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Overview

Mathilda (1959) is a posthumous novella by English writer and Romantic Mary Shelley. Written as a means of self-distraction following the deaths of her young children in Italy, Mathilda is a work haunted by tragic loss. Unpublished for over a century, its posthumous appearance helped cement Shelley's reputation as a leading Romantic, an artist unafraid of confronting such themes and taboos as incest and suicide in her work.

Mathilda, named after its narrator, traces a young woman's troubled life from birth to her premature deathbed. Following her mother's death during childbirth and her father's subsequent abandonment, Mathilda is raised by her aunt in rural Loch Lomond, Scotland. A gifted reader and promising intellectual, she rises from her difficult circumstances to lead a relatively happy childhood. When, at the age of 16, her father reenters her life, the two reconnect and eventually move together to London. As she begins to receive suitors however, her father's strange jealousy and irrational behavior conceal a terrible secret. When he reveals his incestuous desires to Mathilda, she rejects him, resulting in his suicide and leaving her unmarried, orphaned, and financially unstable. Living in self-imposed exile, she befriends the similarly melancholy Woodville, a young widower and poet who does his best to care for her despite her crushing bouts of depression and frequent suicidal thoughts. Mathilda is an emotionally complex and ultimately difficult novella recognized for its controversial themes and for its parallels to Shelley's own tragic life.

With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Mary Shelley's Mathilda is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781513271446
Publisher: Mint Editions
Publication date: 02/09/2021
Series: Mint Editions (Women Writers)
Pages: 106
Product dimensions: 5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.26(d)

About the Author

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was an English novelist. Born the daughter of William Godwin, a novelist and anarchist philosopher, and Mary Wollstonecraft, a political philosopher and pioneering feminist, Shelley was raised and educated by Godwin following the death of Wollstonecraft shortly after her birth. In 1814, she began her relationship with Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom she would later marry following the death of his first wife, Harriet. In 1816, the Shelleys, joined by Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, physician and writer John William Polidori, and poet Lord Byron, vacationed at the Villa Diodati near Geneva, Switzerland. They spent the unusually rainy summer writing and sharing stories and poems, and the event is now seen as a landmark moment in Romanticism. During their stay, Shelley composed her novel Frankenstein (1818), Byron continued his work on Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818), and Polidori wrote "The Vampyre" (1819), now recognized as the first modern vampire story to be published in English. In 1818, the Shelleys traveled to Italy, where their two young children died and Mary gave birth to Percy Florence Shelley, the only one of her children to survive into adulthood. Following Percy Bysshe Shelley's drowning death in 1822, Mary returned to England to raise her son and establish herself as a professional writer. Over the next several decades, she wrote the historical novel Valperga (1923), the dystopian novel The Last Man (1826), and numerous other works of fiction and nonfiction. Recognized as one of the core figures of English Romanticism, Shelley is remembered as a woman whose tragic life and determined individualism enabled her to produce essential works of literature which continue to inform, shape, and inspire the horror and science fiction genres to this day.

Table of Contents

Awknowledgements
Introduction
Mary Shelley: A Brief Chronology
A Note on the Text

Mathilda

Appendix A: The Romantic-Era Suicide Debate
  1. From William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness (1793)
  2. From David Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (1783)
  3. From William Rowley, A Treatise on Female, Nervous, Hysterical, Hypochondriacal, Bilious, Convulsive Diseases. Apoplexy and Palsy; with thoughts on Madness, Suicide, &c. (1788)
  4. From John Francis, “Sermon III. On Self-Murder” (1749)
  5. From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sorrows of Werter: A German Story (1774)
  6. From Lord Byron, Manfred, A Dramatic Poem (1817?)
  7. William Wordsworth, “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” (1798)
Appendix B: Family Resemblances
  1. Full-Detail Transcription from Mary Shelley’s Manuscript of “Mathilda”
  2. From Mary Shelley, “The Fields of Fancy” (1819)
  3. From Mary Shelley, “The Mourner” (1830)
  4. From Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)
  5. From Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Fiction (1788)
  6. From Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798)
  7. From Mary Wollstonecraft, “Cave of Fancy” (1787)
Appendix C: Incest, the Gothic, and Literary Forebears
  1. From Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Cenci (1819)
  2. From Percy Bysshe Shelley, Laon and Cythna, or, The Revolution of the Golden City (1818)
  3. From Vittorio Alfieri, Myrrha: A Tragedy. The Tragedies of Vittorio Alfieri (1815)
  4. From Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796)
  5. From Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764)
  6. From John Polidori, Ernestus Berchtold; or,The Modern Oedipus: A Tale (1819)
Appendix D: Biographical Context: Shelley’s Letters and Journals
  1. William Godwin, “Letter from Godwin to Shelley Following Fanny Imlay’s Suicide” (13 October 1816)
  2. From Harriet Shelley, “Harriet Shelley’s Suicide Letter” (7[?] December 1816)
  3. Mary Shelley and Claire Clairmont, “Mary’s Letter to Friends on Her Son’s Final Illness” (3 and 5 June 1819)
  4. William Godwin, Manuscript Letter to Mary Shelley (9 September 1819)
Works Cited and Select Bibliography
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