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marriage! Freedom for everyone to love as, when and where they will! And a freedom of his own, his championship of which impressed me more than any other. Freedom for the human race to live without the tyranny of religion!
    To my eyes he was beyond doubt a genius.
    I did not, indeed I could not, resist his charm. I saw no one but him, dreaming or waking. My eyes did not function unless he was there for them to look at. I fell in love so madly I almost did not recognize it as love. It was madness and nothing else.
    Shelley was never unkind to Jane. Indeed, he always treated her like a glittering accessory, a beguiling addition to our party. But as it became more and more obvious that it was my “acquaintance” he wanted, I ceased to think about any claim her superior beauty might have on him.
    My trusty confidante and I held candlelit meetings in her room, hours after the rest of the household was asleep. Jane sat in the bed, rosy-faced, wearing her coverlet as a cloak, quizzing and scolding me by turns.
    “He is the perfect man, Mary, but quite unattainable,” she complained. “Why cannot you forget him, and join me in our search for men who are free to marry us? Why have you abandoned your sister’s prospects? I call it very selfish!”
    “Because I love him.”
    “But he is married!”
    “She has betrayed him.”
    “And he has no money!”
    “Papa thinks he has money.”
    “Papa is wrong. Do you not recognize a parasite when you see one?”
    “Do not call him that!”
    “I will call him what I like.” She tossed her head, which was covered all over with curl papers. “He is the well-known species of Parasitus charmingus , identified by its high degree of personal beauty, large brain and warm heart.”
    I laughed aloud.
    “Shh!” She shook me by the arm. “Do you want to wake them all?”
    “Yes,” I replied, still laughing. “I want to wake them all and tell them that I am in love!”
    Poor Jane had no power to dissuade me from my course. All of my senses were fine-tuned to squeeze every pleasure from each moment with Shelley. I read and reread his tattered notes, and put them away with sprigs of lavender in a locked box. I spent an embarrassingly long time during one of his visits devising a way to approach him from behind with my sewing scissors, and cut off one of his curls to put in my locket. Then I was too afraid to do it.
    Secretly I planned a future with him, Harriet or no Harriet.
    He would eventually, I was sure, find a way to marry me. We would make peace with his father and have a large country house and a London apartment, and be at the very centre of society, a world I longed to enter but because of my Radical background had never imagined I would.
    In truth, I wanted everything: rebellion and respectability, dreams and reality. An angel and a man.

    I dreamt he wrote me a letter. So perfect a letter, so full of love and joy, that it could only exist in a dream, because real letters are not perfect. They are instruments of torture. They bring promises of meetings, prosperity, new acquaintance, and news of old acquaintance, babies’ health, the achievements of sons and the marriages of daughters. They tell of death and despair. But they are insubstantial, untrue, faithless. Like love itself .
    The words in the dream-letter were not ordinary words. I had superhuman powers, which allowed me to lift them physically off the page. Some of them I put in my mouth. They tasted bitter, but I could not spit them out. A pile of them lay on the ground. I plunged my hand into them and scattered them like garden leaves. They settled again in different places, mirror images of themselves, written backwards. Others flew about my face and neck, moth-like, not quite biting me but causing me distress. I exclaimed and pushed them away, but they persisted, and I began to scratch my skin .
    All his beautiful words, turning into monster-moths .
    Perhaps dreams mean nothing, but this dream was hard to bear.