Havre
Le Havre is a principal seaport of
Normandy: Mary, Shelley, and Claire
Clairmont embarked for England
from Le Havre when they returned from
Geneva in September 1816. The town would have held
more than a tourist's interest for Mary. Her mother Mary Wollstonecraft had moved to Le
Havre to escape the Terror of 1794: there she wrote her
Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French
Revolution and gave birth to her daughter Fanny Imlay, Mary's half-sister, in May
of that year.
In the 1831 revision Mary Shelley has Victor and his father sail directly
from Dublin to Le Havre, avoiding the
lengthy coach journey across England in the 1818 novel. This, perhaps,
reflects a more sophisticated sense of the historical geography of the
British Isles gained after her return to England in 1823. Over many centuries
Ireland had maintained a commercial
and cultural exchange with France that
flourished independently from the frames of reference in which the British
viewed the power that was increasingly its major antagonist. Napoleon's
attempt to capitalize on the Wolfe Tone rebellion of 1798 underscored the dangers
implicit in Ireland's independent foreign relations, leading directly to
the Act of Union of 1801 in
which Ireland was assimilated to the British crown.
