Mathilda (novella)

Mathilda, or Matilda, is the second long work of fiction of Mary Shelley, written between August 1819 and February 1820. It deals with common Romantic themes of incest and suicide.

The act of writing this novella distracted Mary Shelley from her grief after the deaths of her one-year-old daughter Clara at Venice in September 1818 and her three-year-old son William in June 1819 in Rome. These losses plunged Mary Shelley into a depression that distanced her emotionally and sexually from Percy Shelley and left her, as he put it, "on the hearth of pale despair".

Narrating from her deathbed, Mathilda, a young woman barely in her twenties, writes her story as a way of explaining her actions to her friend, Woodville. Her narration follows her lonely upbringing and climaxes at a point when her unnamed father confesses his incestuous love for her. This is then followed by his suicide by drowning and her ultimate death; her relationship with the gifted young poet, Woodville, fails to reverse Matilda's emotional withdrawal or prevent her lonely death.

The novella begins with readers becoming aware that this story is being narrated in the first person, by Mathilda, and that this narration is meant for a specific audience in answer to a question asked prior to the novella's beginning: "You have often asked me the cause of my solitary life; my tears; and above all of my impenetrable and unkind silence." Readers quickly learn that Mathilda is on her deathbed and this is the only reason she is exposing what seems to be a dark secret.

Mathilda's narrative first explores the relationship between her mother and father, and how they knew each other growing up. Mathilda's mother, Diana, and her father were childhood friends; Mathilda's father found solace in Diana after the death of his own mother and the two married not long after. Mathilda, as narrator, notes that Diana changed Mathilda's father making him more tender and less fickle. However, Mathilda was born a little more than a year after their marriage and Diana died a few days after her birth, causing her father to sink into a deep depression. His sister, Mathilda's aunt, came to England to stay with them and help care for Mathilda, but Mathilda's father, unable to even look at his daughter, left about a month after his wife's death and Mathilda was raised by her aunt.

Mathilda tells Woodville that her upbringing, while cold on the part of her aunt, was never neglectful; she learned to occupy her time with books and jaunts around her aunt's estate in Loch Lomond, Scotland. On Mathilda's sixteenth birthday her aunt received a letter from Mathilda's father expressing his desire to see his daughter. Mathilda describes their first three months in each other's company as being blissful, but this ended first when Mathilda's aunt dies and then, after the two return to London, upon Mathilda's father's expression of his love for her.

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