A daughter’s love. A father’s confession. A silence that destroys them both.
Mary Shelley presents a work of extraordinary emotional intensity, in which grief, isolation, and forbidden affection are explored with unflinching psychological depth. Written in the form of a personal narrative, the novella moves with quiet gravity through the inner landscape of a mind shaped by irreversible experience.
Mathilda, abandoned in early life and raised in emotional solitude, recounts the course of her existence as it is altered by a devastating and transformative revelation. Her attachment to her father, once the center of her emotional world, becomes the source of profound anguish when a truth emerges that redefines their bond and fractures the foundations of her understanding. As she withdraws from society, she seeks refuge in isolation, where memory and reflection become her only companions. Within this solitude, love and despair intertwine, each deepening the other in a sustained act of remembrance.
Mathilda’s mother died shortly after giving birth to her. Her father, unable to bear the loss, abandoned her. She was raised by a cold aunt. When her father finally returns, she is seventeen, and she loves him with an intensity born of long absence. He returns her love—but not as a father. He confesses his incestuous desire. She flees. He drowns himself. She lives in isolation, haunted by guilt, writing her story as a confession before dying of a broken heart.
This is Shelley at her most raw and autobiographical: a novella about the longing for a father’s love, the horror of receiving the wrong kind, and the slow, inexorable grief of a woman who cannot forgive herself for a sin she did not commit. Mathilda was suppressed by Shelley’s own father, William Godwin, who found it too shocking to publish.
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Written in 1819–1820, immediately following the deaths of Mary Shelley’s two young children
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Suppressed by Mary’s father, William Godwin, who refused to return the manuscript; published posthumously in 1959
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A raw, autobiographical exploration of grief, incest, and suicidal despair, unlike anything else in Shelley’s oeuvre
Available in multiple formats:
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Paperback & Hardcover: Beautifully designed print editions presenting the complete, unabridged text made to last.
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Ebook: DRM-free EPUB compatible with Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books, and all major e-readers.
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Audiobook: Professionally narrated, complete and unabridged, available on all major audiobook platforms.
A beautifully crafted edition for your shelf, your device, or your ears, or the perfect gift for anyone who knows that the most devastating secrets are the ones we keep from ourselves.
About the Author
Mary Shelley (1797–1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). Born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, she was the daughter of the philosopher William Godwin and the feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. In 1816, she married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mathilda was written in 1819–1820, a period of intense grief following the deaths of her two young children, Clara and William. The novella draws directly on Shelley’s own emotional devastation, her fraught relationship with her father, and her experience of being treated as a social outcast. She sent the manuscript to her father, William Godwin, who refused to return it, finding the subject matter—incest and suicide—too shocking for publication. The novella was not published until 1959, more than a century after her death. It is now recognized as a major work of romantic-era fiction and a powerful precursor to twentieth-century confessional literature. Shelley died in London in 1851.
