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.