Mathilda

Mathilda Review

Mathilda has one of the most extraordinary publication histories in English literature. Mary Shelley wrote it in 1819, in the aftermath of the death of her infant son William and in a period of severe marital and personal crisis. She sent the manuscript to her father, William Godwin — the philosopher and radical, one of the most eminent intellectuals of his age — for his opinion. He was appalled. He refused to return the manuscript. It remained suppressed until 1959, when it was finally published, 140 years after its composition.

The subject matter explains Godwin’s response. Mathilda is a short novel — really a novella, barely ninety pages — about a young woman whose father falls incestuously in love with her, confesses his passion, and then kills himself in shame. Mathilda survives but does not recover. She retreats from the world, lives in isolation on a moor, and narrates her history in a letter to a poet friend who has tried and failed to draw her back to life.

The autobiographical resonances are not difficult to trace: Shelley’s relationship with her own father was complicated, her grief after her son’s death was crushing, and the emotional texture of the novella — the guilt, the contamination, the sense that something has been destroyed that can never be restored — maps closely onto her documented psychological state. But Mathilda is not merely autobiographical transcription. It is shaped, controlled, and formally precise.

What is most striking about the novella, read now, is how contemporary it feels. The psychological mechanisms Shelley describes — the way trauma forecloses certain futures, the impossibility of explaining the specifics of one’s damage to those who have not experienced it, the exhaustion of surviving something that should not have been survived — are described with an accuracy that anticipates the language of therapeutic psychology by more than a century.

Our rating: 3.9/5

The Suppression and Its Meaning

The publication history of Mathilda is itself a significant literary-historical event. Mary Shelley wrote it in 1819, sent the manuscript to her father William Godwin — the radical philosopher and author of Political Justice, one of the most eminent intellectuals of the age — and he refused to return it. Godwin’s suppression of the manuscript was complete: he neither published it nor destroyed it, simply withheld it, and it remained unpublished for 140 years, finally appearing in 1959 from the University of North Carolina Press.

Godwin’s response is usually attributed to the novella’s subject matter — a father’s incestuous desire for his daughter — which readers have long understood as a displaced engagement with the complicated emotional dynamics of Shelley’s own relationship with him. Godwin was not a warm father; he was cold, intellectually demanding, and largely indifferent to his daughter’s personal suffering even when she was in desperate need of his support. Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, had died eleven days after giving birth to her. Her relationship with her father was therefore freighted with both the absence of the mother who died for her and the inadequacy of the father who survived.

The Gothic Form and Its Uses

Mary Shelley (1797–1851), born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin and later married to Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1816, worked consistently within and against the gothic tradition — a tradition that uses extreme psychological and atmospheric states to access emotions and experiences that realistic fiction tends to sanitize. Mathilda is a gothic work in this sense: the incest, the suicide, the moors, the dying narrator composing her confession for a poet friend who could not save her — these are gothic conventions, but Shelley uses them to render psychological states with a precision that the conventions alone could not achieve.

Why It Feels Contemporary

Read now, Mathilda is striking for how modern its psychological mechanisms feel. The description of how trauma forecloses futures, how contamination spreads from the source of damage into every subsequent relationship, how the specific knowledge of what was done to you creates a kind of loneliness that cannot be explained to those who have not experienced it — these observations anticipate the language of trauma theory by more than a century. Shelley arrived at this understanding not through theory but through her own experience of loss, and the precision of her observation is the precision of someone who had no choice but to look directly at what had happened to her.

The novella was written in the same year as Shelley’s great period of loss: the deaths of her children, the strains in her marriage to Percy, and the ongoing cold war with her father. Mathilda is what she made from this material when she could not yet make it into something else.

The Suppressed Confession

Mathilda, written in 1819, is a novella narrated by a dying young woman recounting her father’s incestuous love for her and its catastrophic consequences. Mary Shelley sent the manuscript to her father, William Godwin, who found the subject too disturbing and declined to return or publish it; the work remained unprinted until 1959. Its raw treatment of grief, isolation and forbidden feeling has made it central to modern reassessments of Shelley beyond Frankenstein.

That William Godwin suppressed the manuscript rather than return it deepened the estrangement between father and daughter, and modern critics read the novella as Shelley’s coded reckoning with her own complicated, grief-stricken bond with the father who had raised her after her mother’s death.