Long-lost Mary Shelley letters surface after more than 150 years

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley loved her son -- but she wished he were a little bit taller.

That’s what she wrote in one of the letters in a recently discovered cache. The correspondence is the first set of unpublished letters by the author of “Frankenstein� to surface in a number of decades -- and they were so lost that no one was looking for them.

The letters were discovered by a researcher who stumbled across them while doing an Internet search for something entirely different.

“I thought: ‘What is this?’ and clicked on the link,� Nora Crook, an emeritus professor at Anglia Ruskin University, told the Guardian. “I knew right away they had never been published before.�

Shelley’s letters were written between 1831 and 1849 to Horace Smith and his daughter Eliza. The friendship between Smith and Shelley had been known before, but the letters show her personality -- loyal, grateful and attentive, Crook says, as well as revealing her “charming wheedling side.�

Shelley was the daughter of proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He died in a boating accident in 1822. The Shelleys had one surviving child, a son who was also named Percy.

“Percy is growing up a very fine young man & developing tastes & talents that would remind you of his father,� she wrote. When he was at Cambridge, she wrote, “he is getting all that we could wish -- he is getting very liberal -- & has so much character & talent -- though still shy -- that I have every hope for his future happiness.� Praising his sweet nature, she admits, “I am mortified he is not taller.�

Two years after the letters stopped, Shelley would die of a brain tumor; in the later letters, she writes of feeling unwell. In 1846, she apologetically noted that her letter might appear “blotty and invalidy.�

Something these letters have that no others from Mary Shelley do are the wax seals, still attached. Shelley used red wax and imprinted “Mary Shelley� in plain script when sealing her letters (a photo is at the Guardian).

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Dialect group’s word of the year: Because. Because oh brother.Carolyn Kellogg: Join me on Twitter, Facebook and Google+