Other editions of book Mathilda

A Banned Tale of Despair“To bestow on your fellow men is a Godlike attribute. So indeed it is and as such not one fit for mortality;-the giver, like Adam and Prometheus, must pay the penalty of rising above his nature by being the martyr of his own excellence.” - Mathilda, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley Mary Shelley's tale of young lonely girl who desperately wishes for a relationship with her absent father. When he finally returns after 15 years, Mathilda finds that his interest in her is beyond tragic. This novella is a perfect example of the period of Romantic literature and is filled with obsession, betrayal and crushing sadness.

How is this book unique?Font adjustments & biography includedUnabridged (100% Original content)IllustratedAbout Mathilda by Mary Wollstonecraft ShelleyMathilda, or Matilda, is the second long work of fiction of Mary Shelley, written between August 1819 and February 1820. It deals with common Romantic themes of incest and suicide. The act of writing this novella distracted Mary Shelley from her grief after the deaths of her one-year-old daughter Clara at Venice in September 1818 and her three-year-old son William in June 1819 in Rome. These losses plunged Mary Shelley into a depression that distanced her emotionally and sexually from Percy Shelley and left her, as he put it, "on the hearth of pale despair". Narrating from her deathbed, Matilda tells the story of her unnamed father's confession of incestuous love for her, followed by his suicide by drowning; her relationship with a gifted young poet called Woodville fails to reverse Matilda's emotional withdrawal or prevent her lonely death. Commentators have often read the text as autobiographical, the three central characters standing for William Godwin, Mary Shelley, and Percy Shelley. There is no firm evidence, however, that the storyline itself is autobiographical. Analysis of Matilda's first draft, titled "The Fields of Fancy", reveals that Mary Shelley took as her starting point Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished "The Cave of Fancy", in which a small girl's mother dies in a shipwreck. Like Mary Shelley herself, Matilda idealises her lost mother. According to editor Janet Todd, the absence of the mother from the last pages of the novella suggests that Matilda's death renders her one with her mother, enabling a union with the dead father. Critic Pamela Clemit resists a purely autobiographical reading and argues that Mathilda is an artfully crafted novella, deploying confessional and unreliable narrations in the style of her father, as well as the device of the pursuit used by Godwin in his Caleb Williams and by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein. The novella's 1959 editor, Elizabeth Nitchie, noted the novella's faults of "verbosity, loose plotting, somewhat stereotyped and extravagant characterization" but praised a "feeling for character and situation and phrasing that is often vigorous and precise". The story may be seen as a metaphor for what happens when a woman, ignorant of all consequences, follows her own heart while dependent on her male benefactor.

On her deathbed, Mathilda writes a letter to her only friend, revealing the dark secret of her past, a secret so shameful, she can only manage it now because her time is running out. Written between 1819 and 1820, author Mary Shelley unfortunately never saw this novella published. Though he enjoyed the writing, her father, William Godwin, refused to return the manuscript to her after she asked him to get it published in England, because he found the theme "disgusting and detestable". The world was, therefore, deprived of this beautifully written story about love and despair until 1959.

The three main characters in Mathilda are clearly Mary Shelley herself, Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley -- and their relations can easily be reassorted to correspond with their lives. Mathilda is the second long work of fiction of Mary Shelley, written between August 1819 and February 1820.The act of writing this novella distracted Mary Shelley from her grief after the deaths of her one-year-old daughter Clara at Venice in September 1818 and her three-year-old son William in June 1819 in Rome. These losses plunged Mary Shelley into a depression that distanced her emotionally and sexually from Percy Shelley and he left her, as he put it, "on the hearth of pale despair". An important and little-known tale from the author of Frankenstein.