[xvii] 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.
[xviii] 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.
NOTES TO MATHILDA
Abbreviations:
F of F—A The Fields of Fancy, in Lord Abinger’s notebook
F of F—B The Fields of Fancy, in the notebook in the Bodleian Library
S-R fr fragments of The Fields of Fancy among the papers of the
late Sir John Shelley-Rolls, now in the Bodleian Library
[1] 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.
[2] 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.
[3] The addition of “I am alone ... withered me” motivates Mathilda’s state of mind and her resolve to write her history.
[4] 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.
[5] 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.