4 weeks earlier than her seventeenth birthday, Mary Godwin eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, twenty-four and estranged from the spouse to whom he was nonetheless married. Simply earlier than dawn on July 28, 1814, they departed her father’s dwelling in a carriage and headed for the Continent, penniless and with solely the obscure contour of a plan. Via privation and persecution, via storms and sprained ankles and hostile villagers, they stored slaking their Romantic souls on nature’s magnificence as they made their means throughout France, Switzerland, Germany, and The Netherlands, understanding not the place they have been going or what the long run held. (The long run held Frankenstein, into which Mary would incorporate most of the transcendent landscapes encountered on this formative journey.)
Alongside the best way, they recorded what they noticed with the wide-eyed marvel of novelty and younger love in a joint journal, which Mary later edited, refined, and revealed anonymously as History of a Six Weeks’ Tour (public library | free ebook), modeled on the deeply private literary travelogue her visionary mother had revealed, beneath her personal title, a yr earlier than dying in birthing Mary.
In a single significantly vivid passage, penned upon making the crossing from France to Switzerland, the Alps rise from the web page of their full unphotographable majesty:
We handed via a slim valley between two ranges of mountains, clothed with forests, on the backside of which flowed a river, from whose slim mattress on both facet the boundaries of the vale arose precipitously. The highway lay about half means up the mountain, which shaped one of many sides, and we noticed the overhanging rocks above us and beneath, monumental pines, and the river, to not be perceived however from its reflection of the sunshine of heaven, far beneath… [Then] we noticed the Alps: vary after vary of black mountains are seen extending one earlier than the opposite, and much behind all, towering above each function of the scene, the snowy Alps. They have been an hundred miles distant, however attain so excessive within the heavens, that they seem like these amassed clouds of dazzling white that organize themselves on the horizon throughout summer season. Their immensity staggers the creativeness, and to this point surpasses all conception, that it requires an effort of the understanding to consider that they certainly type part of the earth.
Beforehand: The Unphotographable #1: A Desert Sunset in the American Southwest.
