SHELLEY, Mary.

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Autograph letter signed to John George Cochrane. A scarce signed letter from Mary Shelley to John George Cochrane, the Scottish editor and publisher of the Foreign Quarterly Review. Shelley is unforgiving in her response to a request for a review of Stendhal's Promenades dans Rome: "I have not forgotten or neglected my task, but M. Beylses' book is so trite so unentertaining - so very commonplace that I have found it quite impossible to do anything with it". Shelley and Stendhal shared a complete devotion to Italy. For Shelley, her travels through Italy were a pilgrimage to "a land not only beautiful and exotic but sacred to what she considered the greatest civilization human beings had ever created, heir to the Greeks" (Sunstein, p. 152). Stendhal, while similarly enchanted by the country's rich history and culture, used his travels as a springboard to muse on his own philosophies - many of which were antagonistic to Shelley's worldview. On reading Stendhal's Promenades, Shelley must have been pained to see her beloved Italy used as a justification for political and moral standpoints she disavowed. Stendhal was not so icy towards Shelley and her late husband. In her biography of Mary, Sunstein paints a picture of Stendhal as "an ardent Shelleyan" who drew on Mary and her husband for his novel Armance: "Proud, reserved but passionate, noble-minded, her brow too prominent, her principles too elevated, she never lies but is forced into caution to preserve her integrity in an al

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