Mathilda | Page 5

she wrote the biographical sketch of Alfieri for Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia nearly twenty years later. She then spoke of the difficulties inherent in such a subject, "inequality of age adding to the unnatural incest. To shed any interest over such an attachment, the dramatist ought to adorn the father with such youthful attributes as would be by no means contrary to probability."[xvii] This she endeavored to do in Mathilda (aided indeed by the fact that the situation was the reverse of that in _Myrrha_). Mathilda's father was young: he married before he was twenty. When he returned to Mathilda, he still showed "the ardour and freshness of feeling incident to youth." He lived in the past and saw his dead wife reincarnated in his daughter. Thus Mary attempts to validate the situation and make it "by no means contrary to probability."
Mathilda offers a good example of Mary Shelley's methods of revision. A study of the manuscript shows that she was a careful workman, and that in polishing this bizarre story she strove consistently for greater credibility and realism, more dramatic (if sometimes melodramatic) presentation of events, better motivation, conciseness, and exclusion of purple passages. In the revision and rewriting, many additions were made, so that Mathilda is appreciably longer than The Fields of Fancy. But the additions are usually improvements: a much fuller account of Mathilda's father and mother and of their marriage, which makes of them something more than lay figures and to a great extent explains the tragedy; development of the character of the Steward, at first merely the servant who accompanies Mathilda in her search for her father, into the sympathetic confidant whose responses help to dramatise the situation; an added word or short phrase that marks Mary Shelley's penetration into the motives and actions of both Mathilda and her father. Therefore Mathilda does not impress the reader as being longer than The Fields of Fancy because it better sustains his interest. And with all the additions there are also effective omissions of the obvious, of the tautological, of the artificially elaborate.[xviii]
The finished draft, _Mathilda_, still shows Mary Shelley's faults as a writer: verbosity, loose plotting, somewhat stereotyped and extravagant characterization. The reader must be tolerant of its heroine's overwhelming lamentations. But she is, after all, in the great tradition of romantic heroines: she compares her own weeping to that of Boccaccio's Ghismonda over the heart of Guiscardo. If the reader can accept Mathilda on her own terms, he will find not only biographical interest in her story but also intrinsic merits: a feeling for character and situation and phrasing that is often vigorous and precise.
Footnotes:
[i] 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.
[ii] 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.
[iii] 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.
[iv] See note 83 to _Mathilda_, page 89.
[v] See Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (4 vols., London, 1798), IV, 97-155.
[vi] See _Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams ... Their Journals and Letters_, ed. by Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, [1951]), p. 27.
[vii] See Thomas Medwin, _The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley_, revised, with introduction and notes by H. Buxton Forman (London, 1913), p. 252.
[viii] _Journal_, pp. 159, 160.
[ix] _Maria Gisborne, etc._, pp. 43-44.
[x] _Letters_, I, 182.
[xi] _Ibid._, I, 224.
[xii] See White, _Shelley_, II, 40-56.
[xiii] See _Letters_, II, 88, and note 23 to Mathilda.
[xiv] See Shelley and Mary (4 vols. Privately printed [for Sir Percy and Lady Shelley], 1882), II, 338A.
[xv] See Mrs. Julian Marshall, _The Life and Letters of Mary W. Shelley_ (2 vols. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1889), I, 255.
[xvi] Julian _Works_, X, 69.
[xvii] _Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal_ (3