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, 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.
The Art of The Novella Series
Too short to be a novel, too long to be a short story, the novella is
generally unrecognized by academics and publishers. Nonetheless, it is a
form beloved and practiced by literature's greatest writers. In the Art
Of The Novella series, Melville House celebrates this renegade art form
and its practitioners with titles that are, in many instances, presented
in book form for the first time.
