CHAP. 2

The next morning while sitting on the steps of the temple of Aesculapius in the Borghese gardens Fantasia again visited me & smilingly beckoned to me to follow her—­My flight was at first heavy but the breezes commanded by the spirit to convoy me grew stronger as I advanced—­a pleasing languour seized my senses & when I recovered I found my self by the Elysian fountain near Diotima—­The beautiful female who[m] I had left on the point of narrating her earthly history seemed to have waited for my return and as soon as I appeared she spoke thus—­[100]

NOTES TO THE FIELDS OF FANCY

[88] Here is printed the opening of F of F—­A, which contains the fanciful framework abandoned in Mathilda.  It has some intrinsic interest, as it shows that Mary as well as Shelley had been reading Plato, and especially as it reveals the close connection of the writing of Mathilda with Mary’s own grief and depression.  The first chapter is a fairly good rough draft.  Punctuation, to be sure, consists largely of dashes or is non-existent, and there are some corrections.  But there are not as many changes as there are in the remainder of this MS or in F of F—­B.

[89] It was in Rome that Mary’s oldest child, William, died on June 7, 1819.

[90] Cf. two entries in Mary Shelley’s journal.  An unpublished entry for October 27, 1822, reads:  “Before when I wrote Mathilda, miserable as I was, the inspiration was sufficient to quell my wretchedness temporarily.”  Another entry, that for December 2, 1834, is quoted in abbreviated and somewhat garbled form by R. Glynn Grylls in Mary Shelley (London:  Oxford University Press, 1938), p. 194, and reprinted by Professor Jones (Journal, p. 203).  The full passage follows:  “Little harm has my imagination done to me & how much good!—­My poor heart pierced through & through has found balm from it—­it has been the aegis to my sensibility—­Sometimes there have been periods when Misery has pushed it aside—­& those indeed were periods I shudder to remember—­but the fairy only stept aside, she watched her time—­& at the first opportunity her ... beaming face peeped in, & the weight of deadly woe was lightened.”

[91] An obvious reference to Frankenstein.

[92] With the words of Fantasia (and those of Diotima), cf. the association of wisdom and virtue in Plato’s Phaedo, the myth of Er in the Republic, and the doctrine of love and beauty in the Symposium.

[93] See Plato’s Symposium.  According to Mary’s note in her edition of Shelley’s Essays, Letters from Abroad, etc. (1840), Shelley planned to use the name for the instructress of the Stranger in his unfinished prose tale, The Coliseum, which was written before Mathilda, in the winter of 1818-1819.  Probably at this same time Mary was writing an unfinished (and unpublished) tale about Valerius, an ancient Roman brought back to life in modern Rome.  Valerius, like Shelley’s Stranger, was instructed by a woman whom he met in the Coliseum.  Mary’s story is indebted to Shelley’s in other ways as well.