Mary (Wollestonecraft Godwin) Shelley is best remembered for writing Frankenstein (a Gothic classic in its own right if you’ve never read it and one never really captured in a movie, least of all by the Karloff films), but she wrote a novel called Mathilda that’s much better and absolutely gives you the creeps. If you don’t know much about Mary Shelley’s life then some biographical information is necessary to explain why:
She was the daughter of the philosopher/novelist/anarchist/essayist William Godwin and the novelist/philosopher/feminist/poet Mary Godwin, a very beautiful woman who Mary was said to much resemble in appearance. Mary Wollestonecraft was a bit of a “free spirit” who wrote fairly candidly about her affairs, lived openly with men she wasn’t married to, had a couple of splashy suicide attempts (one literally so- she jumped into the Thames- the other one was with laudanum) and had an illegitimate daughter by the time she met Godwin. By most accounts they were an extremely happy couple, very passionate and soul mates and all that jazz, and in spite of having written against marriage many times she actually married him not long after learning she was pregnant. (Perhaps she felt that two illegitimate kids in the late 18th century was pushing it, plus she was almost 40 so she wasn’t likely to be fighting off suitors much longer). She died a few days after giving birth to their daughter, who was named for her (Mary Wollestonecraft Godwin) in 1797.
Mary and her half-sister Fanny were largely abandoned to governesses while their father mourned. He remarried to a stepmother who was hated by the girls and who returned the compliment, especially after her own son was born, but they got along famously with their stepmother’s (illegitimate) children including their stepsister Claire. To keep peace in his house and to cut expenses William actually sent them on very long visits to stay with his relatives and his wife’s relatives and friends as much as possible so he and Mary rarely lived in the same house for very long until she was in her teens though he wrote her long letters telling her of his love for her- some of them, um… yeah… he really loved her. (Her half sister Fanny, who wasn’t his, not so much.)
The family reunited largely because people were tired of supporting them. It was becoming simply horrendously dysfunctional: Godwin was always broke and deep in debt and did all manner of odd things to pay the bills (children’s books, pornography, borrowing from Regency era loan sharks, and possibly prostituting his stepdaughter Fanny) but they were falling deeper into poverty and had gone from country cottages to cheap city houses. Then they all met Percy.
At 20 Percy Bysshe Shelley was a (minor) aristocrat, well educated, brilliant, beautiful (in that tubercular English aristocrat way), usually broke and deep in debt himself, and married (his wife was Harriet) with a child and another on the way. He was a reader and admirer of both Wollstonecraft and Godwin and begged to come over and soon moved in, which delighted Godwin both to have a fan who was already getting some fame and to have a guy willing to pay him money (because again in that English aristocratic way the fact he was always in debt never seemed to stop him from having money). Mary was 15 at the time and at some point over the next year (debate as to when) began an affair with him. When she got pregnant by him at 16 he tried to marry her off to his best friend (with the unlikely Hazzard-ous name of Thomas Jefferson Hogg) but she held out for him and they eloped to Italy (though not in the “elope” as in “legally married” sense as he was still married to his wife who had just borne their second child that year). Like most young couples who elope they took the bride’s stepsister with them, which greatly upset Mary’s half-sister Fanny as, among other reasons, she was in love with Shelley herself and in fact may have had an affair with him; Claire almost certainly shagged him, then she met his friend Lord Byron and went with him and had her own illegitimate child (Allegra).
Things generally go to hell all around for a while. Mary had a nightmare pregnancy that resulted in a very premature baby, then had to attend a party Shelley threw in Italy when he received word Harriet had been delivered of a healthy son, then their baby died and she wrote to her friend and former suitor the somehow utterly ominous line
but there were also lighthearted moments: bisexual menages with her stepsister and Dr. Polidori and Byron and her husband, running from bill collectors, getting disowned by her father for having a bastard child (?!) and getting pregnant again (lots of times), and all this before she was even 18.
Then 1816 was a red letter year: Harriet (Mrs. Shelley) drowned herself, and Fanny (Mary’s half sister) checked into a roadside inn and killed herself with laudanum, both emulating (though in Harriet’s case I’m sure coincidentally) Mary Wollestonecraft’s suicide attempts but both being much better at it than she had been. And other stuff was happening with Claire and Mary’s half brother and father and stepmother and Frankenstein was born and she was constantly pregnant and having a roller coaster marriage to Percy that ended one month before his 30th birthday in 1822 when he drowned while boating. His death may have been due to illness or to intoxication (alcohol or drug) or may have been suicide, for he had been having major depression and guilt issues over the women he’d wronged (mainly Harriet) and the children he’d abandoned and money problems and what not.
And believe it or not, this is the short version of the story. Them folks was a big ol’ mess.
So anyway, she wrote Mathilda. It’s known she wrote parts of it as early as 1819 but it’s not certain how much or how often she edited it afterwards, which might make a difference for reasons we’ll see:
Mathilda is a girl whose parents were unconventional literary icons and very happily married until her mother died in childbirth, after which her father marries another woman and spends lots of time away from her but writes her long letters. She looks a lot like her mother. When she and her father do reunite the father confides that he does not love her as a father should but is, rather, truly, madly, desperately in love with her and begs her to consider marrying him (or a marital like relationship).
Meanwhile she has met the young beautiful and engaged (get that- not married, engaged) poet Woodville when she herself is 16 and begins an affair. Ultimately she elopes with Woodville, in part because she loves him and in part to get away from her father and his crazy house. Her father disowns her for this, and soon after her father- a handsome and great poet in his own right- kills himself by taking laudanum and drowning, but making it look like a boating accident.
Then it gets depressing.
Anyway, it’s an almost horrifying read. It’s written in first person with Mathilda writing to Woodville from (of course) her deathbed. It wasn’t published in full until 1959, Godwin himself believed to have convinced his daughter not to publish it.
Sorry- didn’t mean to make it this long, but it’s a Gothic recommend.
