ABSTRACT

On Sunday, 20 July 1816, three weeks after having returned from his Swiss lake tour with Lord Byron, Shelley set off from Geneva with his wife Mary and her half-sister Claire Clairmont to visit the valley of Chamouni, a well-known tourist resort. On the path from Servoz, three leagues from Chamouni, the party was confronted with Mont Blanc's majestic environs. Frances Ferguson addresses Shelley's engagement with the mountain as a Deist symbol and states, 'in his efforts to counter the myth of natural religion that is attached to Mont Blanc, Shelley does not destroy the mountain's symbolic value but merely inverts it'. Shelley realised that his conception of love was sufficiently unconventional to require an explanation. The result was an 1818 essay, unsurprisingly called 'On Love.' Some brief extracts should be sufficient to acquaint a person with its general thrust.