Fuseli

A short section in London, when the young writer decides to live by her pen and starts attending long nightly dinners at her publisher’s house with leading intellectuals such as Blake and painter Henry Fuseli, is also exciting to read.

Early in life, she develops passionate friendships with female friends; in London, she falls in love with Fuseli; and the first love affair she consummates leads to two suicide attempts, before she falls in love with Godwin, Mary Shelley’s father.

Physiognomy was popularized during Ducreux’s lifetime by Johann Kaspar Lavater, who wrote a tract illustrated in the English edition with drawings by William Blake and Johann Heinrich Fuseli of various facial “types” set against neutral backgrounds.

This visitation is unmistakably reminiscent of Fuseli’s The Nightmare.

The only way she could break the spell was to flee to revolutionary France, where she tried to forget Fuseli amid the swoosh of the guillotine.