Mathilda. Мэри Шелли

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СКАЧАТЬ break my fall from happiness to misery; it was as the stroke of lightning – sudden and entire.43 Alas! I now met frowns where before I had been welcomed only with smiles: he, my beloved father, shunned me, and either treated me with harshness or a more heart-breaking coldness. We took no more sweet counsel together; and when I tried to win him again to me, his anger, and the terrible emotions that he exhibited drove me to silence and tears.

      And this was sudden. The day before we had passed alone together in the country; I remember we had talked of future travels that we should undertake together – . There was an eager delight in our tones and gestures that could only spring from deep & mutual love joined to the most unrestrained confidence[;] and now the next day, the next hour, I saw his brows contracted, his eyes fixed in sullen fierceness on the ground, and his voice so gentle and so dear made me shiver when he addressed me. Often, when my wandering fancy brought by its various images now consolation and now aggravation of grief to my heart,44 I have compared myself to Proserpine who was gaily and heedlessly gathering flowers on the sweet plain of Enna, when the King of Hell snatched her away to the abodes of death and misery. Alas! I who so lately knew of nought but the joy of life; who had slept only to dream sweet dreams and awoke to incomparable happiness, I now passed my days and nights in tears. I who sought and had found joy in the love-breathing countenance of my father now when I dared fix on him a supplicating look it was ever answered by an angry frown. I dared not speak to him; and when sometimes I had worked up courage to meet him and to ask an explanation one glance at his face where a chaos of mighty passion seemed for ever struggling made me tremble and shrink to silence. I was dashed down from heaven to earth as a silly sparrow when pounced on by a hawk; my eyes swam and my head was bewildered by the sudden apparition of grief. Day after day45 passed marked only by my complaints and my tears; often I lifted my soul in vain prayer for a softer descent from joy to woe, or if that were denied me that I might be allowed to die, and fade for ever under the cruel blast that swept over me,

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      1

      They are listed in Nitchie, Mary Shelley, Appendix II, pp. 205-208. To them should be added an unfinished and unpublished novel, Cecil, in Lord Abinger's collection.

      2

      On the basis of the Bodleian notebook and some information about the complete story kindly furnished me by

1

They are listed in Nitchie, Mary Shelley, Appendix II, pp. 205-208. To them should be added an unfinished and unpublished novel, Cecil, in Lord Abinger's collection.

2

On the basis of the Bodleian notebook and some information about the complete story kindly furnished me by Miss R. Glynn Grylls, I wrote an article, "Mary Shelley's Mathilda, an Unpublished Story and Its Biographical Significance," which appeared in Studies in Philology, XL (1943), 447-462. When the other manuscripts became available, I was able to use them for my book, Mary Shelley, and to draw conclusions more certain and well-founded than the conjectures I had made ten years earlier.

3

A note, probably in Richard Garnett's hand, enclosed in a MS box with the two notebooks in Lord Abinger's collection describes them as of Italian make with "slanting head bands, inserted through the covers." Professor Lewis Patton's list of the contents of the microfilms in the Duke University Library (Library Notes, No. 27, April, 1953) describes them as vellum bound, the back cover of the Mathilda notebook being missing. Lord Abinger's notebooks are on Reel 11. The Bodleian notebook is catalogued as MSS. Shelley d. 1, the Shelley-Rolls fragments as MSS. Shelley adds c. 5.

4

See note 83 to Mathilda, page 89.

5

See Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (4 vols., London, 1798), IV, 97-155.

6

See Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams … Their Journals and Letters, ed. by Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, [1951]), p. 27.

7

See Thomas Medwin, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, revised, with introduction and notes by H. Buxton Forman (London, 1913), p. 252.

8

Journal, pp. 159, 160.

9

Maria Gisborne, etc., pp. 43-44.

10

Letters, I, 182.

11

Ibid., I, 224.

12

See White, Shelley, II, 40-56.

13

See Letters, II, 88, and note 23 to Mathilda.

14

See Shelley and Mary (4 vols. Privately printed [for Sir Percy and Lady Shelley], 1882), II, 338A.

15

See Mrs. Julian Marshall, The Life and Letters of Mary W. Shelley (2 vols. London: Richard Bentley & Son, 1889), I, 255.

16

Julian Works, X, 69.

17

Lives of the Most Eminent Literary and Scientific Men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal (3 vols., Nos. 63, 71, and 96 of the Rev. Dionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia, London, 1835-1837), II, 291-292.

18

The most significant revisions are considered in detail in the notes. The text of the opening of The Fields of Fancy, containing the fanciful framework of the story, later discarded, is printed after the text of Mathilda.

19

The name is spelled thus in the MSS of Mathilda and The Fields of Fancy, though in the printed Journal (taken from Shelley and Mary) and in the Letters it is spelled Matilda. In the MS of the journal, however, it is spelled first Matilda, later Mathilda.

20

Mary has here added detail and contrast to the description in F of F – A, in which the passage "save a few black patches … on the plain ground" does not appear.

21

The addition of "I am alone … withered me" motivates Mathilda's state of mind and her resolve to write her history.

22

Mathilda too is the unwitting victim in a story of incest. Like Oedipus, she has lost her parent-lover by suicide; like him she leaves the scene of the revelation overwhelmed by a sense of her own guilt, "a sacred horror"; like him, she finds a measure of peace as she is about to die.

23

The addition of "the precious memorials … gratitude towards you," by its suggestion of the relationship between Mathilda and Woodville, serves to justify the detailed narration.

24

At this point two sheets have been removed from the notebook. There is no break in continuity, СКАЧАТЬ