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  To them should be added an unfinished and unpublished novel, Cecil, in Lord Abinger’s collection.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about the complete story kindly furnished me by Miss R. Glynn Grylls, I wrote an article, “Mary Shelley’s Mathilda, an Unpublished Story and Its Biographical Significance,” which appeared in Studies in Philology, XL (1943), 447-462.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.