Mathilda

By Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

But my father, my beloved and most wretched father... Would he never overcome the fierce passion that now held pitiless dominion over him?

With its shocking theme of father-daughter incest, Mary Shelley’s publisher—her father, known for his own subversive books—not only refused to publish Mathilda, he refused to return her only copy of the manuscript, and the work was never published in her lifetime.

His suppression of this passionate novella is perhaps understandable—unlike her first book, Frankenstein, written a year earlier, Mathilda uses fantasy to study a far more personal reality. It tells the story of a young woman whose mother died in her childbirth—just as Shelly’s own mother died after hers—and whose relationship with her bereaved father becomes sexually charged as he conflates her with his lost wife, while she becomes involved with a handsome poet. Yet despite characters clearly based on herself, her father, and her husband, the narrator’s emotional and relentlessly self-examining voice lifts the story beyond autobiographical resonance into something more transcendent: a driven tale of a brave woman’s search for love, atonement, and redemption.

It took more than a century before the manuscript Mary Shelley gave her father was rediscovered. It is published here as a stand-alone volume for the first time.

The Art of The Novella Series

Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented in book form for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Nov 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781612192451

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was born in 1797, the daughter of two of the leading radical writers of the age. Her mother died just days after her birth and she was educated at home by her father and encouraged in literary pursuits. She eloped with and subsequently married the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, but their life together was full of hardship. The couple were ruined by disapproving parents and Mary lost three of her four children. Although its subject matter was extremely dark, her first novel Frankenstein (1818) was an instant sensation. Subsequent works such as Mathilda (1819), Valperga (1823) and The Last Man (1826) were less successful but are now finally receiving the critical acclaim that they deserve.

Reviews for Mathilda

[birdie.newborn · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Given the premise of the book, one is led through a lonely childhood with delight in nature, to exquisite joy, soon followed by anguish, despair, and a will to die. Heady, but also sobby.

[john257hopper · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This short novel was Mary Shelley's second book after Frankenstein, but due to its controversial themes, it was not published until 140 years later in 1959. It is a semi-autobiographical portrayal, with the roles of Shelley, her father William Godwin and her husband Percy Shelley taken by Mathilda, her unnamed father and her poet companion, Woodville. The controversy lies mainly in the theme of the incestuous love ("unlawful and monstrous passion") her father feels for Mathilda, which, not surprisingly, given that there is no suggestion of any real such impropriety, led to William Godwin refusing to return the manuscript to Mary for publication. Linked to this theme, the main thrust of the novel is Mathilda's despair and wish for death because of guilt at supposedly having provoked the unnatural love on the part of her father; it is a bleak piece of writing, penned by Shelley after the death of her two young children, one year old Clare and three year old William, which led to her temporary alienation from her husband. In sum, a morbid read, arguably significant more for its literary background than its intrinsic merit as a novel.

[joririchardson · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Oh, Shelley. First a story about a lonely, half-dead monster, and now a tale of incestuous romance. I was very intrigued about the novella "Mathilda." I had heard of before, as "that other Shelley book," but somehow the knowledge of what it was about managed to never reach me until a few days ago.For those who also do not know the story, this is about a girl who is indeed named Mathilda. Her mother tragically died in childbirth, inspiring her passionate father to flee in grief to the ends of the earth, leaving his infant daughter with a prickly aunt. This aunt raises Mathilda in Scotland, and while she is never cruel to the girl, she refuses to show her the slightest affection, which Mathilda bears with much suffering. She lives in hope that one day, her father will return to reclaim her. Miraculously, one day a letter appears, saying that he intends to do just that. Mathilda meets her father for the first time, and the two instantly form a connection. They become each others dearest friends, and Mathilda feels loved for the first time in her life.However, after going to live with her father in England, his attitude toward her shifts to one of coldness, and he seems repulsed by her very presence, no matter what Mathilda does. At last, alone in the woods one day, Mathilda confronts him about it tearfully. Her father confesses that he loves her - and not in the way that a father should.Horrified, Mathilda retreats back to the house. As she is planning on leaving, she receives word that her father has left mysteriously. Gathering from the letter he left her that he is in a dark state of mind, she rushes to the place she believes him to have gone, hoping that it is not too late.This was a melodramatic little story, which came as no surprise to me. I did not have any particular love for it, except for some scenes that stood out in my mind. The scene in the forest was striking, of course. I knew what was coming and was just waiting for Mathilda to realize it. The scene where Mathilda is racing to find her father was my favorite scene of the book. There was already such breathless urgency to it, and then of course, a thunderstorm had to begin.What was left of the book following this scene, I wasn't so sure about. It was sad, yes, but I felt that the woeful atmosphere was being pushed at me just a bit too much. I love a good depressing book, but it has to actually BE depressing. If the author is simply trying to convince us to be depressed and it isn't working, that isn't a good sign. Our heroine Mathilda was a girl that you cannot help but feel pity for. She is quite the good girl, and all her wishes and hopes are honest and simplistic, making the reader think "Gosh, how hard would it be to just give the poor girl that little thing?" I liked her, because though she is an unfortunate little thing, she also possesses a strength underneath, shown in her bravery and her compassion concerning the climax with her father. What a sad life she led. She grew up longing for affection that her aunt stonily refused her, and then finds this relationship with her beloved father. However, she was getting her hopes up too soon, because then her father turns away from her more pointedly than her Aunt ever did. All her life, Mathilda longs above all else to be loved. She finds no love with her aunt, but her father does come to love her - in a backwards sort of way. Mathilda's father is described from the beginning as "passionate," and as having strong, romantic emotions. At first I thought in disapproval that this seemed an excuse, or a way of watering things down. However, I was never quite able to hate him. He has evidentially never gotten over the death of his wife. He loved her very much, and now he has before him a beautiful young girl who looks, speaks, walks, and acts like his lover, like a ghost. We see plenty of Mathilda's sad story, but her father's was equally sorrowful. Also, he distances himself from Mathilda in an effort to protect her. When at last he confesses, he feels so guilty that he nearly dies. To me, he seemed to be a good man who tragically fell into wicked desires.As shocking as this book was for its time (though it was not actually published until much later), it does not, as seems to be heavily hinted in the reviews I've found, contain any incestuous sex. Mathilda's father proclaims desire for her, but that is as far as it ever goes. I wanted to say that because some reviews state outright that the two have sex. And this simply isn't correct.An interesting bit of information about the book was that after writing it, Shelley felt it to be darkly prophetic. Upon the death of her husband, she raced in a carriage toward the sea-side, hoping she would find him alive, just like in that scene from her own book.An intriguing story.

[amydross · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderfully lurid and disturbing gothic(ish) tale. But there's one point where the narrator says, "my story is basically over, and I'm not sure why I'm still writing," and I have to agree. The climax comes early, and the rest doesn't really measure up.

[toohotty · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book reminded me why I don't normally read stuff written before 1950, and that reason is because everyone has so many FEELINGS! On the plus side, this book is about sex with your father. Ok, seriously... Basically this book is about a young girl whose mother died at her birth, so her father left in his grief. She was raised by an emotionally distant nurse. All she wanted was affection. Her father came back when she was 16 and conflated his wife and daughter into one person because that's what men do in these novels. She fell in love with him because of lonliness, and then they had sex. He freaks out and kills himself, so SHE freaks out and WANTS to kill herself, but she becomes a hermitess instead, which she FAILS at when she befriends a poet grieving the loss of his fiance. He talks her into trying to live her life, but she dies of consumption right after this revelation OOPS! You couldn't get more Lifetime Original if you added an eating disorder and breast cancer. While Mary Shelley's language is flowery and poetic as ever, the story never goes beyond a shallow (yet overwrought) examination of the pathos Mathilda suffers. On the plus side, it's a quick read (being a novella and all) and the cover's a neat shade of purple. It's also got a neat history, as her father refused to publish it when it was written due to how autobiographically it could be construed. So... you decide.

[drfuriosa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was promised a scandalous book about incest, and I instead got a Romantic treatise on suicide. So, this is absolutely going on every grad school syllabus on any Romantic era seminar.