Mathilda

Description

THE ART OF THE NOVELLA SERIES With its shocking theme of father-daughter incest, Mary Shelley's publisher-her father, known for his own subversive books-not only refused to publish Mathilda, he refused to return her only copy of the manuscript, and the work was never published in her lifetime. His suppression of this passionate novella is perhaps understandable-unlike her first book, Frankenstein, written a year earlier, Mathilda uses fantasy to study a far more personal reality. It tells the story of a young woman whose mother died in her childbirth-just as Shelly's own mother died after hers-and whose relationship with her bereaved father becomes sexually charged as he conflates her with his lost wife, while she becomes involved with a handsome poet. Yet, despite characters clearly based on herself, her father, and her husband, the narrator's emotional and relentlessly self-examining voice lifts the story beyond autobiographical resonance into something more transcendent- a driven tale of a brave woman's search for love, atonement, and redemption. It took more than a century before the manuscript Mary Shelley gave her father was rediscovered. It is published here as a stand-alone volume for the first time.

Mary Shelley was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin on August 30, 1797 in London, the daughter of William Godwin- a radical philosopher and novelist, and Mary Wollstonecraft- a renowned feminist and the author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She eloped to France with Shelley in 1814, although they were not married until 1816, after the suicide of his first wife. She began work on Frankenstein in 1816 in Switzerland, while they were staying with Lord Byron, and it was published in 1818 to immediate acclaim. She died in London in 1851.

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read." -Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer "Small wonders." -Time Out London "[F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works." -Adam Begley, The New York Observer "I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series." -The New Yorker "The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed-tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are." -KQED (NPR San Francisco) "Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package." -The Wall Street Journal