The Aziola’s Cry: A Novel of the Shelleys
The Aziola’s Cry is as mournful and haunting as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem about the ‘little downy owl’. Crafted around the years the Shelleys spent together, 1814-1822, Harker Shaw’s biographical fiction focuses on how those years may have contributed to literary conversation and collaboration between the two intellectuals.
In 1814, twenty-one-year-old Shelley declared undying love for the brilliant sixteen-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft. Refusing to be encumbered by the strictures of British society, Mary wholeheartedly agreed to become his mistress (Shelley was married, although estranged from his wife at the time). Shunned by her outraged family, Shelley, Mary, and her stepsister, Jane (Claire Clairmont), left for the continent. For Mary there was no other option. Shelley was her destiny, the mirror to her soul.
Their peripatetic lifestyle was dogged by financial insecurity, tragedy, and loss, one event after another. Mary, wrapped in her unspeakable grief, became distant, unable to give of herself, and concentrated instead on her writing. Shelley, who craved her companionship like the air he breathed, found some comfort in other pursuits.
Harker Shaw’s Shelley is a conflicted soul, slandered in England as an atheist, a revolutionary and a writer of immoral works. His fear that no one would ever read his words overrode his wish to contribute to the betterment of mankind. Mary was a consistent stabilising force for his inner torment. Harker Shaw’s narrative is a spell-binding historical account, an enduring ode to the terrible price the Shelleys paid for their love―a viscerally painful story of unrelenting loss. Pages are haunted by an overriding sense of fate. Magnificent descriptions of violent storms foreshadow the future. Periods of happy bliss alternate with overwhelming grief and melancholy. Harker Shaw sticks very closely to historical fact, which could become tedious, yet this emotionally stirring love story is a work of beauty I won’t soon forget.
