Mathilda

Name: Mathilda
Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

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Language: en2,337 downloads on Project Gutenberg

Subjects

Fathers and daughters -- Fiction Guilt -- Fiction Incest -- Fiction

In: Novels·British Literature

Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #15238.

About this book

The work is a short, highly personal novella by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, written in the summer of 1819 and preserved in both a rough draft and a final copy. It tells the tragic tale of a daughter, Mathilda, whose father falls into an incestuous love for her, leading to his suicide and her subsequent exile to a lonely heath. The opening material explains that the manuscript has been faithfully reproduced, complete with the author’s own marginal notes and the editor’s scholarly emendations, and it situates the story within Shelley’s own life, linking the three principal characters to Mary herself, her father William Godwin, and her husband Percy Shelley. The introduction also outlines the complex transmission of the manuscript through various libraries and private collections before it became accessible to scholars, underscoring the text’s rarity and its intimate connection to Shelley’s autobiographical concerns.

The prose reflects the early‑19th‑century Romantic sensibility of Shelley’s prose fiction, marked by a lyrical yet precise diction, frequent allusions to Dante and classical myth, and a reflective, confessional tone. The editor’s extensive footnotes and historical commentary preserve the original spelling quirks and manuscript markings, offering a scholarly yet readable experience. Readers who appreciate psychologically intense, morally unsettling narratives, particularly those interested in the intersections of personal trauma, familial guilt, and the darker side of Romantic literature, will find this novella compelling. It also appeals to scholars of Shelley’s life and to anyone drawn to early Victorian explorations of taboo subjects rendered in a richly layered, historically grounded style.

Characters in Mathilda

MathildaYoung Romantic woman, delicate features, dark hair loosely gathered, simple high‑waisted gown, pale skin
Mathilda's fatherMiddle‑aged gentleman, thoughtful eyes, graying hair, trimmed beard, scholarly coat, solemn expression

The opening · free to read

The text follows Mary Shelley’s manuscript exactly except for the omission of mere corrections by the author, most of which are negligible; those that are significant are included and explained in the notes. Footnotes indicated by an asterisk are Mrs. Shelley’s own notes. She was in general a fairly good speller, but certain words, especially those in which there was a question of doubling or not doubling a letter, gave her trouble: untill (though occasionally she deleted the final l or wrote the word correctly), agreable, occured, confering, buble, meaness, receeded, as well as hopless, lonly, seperate, extactic, sacrifise, desart, and words ending in -ance or -ence. These and other mispellings (even those of proper names) are reproduced without change or comment. The use of sic and of square brackets is reserved to indicate evident slips of the pen, obviously incorrect, unclear, or incomplete phrasing and punctuation, and my conjectures in emending them.

I am very grateful to the library of Duke University and to its librarian, Dr. Benjamin E. Powell, not only for permission to transcribe and publish this work by Mary Shelley but also for the many courtesies shown to me when they welcomed me as a visiting scholar in 1956. To Lord Abinger also my thanks are due for adding his approval of my undertaking, and to the Curators of the Bodleian Library for permiting me to use and to quote from the papers in the reserved Shelley Collection. Other libraries and individuals helped me while I was editing Mathilda: the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore, whose Literature and Reference Departments went to endless trouble for me; the Julia Rogers Library of Goucher College and its staff; the library of the University of Pennsylvania; Miss R. Glynn Grylls (Lady Mander); Professor Lewis Patton of Duke University; Professor Frederick L. Jones of the University of Pennsylvania; and many other persons who did me favors that seemed to them small but that to me were very great.

I owe much also to previous books by and about the Shelleys. Those to which I have referred more than once in the introduction and notes are here given with the abbreviated form which I have used:

Frederick L. Jones, ed. The Letters of Mary W. Shelley, 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944 (Letters)

---- Mary Shelley’s Journal. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1947 (Journal)

Roger Ingpen and W.E. Peck, eds. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Julian Edition, 10 vols. London, 1926-1930 (Julian Works)