Mathilda

Mathilda (1959) is a posthumous novella by English writer and Romantic Mary Shelley. Written as a means of self-distraction following the deaths of her young children in Italy, Mathilda is a work haunted by tragic loss. Unpublished for over a century, its posthumous appearance helped cement Shelley-s reputation as a leading Romantic, an artist unafraid of confronting such themes and taboos as incest and suicide in her work.

Mathilda, named after its narrator, traces a young woman-s troubled life from birth to her premature deathbed. Following her mother-s death during childbirth and her father-s subsequent abandonment, Mathilda is raised by her aunt in rural Loch Lomond, Scotland. A gifted reader and promising intellectual, she rises from her difficult circumstances to lead a relatively happy childhood. When, at the age of 16, her father reenters her life, the two reconnect and eventually move together to London. As she begins to receive suitors however, h