Thy form is here indeed—­a lovely one—­
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow’s most obscure abode. 
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.

Professor White believed that Shelley recorded this estrangement only “in veiled terms” in Julian and Maddalo or in poems that he did not show to Mary, and that Mary acknowledged it only after Shelley’s death, in her poem “The Choice” and in her editorial notes on his poems of that year.  But this unpublished story, written after the death of their other child William, certainly contains, though also in veiled terms, Mary’s immediate recognition and remorse.  Mary well knew, I believe, what she was doing to Shelley.  In an effort to purge her own emotions and to acknowledge her fault, she poured out on the pages of Mathilda the suffering and the loneliness, the bitterness and the self-recrimination of the past months.

The biographical elements are clear:  Mathilda is certainly Mary herself; Mathilda’s father is Godwin; Woodville is an idealized Shelley.

Like Mathilda Mary was a woman of strong passions and affections which she often hid from the world under a placid appearance.  Like Mathilda’s, Mary’s mother had died a few days after giving her birth.  Like Mathilda she spent part of her girlhood in Scotland.  Like Mathilda she met and loved a poet of “exceeding beauty,” and—­also like Mathilda—­in that sad year she had treated him ill, having become “captious and unreasonable” in her sorrow.  Mathilda’s loneliness, grief, and remorse can be paralleled in Mary’s later journal and in “The Choice.”  This story was the outlet for her emotions in 1819.

Woodville, the poet, is virtually perfect, “glorious from his youth,” like “an angel with winged feet”—­all beauty, all goodness, all gentleness.  He is also successful as a poet, his poem written at the age of twenty-three having been universally acclaimed.  Making allowance for Mary’s exaggeration and wishful thinking, we easily recognize Shelley:  Woodville has his poetic ideals, the charm of his conversation, his high moral qualities, his sense of dedication and responsibility to those he loved and to all humanity.  He is Mary’s earliest portrait of her husband, drawn in a year when she was slowly returning to him from “the hearth of pale despair.”

The early circumstances and education of Godwin and of Mathilda’s father were different.  But they produced similar men, each extravagant, generous, vain, dogmatic.  There is more of Godwin in this tale than the account of a great man ruined by character and circumstance.  The relationship between father and daughter, before it was destroyed by the father’s unnatural passion, is like that between Godwin and Mary.  She herself called her love for him “excessive and romantic."[xiii] She may well have been recording, in Mathilda’s sorrow over her alienation from