Mathilda

WRITTEN in Italy immediately following the successful publication of Mary Shelley's iconic horror story Frankenstein, her second novel could not be more different in its central adult theme of a widowed father's unnaturally excessive love for his teenage daughter.


Mathilda served as a distraction from the author's personal tragedies and emotional tumult, which included the recent death of her two young children and the increasingly erratic behaviour of her lover (later, husband) the charismatic but philandering and penurious poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.


On completing the final draft in 1820, Mary Shelley sent her manuscript to her father—the historian and novelist William Godwin—in the hope that he would find a British publisher. Godwin was so outraged at the novel's deep interrogation of emotions and emphasis on unrequited incest that he not only refused to promote its publication but refused to return the manuscript to his daughter.

Following the death by drowning of her husband in 1822, Mary returned to London and, immersed in supporting herself and her only surviving child, Mathilda was evidently mothballed while she devoted her energies to writing five other novels and promoting Percy Bysshe Shelley's canon of work.

The only known surviving copy of Mathilda was discovered by chance by a university archivist in the 1950s.


This wholly new ebook edition sympathetically applies the editing and corrections that a contemporaneous publisher, given the opportunity to edit the author's final draft, would doubtless have effected, while taking nothing away from the style and integrity of Mary Shelley's powerful original. Also included are biographical notes and a preface unique to this edition.