Two years pass …
Mathilda has begun studying
again, an activity that has a welcome effect: I became more human, she says simply.[1] This, of course, is
exactly how Mary Shelley herself had dealt with the loss of children, of her
husband. She’d thrown herself into studying—reading, writing—and she was able,
she said, to lose herself, to forget. For a while.
Then Mathilda meets a persistent
young man named Woodville, a character who resembles Bysshe Shelley in just
about every way. His genius is
transcendent;[2]
he’s published poems. But he’s suffered tragedy, as well: His fiancée fell ill
and died, but devoted Woodville watched
beside her for twelve hours, staying with her until the end.[3]
Well, both Woodville and
Mathilda are suffering; both desire solitude; they become friends. The two of
them consider a joint suicide, but he eventually talks her—and himself—out of
it. Nature cooperates, though. She becomes consumptive, fails and falls
rapidly. But she tells Woodville at the end of her story that she is not sad;
she craves death. In truth I am in love
with death, she writes; no maiden
ever took more pleasure in the contemplation of her bridal attire than I in
fancying my limbs already enwrapt in their shroud: is it not my marriage dress?[4]
Well, when William Godwin
received this manuscript from his daughter—with her naïve request to find a
publisher—he was alarmed. In her biography Mary
Shelley, Miranda Seymour quotes the following passage from the journal of
Maria Gisborne, the family friend who had transported the diary from Italy to
Godwin’s hand.
According to Gisborne, Godwin found
the novella disgusting & detestable;
and there ought to be, at least if [it] is ever published, a preface to prepare
the minds of readers, & to prevent them from being tormented by the
apprehension from moment to moment of the fall of the heroine.[5]
And so—as I said at the outset
of this account of Mathilda—Godwin put
the manuscript in a drawer, pretty much ignored Mary’s inquiries about it, and
it was not published until 1959 by the University of North Carolina Press in
their Studies in Philology. Mary had
been dead more than a century. I was in high school.
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