her father and her loss of him by death, her own grief at a spiritual separation from Godwin through what could only seem to her his cruel lack of sympathy.  He had accused her of being cowardly and insincere in her grief over Clara’s death[xiv] and later he belittled her loss of William.[xv] He had also called Shelley “a disgraceful and flagrant person” because of Shelley’s refusal to send him more money.[xvi] No wonder if Mary felt that, like Mathilda, she had lost a beloved but cruel father.

Thus Mary took all the blame for the rift with Shelley upon herself and transferred the physical alienation to the break in sympathy with Godwin.  That she turned these facts into a story of incest is undoubtedly due to the interest which she and Shelley felt in the subject at this time.  They regarded it as a dramatic and effective theme.  In August of 1819 Shelley completed The Cenci.  During its progress he had talked over with Mary the arrangement of scenes; he had even suggested at the outset that she write the tragedy herself.  And about a year earlier he had been urging upon her a translation of Alfieri’s Myrrha.  Thomas Medwin, indeed, thought that the story which she was writing in 1819 was specifically based on Myrrha.  That she was thinking of that tragedy while writing Mathilda is evident from her effective use of it at one of the crises in the tale.  And perhaps she was remembering her own handling of the theme when 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