AT A PIVOTAL MOMENT IN MARY SHELLEY'S SECOND NOVEL, VALPERGA; OR the Life and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca (1823), Shelley describes the pain experienced by the central female character, Euthanasia dei Adimari, following the dissolution of her relationship with the tide character of Castruccio. The narrator explains, "She determined to think no more of Castruccio; but every day, every moment of the day, was as a broken mirror, a multiplied reflection of his form alone." (1) In her note to this passage, Tilottama Rajan suggests that this image of the multiplied reflection of a shattered mirror may echo a passage from Percy Shelley's De fence of Poetry, in which he describes drama "'so long as it continues to express poetry,' as a 'prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature ... and multiplies all that it reflects'" (459n). Owing to the relative contemporaneity of the composition of the passages, this connection is logical. Mary Shelley completed composition of her novel, after a period of over four years, by December of 1821, while Percy had completed his essay in March of that same year. Nevertheless, the brightness of Percy Shelley's imagery and the celebratory attitude he expresses in this passage and in the larger essay as a whole offer a stark contrast to the gloomy discussion found in Mary Shelley's treatment of the similar image in her novel. A clearer precursor to Mary Shelley's use of the image of the broken mirror is in the writings of Lord Byron, whose often skeptical views offer a more fitting parallel to those found in Shelley's writings. No connection has previously been made between Shelley's use of this image and Byron's, even in criticism of Shelley's novels that incorporates consideration of Byron's influence on Shelley's writing. Such discussions most often focus on the presence of Byron the man, rather than Byron the poet, and therefore diminish the focus on Shelley's skills as a writer, instead often portraying her as a deeply troubled woman seeking to relieve her personal sufferings through the incorporation of autobiographical parallels into her fiction. (2)
