[23] In F of F—­A there follows a passage which has been scored out and which does not appear in Mathilda:  “I have tried in somewhat feeble language to describe the excess of what I may almost call my adoration for my father—­you may then in some faint manner imagine my despair when I found that he shunned [me] & that all the little arts I used to re-awaken his lost love made him”—.  This is a good example of Mary’s frequent revision for the better by the omission of the obvious and expository.  But the passage also has intrinsic interest.  Mathilda’s “adoration” for her father may be compared to Mary’s feeling for Godwin.  In an unpublished letter (1822) to Jane Williams she wrote, “Until I met Shelley I [could?] justly say that he was my God—­and I remember many childish instances of the [ex]cess of attachment I bore for him.”  See Nitchie, Mary Shelley, p. 89, and note 9.

[24] Cf. the account of the services of Fantasia in the opening chapter of F of F—­A (see pp. 90-102) together with note 3 to The Fields of Fancy.

[25] This passage beginning “Day after day” and closing with the quotation is not in F of F—­A, but it is in S-R fr.  The quotation is from The Captain by John Fletcher and a collaborator, possibly Massinger.  These lines from Act I, Sc. 3 are part of a speech by Lelia addressed to her lover.  Later in the play Lelia attempts to seduce her father—­possibly a reason for Mary’s selection of the lines.

[26] At this point (f. 56 of the notebook) begins a long passage, continuing through Chapter V, in which Mary’s emotional disturbance in writing about the change in Mathilda’s father (representing both Shelley and Godwin?) shows itself on the pages of the MS. They look more like the rough draft than the fair copy.  There are numerous slips of the pen, corrections in phrasing and sentence structure, dashes instead of other marks of punctuation, a large blot of ink on f. 57, one major deletion (see note 32).

[27] In the margin of F of F—­A Mary wrote, “Lord B’s Ch’de Harold.”  The reference is to stanzas 71 and 72 of Canto IV.  Byron compares the rainbow on the cataract first to “Hope upon a death-bed” and finally

Resembling, ’mid the torture of the scene, Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.

[28] In F of F—­A Mathilda “took up Ariosto & read the story of Isabella.”  Mary’s reason for the change is not clear.  Perhaps she thought that the fate of Isabella, a tale of love and lust and death (though not of incest), was too close to what was to be Mathilda’s fate.  She may have felt—­and rightly—­that the allusions to Lelia and to Myrrha were ample foreshadowings.  The reasons for the choice of the seventh canto of Book II of the Faerie Queene may lie in the allegorical meaning of Guyon, or Temperance, and the “dread and horror” of his experience.

[29] With this speech, which is not in F of F—­A, Mary begins to develop the character of the Steward, who later accompanies Mathilda on her search for her father.  Although he is to a very great extent the stereptyped faithful servant, he does serve to dramatize the situation both here and in the later scene.