In Defence of Harriet Shelley
1918
Twain takes on the Romantic era's most convenient villain. Harriet Shelley, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley's abandoned wife, has been cast for over a century as the nagging obstacle between genius and true love. Twain, with his characteristic demolition of hypocrisy, tears apart the biographical literature that blamed her for her husband's infidelities, pointing out the inconsistencies and biases that turned a suffering woman into a scapegoat. He argues that Harriet has been unfairly treated by historians and biographers who romanticized Percy and Mary while ignoring the real human cost of his actions. Written in 1918, this is Twain the serious moralist alongside Twain the satirist, using wit as a weapon against a century of literary mythmaking. It endures because the dynamics Twain dissected have not changed: how we build up artists and tear down the people they hurt, how a woman's character gets erased the moment a poet needs a villain.
