of leaves onto walls and floors.

I like autumn, and I like trees and leaves.

I like to think that, due to the sunlight’s angle, Elinga preferred to paint his interiors in the season of fall.

I like the thought that back then, there were fall days such as this one today, and just like today the sun and the leaves made patterns on the floors in Amsterdam.

People gazed at them quietly, enjoyed their warmth and marveled at their beauty.

Perspectives of The Perspective Box

There is one last thing I find out on my accidental rabbit hole trip — originating innocently with the sad woman and the letter.

It is that Elinga is apparently ‘best known’ (though he does not seem to be known much at all) for his ‘perspective box,’ of which I had no idea what it is.

This, then, is the perspective box: it is an actual physical box, a wooden cabinet, which contains a peephole through which curious spectators can glance.

Inside this box, the artist has with the help of smart optical trickery created a three-dimensional interior of a home.

Perspective Box of a Dutch Interior, Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678)

What one would see is a distinctly 17th century Dutch home, because these kinds of optical illusion devices were only produced in the Dutch Republic of the 17th century — and also only for about 25 years.

Today, only six such perspective boxes survive — and one of them is Pieter Janssens Elinga’s, which can be admired at the Bredis Museum in the Netherlands (I’m waving madly at my friends in The Hague right now).

Perspective box, Peter Janssens Elinga (1650)

Certainly, Elinga’s geometrical skills must be admirable to someone who knows their way about geometrical skills and finds them admirable.

But what strikes me is that, even in this oddly disorienting painting of the ‘perspective box,’ those same figures reappear.

The ones I’m actually interested in.

Not the friendly letter carrier, although I’m sure he was a nice person.

There’s the woman who is reading — always, a woman reading. Letters and books, books and letters.

Sometimes, she’s even kicked off her little high heels and they lay splayed on the floor in the foreground of the painting.

Reading Woman, Peter Janssens Elinga (second half of 17th century)

In another Elinga painting, a couple of creepily skeletal cats (possibly dogs?) and a small child — dressed in an impressively heavy-looking yellow silk gown — try to divert a woman’s attention from her book, and she seems less than enthusiastic about the interruption.

(I want to know what captivates her attention so. What is she reading? What monopolizes the focus of this woman — these women?

I hope to god it’s not the Bible. Mainly because for long, long periods in human history, the Bible was the only reading material deemed socially acceptable for women; at the same time, women were generally not permitted to leave the limits of their homes, and so imagine being forced to stay indoors and read the Bible for most of your life, then probably dying an early death in childbirth — there has to be more to life, any life, all these past and bygone lives, than that.)

And then there’s the maid, who is always and forever sweeping those geometrical floors; the water job seems to have been an exception.

This woman, the servant, is relentlessly busy.

She never has a minute to read, I doubt she is literate.

She is principally there to clean up after the men — who come blasting in from the outside, with their jolly bouncing curls and their letters speaking of events unfurling beyond the bounds of geometrically admirable walls — and the silent women who only sit and read, sit and read, of things happening outside their homes.

I am tempted to message Pieter Janssens on Linkedin, asking him whether he painted these women because he actually wanted them to sweep and read, or because he pitied them for having to do so.

As with most male artists during history, the painters of the Dutch Golden Age were concerned with the role of the female and used art to depict women in wishful scenarios, performing idealized roles — roles that women were expected to at least want to aspire to.

Quite possibly, Elinga’s paintings are also simply depictions of what life, at the time — for certain people, principally women — had turned out to be.

But still today, when I look at paintings like these, I can almost sense these women’s presence.

I can almost sense outlines of their forgotten stories, their silent, vanished lives.

An October in Rome

The Last Man by Mary Shelley (1826)

In the fall of last year, I spent a month in Rome.

Further North, the air was cooling to a wintery chill: my journal documents news of snow chaos in Oslo and fairy tale winter landscapes in the town of my Norwegian in-laws.

But where I was, in the Eternal City, the sun shone with powerful rays, low and golden and warm.

During these last October days, people still wore dresses and sipped on glasses of red wine in cafés outside. The ivy growing on Trastevere’s ancient layers of bricks and cobblestone remained lush and green for a long time, then turned a fiery red.

Under Roman stone pines, the wide meadows of Villa Doria Pamphili were blessed with a second bright bloom of dandelions. The dandelions radiated like millions of copies of the sun, a green yellow galaxy of vast dimensions.

People forced their children off into this galaxy and took pictures of them for the ‘gram.

I, too, ventured out into these flower fields, traveling on the flying carpet of a beach towel while forcing myself through Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, written in 1826.

Probably best known for her iconic debut, Frankenstein (1818), her second novel — rather sinister and verbose — tells of the last person on earth after the human race has been wiped out by a 21st century pandemic.

(Yes. Shelley has always been a visionary).

I had not expected Mary Shelley to become such an integral part of my experience in and of Rome.

But there she was, with me.

Her words, written centuries ago, were still capable of chilling a glorious 21st century fall afternoon.

Mary Shelley as the Last Woman

Mary Shelley by Richard Rothwell (ca. 1831-1840)

Shelley’s motivation for writing The Last Man was personal.

Even though Mary Shelley was infatuated with the Italy of her time, the four years she spent in this country cost her nearly all of her young family.

She tragically buried two of her four children there. Within a time span of two years, her son William — aged three — died of Malaria in Rome, and Clara Everina — aged one — died of dysentery in Venice.

Lastly, Mary Shelley’s young husband — the famous poet Percy Bysshe Shelley — drowned in a sailing accident along with two companions off the Gulf of La Spezia, or the Gulf of Poets, near Lerici.

He had only been 29 at the time of his death.

Only one of Mary’s children — Percy Florence Shelley — survived into adulthood.

‘THE LAST MAN!’ Mary lamented in her diary in 1824, two years after her husband’s and children’s death.

‘Yes I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.’

Over and over, the main character, Lionel Verney, must go through the motions of beloved friends and family slipping from his human arms and into the arms of death.

‘one deep sigh, and life was gone.’

The ‘plague’ of his 21st century is merciless. The world and its towns grow sparser, emptier.

Remaining colonies of humans gather, wanting to migrate South, where — so they hear — the pandemic doesn’t rage quite so violently. But the journey is long and perilous.

We feared the balmy air—we feared the cloudless sky, the flower-covered earth, and delightful woods, for we looked on the fabric of the universe no longer as our dwelling, but our tomb [...]. Pestilence had become a part of our future, our existence; it was to be guarded against, like the flooding of rivers, the encroachments of ocean, or the inclemency of the sky.

(On a planet increasingly harrowed by natural disasters exacerbated by global warming, these words ring even truer today than Shelley may have ever dreamed of).

Astonishingly, in the light of this global plague, the majority of remaining humans do not turn violent.

Fear-fueled brutality, greed, and even cannibalism are a recurring theme in our contemporary tales of dystopia — think of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2007), think of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), or Hanya Yanagihara’s To Paradise (2022).

These are randomly picked examples, all of them dealing with the fear of post-apocalyptic chaos, and the list is potentially infinite.

But in Shelley’s vision of human extinction, ‘we are all equal now.’

[M]agnificent dwellings, luxurious carpets, and beds of down, were afforded to all. Carriages and horses, gardens, pictures, statues, and princely libraries, there were enough of these even to superfluity [...].

On their journey southwards, the English colony of survivors shrinks and shrinks. During each stop — extended periods are needed to get through France — more people fade away.

The landscapes they cross are devoid of human presence.

France was a blank; during the long line of road from Calais to Paris not one human being was found.

A little later, Lionel recounts:

Weed-grown fields, desolate towns, the wild approach of riderless horses had now become habitual to my eyes; nay, sights far worse, of the unburied dead, and human forms which were strewed on the road side [...]. Sights like these had become [...] so familiar, that we had ceased to shudder.

The upside of this was that the travelers were able to briefly live like royalty and move into the marvelous rooms of Versailles for a while.

But nothing gold can stay, they have to move on. Upon their arrival in Arveiron, there are only four humans left: two men (one of which is Lionel, the narrator) and two children.

This is when the plague suddenly stops.

‘From this moment,' Lionel recounts, 'I saw plague no more.'

It’s just that nearly everyone is dead now. They decide to make the best of it.

They still wish to complete their journey southwards, but ‘had no cause to hasten our steps.’ Everything was quiet and peaceful now, time and distance irrelevant.

Thus casually making their scenic trip through the Alps, they finally ‘entered smiling Italy.’

They visit abandoned Milan; they admire grand churches now colonized by sheep. In Como they pick a ‘summer residence.’ In August, they depart towards Rome.

But then, on the way to the Eternal City, things truly go to hell.

In a sailing accident — echoing Percy Shelley’s death — everyone but the narrator drowns.

'Now,' Lionel writes towards the end, 'I awoke for the first time in the dead world—I awoke alone.'

He wonders:

Will the earth still keep her place among the planets; [w]ill the seasons change, the trees adorn themselves with leaves, and flowers shed their fragrance, in solitude? [W]ill the tides rise and fall, and the winds fan universal nature; will beasts pasture, birds fly, and fishes swim, when man, the lord, possessor, perceiver, and recorder of all these things, has passed away, as though he had never been?

(Of course, I want to tell Lionel — the Earth will keep her place. It has done so for 4.5 billion years, unrecorded by human eyes — and will no doubt do so again).

The night after he loses his last companions, Lionel lies down flat on the pavement of a town, in a place on the planet we have decided to call Italy.

‘Midnight came’ to him, he says, and

thus I passed the second night of my desolation.

Where Mary Shelley Keeps Her Husband’s Heart

My October in Rome — that promised land Lionel and his group had sought to reach — Mary Shelley didn’t stay on the pages of her pandemic novel.

Her ghostly spirit leaked out of those dystopian lines and into my sun-soaked present.

In The Last Man, Shelley has her main character exclaim:

Surely death is not death, and humanity is not extinct; but merely passed into other shapes, unsubjected to our perceptions. Death is a vast portal, an high road to life: let us hasten to pass; let us exist no more in this living death, but die that we may live!

I can’t help but hear Mary Shelley’s own bereaved voice, insisting that her loved ones had not been torn from her completely. Her family are alive, somewhere, somehow — they have simply ‘passed into other shapes.’

When Percy Shelley’s bloated and disfigured body was found — days after the sailing accident that had killed him and two more men — friends wisely prevented Mary from seeing it.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was cremated without his widow’s presence, but Mary Shelley did receive some of his remains.

Amongst them his heart.

I must repeat:

His heart.

Which she kept.

For the rest of her life.

And so here we have a woman who most certainly could not be contained in one of Elinga’s domestic perspective boxes, doomed to mutely read the Bible or else forever sweep floors that border on optical illusions.

In Mary Shelley’s lifetime, the Amsterdamers of the 1600s are already long gone. None of them are alive now. The austere but light-flooded interiors of the Dutch Golden Age have passed; two centuries worth of lavish Baroque parties have swept across the European continent then evaporated.

An entire city — and planet — of people dead and replaced with a whole new group, doing entirely new things.

It’s the beginning of the 1800s. This is a new century: Mary Shelley is of a different breed.

The steam engine is starting to be known.

Alessandro Volta has just invented the electric battery.

Thanks to Western industrialization, machine-produced textiles — fueled by the labors of enslaved people — are all the rage. Marie Antoinette spends heavily on indienne, a fabric produced extensively, amongst other places, in certain regions of Switzerland.

(In my first issue of the Quiet Pages, I've stumbled upon the now unignorable connection between Swiss regions such as St. Gallen and Appenzell, Western textile industrialization, and the transatlic slave trade).

Certainly still very unusual for her day and age, Mary Shelley by no means has the opportunities White women have in the Global West today, but her parents are both liberal writers; her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, is a renowned and widely read early feminist.

Mary Wollstonecraft by John Keenan (1787)

Wollstonecraft’s life is as eventful and rebellious as her daughter’s will turn out to be.

Today, she is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she asserts that women are not inherently inferior to men — they only seem(ed) so due to their lack of education.

During her lifetime, this courageous writer was both loved and hated for her views and unconventional lifestyle choices.

I have at home an unread literary biography waiting for me, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft by Lyndall Gordon (2005), and even just a tentative glance at the first chapter — titled ‘Violence at Home’ — tells me of this woman’s fierceness.

Cover of "Vindication" by Lyndall Gordon

Seven years before she is to give birth to little Mary Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft — then aged 33 — travels to Paris of all places, ‘at a time when Englishmen like Wordsworth were speeding in the opposite direction — back to the safety of their country.’

It is December 1792, the height of the French Revolution.

When [...] Mary Wollstonecraft arrived at a friend’s hôtel, she found it deserted, one folding door opening after another, till she reached her room at the far end. There she sat by her candle, knowing no one and unable to speak the language.

The silence, in contrast to London, was eerie. As she looked up from the letter she was writing, eyes glared through a glass door [...]. Earlier that day she had seen the King carried past her window at nine in the morning, on the way to his trial.

This very King is to be executed. Marie Antoinette, however lavishly draped in her indiennes, will follow him to his death not too long after.

Many prominent heads are about to roll.

In the France of such turbulent times, Wollstonecraft gives birth to her first daughter, Fanny, then flees with her back to London.

Her second daughter, Mary Shelley, is born in 1797 and gets to spend less than two weeks with her by then notorious mother.

Eleven torturous days after giving birth, the great Mary Wollstonecraft — like thousands of women in her time — dies of puerperal fever: an infection introduced into her organism by her doctor’s unsterile hands.

This I learn with loud gasps, years before my autumn in Rome, in another first chapter of another incredibly captivating literary biography: In Search of Mary Shelley by Fiona Sampson (2018).

Cover of "In Search of Mary Shelley" by Fiona Sampson

In her agony, Mary Wollstonecraft cannot move or breathe properly.

[T]here has been vomiting and [...] diarrhoea, eventually containing the ‘black coffee grounds’ of blood. Mary [Wollstonecraft], who must be unusually strong, takes longer to die than most women.

Even in her debilitating condition, Wollstonecraft still tries to nurse her baby daughter. But then her infection becomes apparent, and she is made to stop.

Puppies are brought in to drain off the new mother’s milk.

'How could this reduction to the purely animal not be humiliating?' Fiona Sampson asks in her biography.

Wollstonecraft is only three years away from the 19th century. The medical cause for puerperal fever — the unsterilized hands of the doctors assisting births — has already been identified by one Alexander Gordon.

But the medical profession is outraged at the implication of it carrying the blame for the deaths of thousands and thousands of women.

It will take almost one more century before doctors start sterilizing their hands.

In Mary Shelley then we have the kind of woman who — legend has it — learned the alphabet by tracing the letters on her mother’s grave.

This is a woman who, like her mother, isn’t muted: she is outspoken and processes her life by writing.

Because she is interested in the new phenomenon of electricity, she writes of monstrous corpses being animated with the 'spark of life.' And because she, in her twenties, loses multiple children and a husband in Italy, writes of humanity being swept off the planet in a matter of seven years.

In Mary Shelley, we also have a woman who keeps her dead husband’s heart, wrapped in pages of his last known poetry.

(Don’t we all.)

It is her one surviving son, Percy Florence, who will find his father’s heart in a desk drawer after his mother’s demise in 1851.

Or at least he finds what Mary Shelley must have assumed was her husband’s heart — there is some debate on exactly what type of organ it might have actually been.

'Really, it could have been anything,' writes Anna Mazola in an insightful blog post called ‘Did Mary Shelley Keep Percy’s Heart?’

Either way, this was the kind of woman whom, last fall, I was about to visit.

Or maybe she was about to visit me.

It turns out that the main character in Shelley’s The Last Man Lionel was right: Shelley and her loved ones had truly stepped through the ‘portal of death’ and ‘passed into other shapes.’

They had died ‘so that they could live:’ in Rome.

Bracing Ourselves for the End

Wintering by Katherine May (2020)

We tend to see fall as a time when great things — great summers — come to an end.

The shedding of leaves seems to us a sort of cyclic death, and in some ways it is.

In one of my very first poetry lectures at university, the professor introduced us to a short, musical poem composed by Gerard Manley Hopkins, called Spring and Fall, and dedicated ‘to a young child.’

Written in 1880, the young child watches the seasons turn and cries.

Márgarét, áre you gríeving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

[...]

Now no matter, child, the name:

Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.

Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed

What heart heard of, ghost guessed:

It ís the blight man was born for,

It is Margaret you mourn for.

The narrator — perhaps not entirely age-appropriate — suggests here that Margaret is not in fact crying over the falling leaves.

Instead, the child’s heart and spirit already sense something deeper, something underlying, at the base of this seasonal change: as she watches the leaves drift in hues of gold, she becomes aware of her own mortality.

For years now, whenever I catch myself ‘grieving’ over golden groves ‘unleaving,’ I wonder if Hopkins is right.

Are we watching the seasons turn and grieve for what is to happen to us, what is to come?

Certainly, this cooling, darkening, retreating into our homes reminds us again of the sharp edges of life.

In her joyfully written book Wintering: The Power of Rest in and Retreat in Difficult Times (2020), Katherine May writes:

But winter is a time when death comes closest — when the cold feels as though it might yet snatch us away, despite our modern comforts.

Last winter, temperatures in Oslo fell below -20 degrees Celsius for several weeks.

The streets and sidewalks were glazed with thick sheets of ice.

We live in an old apartment built in the 1890s: the timber walls are seemingly paper thin, drafts pull like ghosts through cracks in the wooden floors and frames of ancient windows.

Life became elemental.

Offices informed their employees that the buildings couldn’t be heated up to 20 or 21 degrees.

Enough firewood for our stove needed to be ordered and stacked so that we could keep on working from home.

Firewood prices skyrocketed.

The risk of pipes freezing and cutting off water supplies was fought against with a machinery of portable ovens and radiators humming away in basements.

Electricity prices skyrocketed.

The dog — stuffed into two little dog coats — did not want to go for walks, and neither did we. He hated the little socks that were needed to keep his paws from freezing, but he hated walking barefoot, too.

For many weeks, these reluctant sprints in the icy dark had to be prepared for and executed efficiently. To pick up the dogs’ turds I had to take off my wool mittens, but underneath I began wearing a second pair of fingered gloves so my skin wouldn’t burn so much when I came back into the apartment.

Firing up the oven first thing in the morning, I thought often of the young men that I’d seen in the news. Regular young men like my husband, working as developers or chefs or personal trainers or firemen in the cities and towns, now hiding like ghosts out in the vast woods of Norway’s neighboring country.

I thought of these men — the estimate was at about two-thousand at the time — each surviving on their own, in hastily built shacks to escape an involuntary draft into the army.

Men hiding out in the woods in the dead of winter: this to me seemed like an image from another time, another war eighty years ago.

Katherine May writes:

[T]his is the season of ghosts. Their pale forms are invisible in bright sunlight. Winter makes them clear again.

But it was happening now, in the 2020s, and this seemed absurd.

I looked at my neatly stacked firewood, my full fridge, and the dog snoring peacefully away on the sofa. This, too, seemed absurd.

One morning in January 2024 — it was freezing as I woke up — the news said that there was a realistic chance that war, 'real war,' might come to Norway. The article said the Norwegian population 'should be prepared for war.'

As if war were something civilians could ever adequately prepare for, and then things would go smoothly.

Still, my mind started mulling over what one was to do, should war come to Norway.

Where would we hide? In this inhumane cold, the basement seemed preferable to a shack in the woods, but decidedly not ideal.

Would we be among those who understood early enough to leave?

I asked my husband.

When, really, is the moment that you decide to get your four-wheeled suitcase from the attic, pack a few essential items (which ones?) and drive off?

To where?

Would we have enough gas in our car to get somewhere safe? Maybe my husband and the dog and I could get to my family's home in Switzerland, somehow. The easiest way would be to cross the sea to Germany.

But what about the ferries?

In the event of war, how long would ferries run?

Such were the thoughts I mulled over in bed, while the day outside bloomed into the murky twilight of winter.

There is, always, a precariousness to life.

Almost as if we continuously stand on the brink of something — but we sleepwalk. We never look down.

In the glorious fall months, when Earth rotates and the air crackles with a new crispness, something ancient in us remembers.

Even as we admire the festival of fiery leaves, and harvest apples, and pumpkins, and mushrooms; even as we celebrate this abundance brought forth by a good summer we sense it: there is something very old in us, reminding us that harsher times are about to begin.

The memory of tens of thousands of winters past is ingrained in our bodies.

And we remember again that below this modern, comfortable, polished surface of our everyday lives — below our fridges and wool blankets and bags of firewood delivered to our doorsteps — we are still mere organisms.

We are still vulnerable.

We have sensed this vulnerability for eons.

When the days begin to shorten, we know we are in a transition. We huddle together and brace ourselves for the changes ahead.

We remember again that, before long, we will come very close to that invisible brink.

Mary Shelley’s Travel Desk, Keats’ Death Mask and Percy’s Lock of Hair

The Keats-Shelley House is a beautiful institution in the middle of Rome, located right by the Spanish Steps.

It is named after the two Romantic poets: John Keats — who died of tuberculosis aged 25, in one of the rooms that has been preserved for visitors to see — and Mary Shelley’s husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley.

A third famous male figure also looms prominently in the mix of the museum’s collection: Lord Byron, who died in 1824 (aged 36) of ‘illness and fever’ in 1824.

These three men were friends — and they all died within three years of each other.

(Clearly, survival was a huge challenge before the age of antibiotics.)

I was lucky enough to visit the Keats-Shelley house several times during my stay in Rome — as were they.

I went once to stand in the bedroom in which John Keats spent his last few months and eventually died.

After his death, all of the room’s furniture and wallpaper was removed and burned to cleanse the room of any lingering illness.

But since, the space has been refurbished in a way that mimicks the room

in which the young man was bled and starved by his worried physicians, and begged to die when his caregivers, fearing suicide, refusing him pain relief through opium or laudanum’ (Source: Atlas Obscura).

My gaze fell through the window through which John Keats, too, must have looked.

It was now the year 2023, we were nearing Halloween, and tourists huddled under colorful umbrellas in cafés in the misty spray of October.

I took a good look at Keats’ death mask.

John Keats' death mask, as seen at the Keats-Shelley House in Rome, 2023

Right there, in front of me, was the face — in perfect 3D — of this man whom, hundreds of years ago, Mary Shelley had known so well.

Mary Shelley had known this face, talked to this face.

And, in turn, this face had known Mary Shelley’s.

Its eyes had looked about and heard the rustle of her dresses; had observed her laugh and grieve her lost children.

Here then, in this quiet refuge in the 21st century center of Rome, that face still existed — a face that’s been buried in the city’s Protestant Cemetery some two hundred years ago.

And there were more things, more memento mori amongst the artifacts of the Keats-Shelley House: here, for example, was Percy Shelley’s hair.

When you see it, your first thought may be: well, it’s hair.

But how strange to think of the specific person it belonged to!

How strange to think they once existed and lived and moved (in 3D!), and there was a moment in their lives when they — or a loved one — looked in the mirror, perhaps in the light of candles at night, and took a pair of scissors and snapped off a lock of hair to give to someone they cherished.

It reminded me of another poet — the great American poet Walt Whitman, who was just a toddler on the East coast when, over in Rome, Keats’ death mask was fitted over a lifeless face and Mary Shelly buried her children.

In his poem, ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (1855), he writes:

The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away,

The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them,

The certainty of others, the life, love, sight, hearing of others.

Others will enter the gates of the ferry and cross from shore to shore [...].

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood-tide, the falling-back to the sea of the ebb-tide [...].

I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence,

Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt, [...]

What is it then between us?

What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,

I too lived

‘I too lived’ — this preserved room, Keats’ lock of hair seems to say…

You may think your reality is the only one. But I too lived.

We are all forged of the same current of consciousnesses passing through the centuries.

Looking ahead at what they knew was bound to come, knowing the leaves of their life were bound to turn one day, these humans took parts of their bodies and immortalized them, so they could stay with their beloved forever.

A lock of hair, a death mask, functioning as portals — as a way to pass through death and live on in different shapes.

A way to finally let go and fly off life’s invisible brink.

The process of saying goodbye, as well as holding on, to our loved ones is subject to time and cultural changes.

In the global West, the practices of keeping organs, hair, or death masks are no longer part of our mainstream grieving repertoire.

But here is another thing I learnt from a university class when I was young, many hundreds of years ago.

Photographs are modern death masks.

This was suggested to me in a seminar on the ethics of documentary photography. To this day I don’t remember why I was in it, seeing that I was a literature student — but I do remember this one thing:

In his seminal work, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes compared photographs to death masks by suggesting that both capture a moment of life that is now past, preserving it in a frozen, permanent form.

With photographs, rays of light layer themselves over a specific instant, immortalizing something that soon thereafter no longer exists — just as the wax of a death mask layers itself over the features of someone who has died and whose body will soon vanish.

Barthes writes:

In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder … over a catastrophe which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Photographs, like death masks, make the viewer acutely aware of the passage of time and the inevitability of death.

Samhain: A Veil Separating the Dead from the Living

In her meditation on how to ‘winter’ during the tougher periods of life, Katherine May reflects on the Gaelic pagan tradition of Samhain.

Samhain was and still is celebrated on October 31 — as is Halloween — and celebrates the end of harvest season.

But it is also meant to usher in the beginning of the ‘dark half’ of the year.

Samhain, then, is more than just a celebration: it’s a portal.

Quite possibly, Samhain is the kind of portal Mary Shelley’s main character, Lionel, was hoping for death to be.

During Samhain, the barriers between the world of the living and the dead break down.

Samhain was considered to be a moment when the veil between this world and the Otherworld was at its thinnest. [T]his was a liminal moment in the calendar: a time between two worlds […].

It occurs to me then that death masks seem an appropriate topic for fall, for Samhain, for Halloween.

They are an object of immortalization, making it possible to get a 3D-glimpse of a past that no longer exists. A past that, by layering itself over something that’s long gone now, almost becomes tangible again.

Almost, you can feel all these humans coming alive again.

Almost, you can see them move and discuss. Almost, you hear them urging each other to shush and be quiet.

Shut up children, Mary Shelley hisses to her babies. Your mother — one of the first to write science fiction — is working.

My decidedly favorite artifact of the Keats-Shelley House collection is Mary Shelley’s very own ‘traveling desk.’

Several times I’ve stood before it, incredulous of the fact that the very Mary Shelley — who wrote Frankenstein and The Last Man and lost all those children and a husband and who was the daughter of Wollstonecraft who had seen the French king rush by — sat at this desk in the flesh, and wrote.

Traveled — through Switzerland (where she wrote Frankenstein), through Italy (where you know what happened.) And wrote.

Wrote, wrote, wrote.

Still today, we are able to trace the meaning of her memento mori, her actions, her words.

Katherine May reflects on the custom of Halloween — she says:

Halloween [...] still reveals our need to enter liminal spaces: [W]e wish that the veil between the living and the dead would lift for a while.

Death masks, three-hundred-year-old paintings, preserved hearts, enshrined writing desks.

Letters of which we will never know the stories.

All of these become more tangible, their hidden dimensions more palpable, around the time of Halloween.

We sense the apocalypse of endings and beginnings, past and ahead.

We understand more clearly that we are part of an eternal cycle, an eternal flow.

This is the End of a Beginning

Uncle Pappy: ‘I’m glad I’m on Earth at the same time as y’all’

Fall is a time when trees retract their chlorophyll and cast off their leaves. This isn’t a passive process — it is an active choice, a willful shedding. An act of preparation, plants look ahead and preserve their life.

If you look closely at a tree no in October, you will see that the buds for next spring are already present and fully formed.

So what do we really know of beginnings and endings? Do they even exist? Or is everything simply one unstoppable process — the same sun rays sparkling on the polished floors of a 17th century house in Amsterdam now illuminating yours on a fiery fall day?

We are different today, and yet we are all still the same.

We are all, still, doing the same things.

We are all, still, saying: But I too lived.

I too cherished these sun rays.

I too loved someone.

I too have received some heart-breaking news.

There is an old and extremely happy man living — evidently, because all of his Instagram videos are filmed there — in a swamp in a Southern US-state, from whence he relentlessly dishes out fragments of quick and surprisingly deep wisdom.

This man calls himself Uncle Pappy.

His Instagram description goes:

Uncle Pappy 🌴

A fella

Uniting folks 🌎

Spreading positivity ✨

Loving the environment 🌴

Uncle Pappy swims with alligators (again, don’t we all?), has a huge gray mustache and is permanently enlightened.

In my favorite of his reels to date, he quotes the novelist Anne Lamott (or Pete Holmes, he seems undecided), who expressed the following sentiment: ‘Every hundred years, there’s all new people.’

If transcribed, the things he says read almost like a poem.

And it is with this quasi-poem that I want to conclude and send you off into the rest of your October:

Every hundred years, there’s all new people baby

every hundred years all new people

the people we’re on Earth with right now

this is our CREW okay

in the same way you can’t pick your family

but you gotta get along with ‘em

we can’t pick the people we’re on Earth with

but we gotta get along man

in the whole grand scheme of the universe

all the time, all the space