Mathilda (Melville House)

✍ Scribed by Shelley, Mary

• Book ID: 107908109
• Publisher: Melville House
• Year: 2012
• Tongue: en-US
• Weight: 157 KB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781612192451

✦ Synopsis

But my father, my beloved and most wretched father... Would he never overcome the fierce passion that now held pitiless dominion over him?

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,...