Crime and Punishment in Victorian Britain
«Falkner» is Mary Shelley's late novel about how one person tries to cope with years of guilt for murder.
Mary Shelley is primarily known for her fantastic novel «Frankenstein», which was recently adapted into a film by Mexican director Guillermo del Toro. But «Frankenstein» is far from being the only work by the author. She wrote three children's books, many essays and short stories, as well as seven novels. «Falkner» is the penultimate one. Ekaterina Petrova, a literary reviewer for «Real Time», tells us what this nearly forgotten novel is about.
The Author of «Frankenstein»
Mary Shelley's novel «Falkner» was first published in 1837 in London by Saunders and Otley. The book was released in three volumes, which was the standard format for an English novel in the first half of the 19th century. The publication was printed by the Stevens and Pardon printing house. The spine of each volume bore the brief title «Falkner», while the title page gave the full title: «Falkner. A Novel». Mary Shelley's full name was not mentioned anywhere; the author was identified by the formula «Author of «Frankenstein», «The Last Man», etc.». In this way, the publisher directly linked the new book to Shelley's already known works.
Each volume began with an epigraph from the poem by the writer's husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, «Rosalind and Helen» (1819). In translation, it reads:
And in memory of the sad history
An altar was erected and a wondrous temple;
Steps led up from the flower garden,
And above the gate there was a carved inscription:
«Loyalty for centuries».
This text was reproduced unchanged in all three volumes and was part of the mandatory set of title elements of the 1837 edition.
In the same year, 1837, «Falkner» was published in the USA — in one volume by the New York publishing house Harper & Brothers. This version differed only in format and volume, while the text of the novel remained the same. A copy of the American single-volume edition is stored, among other places, in the Sadleir–Black collection. Later, it was this 1837 edition that was digitized and made publicly available on the HathiTrust platform. And it was from this version that the translation into Russian was made.
After its first publication, the novel was included in several collections of Mary Shelley's works on several occasions. At the end of the 20th century, «Falkner» was included in the academic edition «Novels and Collected Works of Mary Shelley», edited by Pamela Clemit (1996).
I/We «Falkner»
«Falkner» begins with the story of Elizabeth's childhood. The action takes place in the town of Treby. The girl's father dies of consumption, and her mother dies a few months later. Before dying, the mother begins a letter to a woman named Alithea, asking her to take the daughter in and explicitly stating that Elizabeth must not fall into the hands of her late husband's family. The letter remains unfinished and undelivered. The mistress of the house, Mrs. Baker, reads it and keeps the child with her, expecting that the relatives will eventually be found and reward her. Elizabeth lives with Mrs. Baker and spends a lot of time at her mother's grave — there she plays, reads and prays, saying that she feels closest to her mother in the cemetery.
She had no one closer to her in the whole world than these two graves, and she kissed the earth and the flowers, which she did not dare to pick, sat and hugged the tomb mound. Her mother was everywhere. Her mother lay in the ground, but the girl felt her love and felt loved.
A stranger, John Falkner, appears in Treby. He keeps to himself and one day comes to the cemetery with the intention of ending his life, tormented by the knowledge that he once took another person's life. By mistake, he sits on Elizabeth's mother's grave, and the girl stops him from doing something irreversible. Falkner escorts her home, meets Mrs. Baker and learns the child's story. After reading the unfinished letter, he realizes that the woman the dying mother of Elizabeth was addressing is the same Alithea, whose death he considers his fault. This coincidence becomes a decisive fact for him. He takes Elizabeth with him and leaves Treby for London. On the way, the girl begins to call him «dad», and Falkner is convinced that she will be better off with him than with distant and indifferent relatives.
The further development of the plot is built around their life together and their travels. Elizabeth becomes a constant reminder to Falkner of duty and responsibility. Next to her, his outbursts of anger subside, and she herself feels safe. Already at an early stage of the narrative, the Neville family line appears: Falkner learns about the escape of Mr. Neville's wife with a mysterious man and that the husband has gone to look for her. These facts are not directly linked to each other, but they lay the foundation for future events, to which the novel will return later, when Elizabeth befriends Mr. Neville's son and learns the story of his mother's disappearance.
The narrative in the novel is conducted from the perspective of a nameless omniscient narrator who freely moves between the external description of events and the internal states of the characters. At the same time, the narrator deliberately withholds some information until key plot points. Although the story is told in the third person, in some episodes the narrative shifts to the first-person plural — «we», which allows for generalizing the characters' personal experience and relating it to universal models of behavior.
We tend to laugh at the claims of the science of physiognomy, but can we really argue that the first impression is the most important?
The syntax in this novel is intentionally overloaded: long sentences with dashes and clarifications create an effect close to stream of consciousness, capturing the process of internal fluctuation rather than its result.
«Narrative of Destabilization»
Structurally, the most important element of the novel is Rupert Falkner's letter, in which he recounts the story of Alithea Neville's abduction and the circumstances of her death. It is at this point that the plot unfolds retrospectively, and the novel temporarily turns into a confessional text in the first person.
Falkner's character develops along with the plot. His initial goal — to atone for his guilt and die — transforms into a desire to act for the sake of others as the novel progresses. This shift is reflected not through declarations, but through a series of actions and decisions. Falkner's tragedy is rooted in his belief in the possibility of subjugating reality to his own will: at the beginning of the novel, he is described as a man who imagined that success could be achieved by force. The realization of the fallacy of this approach comes only after he acknowledges and abandons his attempts to control the fate of those around him.
A special place in the novel is occupied by the theme of the perception of the body and experience, which is directly addressed in the author's intrusions. One of the later passages fixes the distance between the external view and the internal experience: for the eye of a surgeon, the human body can appear only as a «cluster of bones, muscles and arteries», and then the observer sees only people, «each of whom sleeps and wakes, walks and meets his fellow men», without distinguishing another person behind them. This comment is built into the narrative as a generalization and relates to the key problem of the novel — the limitation of a view that is fixed on the surface of events and bodies, but misses their internal coherence.
Critical tradition has long viewed «Falkner» as a relatively conservative late novel by Shelley and as an example of «family» or «domestic» prose, in which social and political issues are supposedly reduced to private morality. However, a number of researchers point out that the novel, like «Lodore» (1835), focuses on the problems of power, responsibility and the structure of social ties. Researcher Betty Bennett emphasizes that in these texts Shelley combines the psychological and social novel with the novel of education, resulting in not an idyll, but a «narrative of destabilization», where the central figures are educated women who strive for a just world order.
The ending of the novel is deliberately devoid of the effect of catharsis. The trial, Falkner's acquittal, and the subsequent coexistence of the characters are recorded by the writer as the completion of a chain of events, not as the triumph of moral order. The final chord is formulated in a direct author's comment on the futility of trying to rewrite the past:
Speculating about the past is pointless; it cannot be changed, and each link in the chain is forged and скреплено by a higher force that had its own special reason for doing so.
With this formula, Shelley concludes the novel, bringing it to a state of stable equilibrium, where responsibility to others finally displaces the desire to subjugate reality to one's own desires.
Publisher: «Podpisnye izdaniya», «Yandex Books»
Translated from English by Yulia Zmeeva
Number of pages: 528
Year: 2025
Age rating: 16+
Ekaterina Petrova is a literary reviewer for the online newspaper «Real Time» and the host of the «Macaroons» Telegram channel.