On the basis of the Bodleian notebook and some information about the complete story kindly furnished me by
1
They are listed in Nitchie, Mary Shelley, Appendix II, pp. 205-208. To them should be added an unfinished and unpublished novel, Cecil, in Lord Abinger's collection.
2
On the basis of the Bodleian notebook and some information about the complete story kindly furnished me by Miss R. Glynn Grylls, I wrote an article, "Mary Shelley's Mathilda, an Unpublished Story and Its Biographical Significance," which appeared in Studies in Philology, XL (1943), 447-462. When the other manuscripts became available, I was able to use them for my book, Mary Shelley, and to draw conclusions more certain and well-founded than the conjectures I had made ten years earlier.
3
A note, probably in Richard Garnett's hand, enclosed in a MS box with the two notebooks in Lord Abinger's collection describes them as of Italian make with "slanting head bands, inserted through the covers." Professor Lewis Patton's list of the contents of the microfilms in the Duke University Library (Library Notes, No. 27, April, 1953) describes them as vellum bound, the back cover of the Mathilda notebook being missing. Lord Abinger's notebooks are on Reel 11. The Bodleian notebook is catalogued as MSS. Shelley d. 1, the Shelley-Rolls fragments as MSS. Shelley adds c. 5.
4
See note 83 to Mathilda, page 89.
5
See Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (4 vols., London, 1798), IV, 97-155.
6
See Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams … Their Journals and Letters, ed. by Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, [1951]), p. 27.
7
See Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, revised, with introduction and notes by H. Buxton Forman (London, 1913), p. 252.
9
Maria Gisborne, etc., pp. 43-44.
12
See White, Shelley, II, 40-56.
13
See Letters, II, 88, and note 23 to Mathilda.
14
See Shelley and Mary (4 vols. Privately printed [for Sir Percy and Lady Shelley], 1882), II, 338A.
15
See Mrs. Julian Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary W. Shelley (2 vols. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1889), I, 255.
17
Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal (3 vols., Nos. 63, 71, and 96 of the Rev. Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, London, 1835-1837), II, 291-292.
18
The most significant revisions are considered in detail in the notes. The text of the opening of The Fields of Fancy, containing the fanciful framework of the story, later discarded, is printed after the text of Mathilda.
19
The name is spelled thus in the MSS of Mathilda and The Fields of Fancy, though in the printed Journal (taken from Shelley and Mary) and in the Letters it is spelled Matilda. In the MS of the journal, however, it is spelled first Matilda, later Mathilda.
20
Mary has here added detail and contrast to the description in F of F – A, in which the passage "save a few black patches … on the plain ground" does not appear.
21
The addition of "I am alone … withered me" motivates Mathilda's state of mind and her resolve to write her history.
22
Mathilda too is the unwitting victim in a story of incest. Like Oedipus, she has lost her parent-lover by suicide; like him she leaves the scene of the revelation overwhelmed by a sense of her own guilt, "a sacred horror"; like him, she finds a measure of peace as she is about to die.
23
The addition of "the precious memorials … gratitude towards you," by its suggestion of the relationship between Mathilda and Woodville, serves to justify the detailed narration.
24
At this point two sheets have been removed from the notebook. There is no break in continuity, however.
25
The descriptions of Mathilda's father and mother and the account of their marriage in the next few pages are greatly expanded from F of F – A, where there is only one brief paragraph. The process of expansion can be followed in S-R fr and in F of F – B. The development of the character of Diana (who represents Mary's own mother, Mary Wollstonecraft) gave Mary the most trouble. For the identifications with Mary's father and mother, see Nitchie, Mary Shelley, pp. 11, 90-93, 96-97.
26
The passage "There was a gentleman … school & college vacations" is on a slip of paper pasted on page 11 of the MS. In the margin are two fragments, crossed out, evidently parts of what is supplanted by the substituted passage: "an angelic disposition and a quick, penetrating understanding" and "her visits … to … his house were long & frequent & there." In F of F – B Mary wrote of Diana's understanding "that often receives the name of masculine from its firmness and strength." This adjective had often been applied to Mary Wollstonecraft's mind. Mary Shelley's own understanding had been called masculine by Leigh Hunt in 1817 in the Examiner. The word was used also by a reviewer of her last published work, Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1844. (See Nitchie, Mary Shelley, p. 178.)
27
The account of Diana in Mathilda is much better ordered and more coherent than that in F of F – B.
28
The description of the effect of Diana's death on her husband is largely new in Mathilda. F of F – B is frankly incomplete; F of F – A contains some of this material; Mathilda puts it in order and fills in the gaps.
