[45] Job, 17: 15-16, slightly misquoted.
[46] Not in F of F—A. The quotation should read:
Fam. Whisper it, sister! so and so!
In a dark hint, soft and slow.
[47] The mother of Prince Arthur in Shakespeare’s King John. In the MS the words “the little Arthur” are written in pencil above the name of Constance.
[48] In F of F—A this account of her plans is addressed to Diotima, and Mathilda’s excuse for not detailing them is that they are too trivial to interest spirits no longer on earth; this is the only intrusion of the framework into Mathilda’s narrative in The Fields of Fancy. Mathilda’s refusal to recount her stratagems, though the omission is a welcome one to the reader, may represent the flagging of Mary’s invention. Similarly in Frankenstein she offers excuses for not explaining how the Monster was brought to life. The entire passage, “Alas! I even now ... remain unfinished. I was,” is on a slip of paper pasted on the page.
[49] The comparison to a Hermitess and the wearing of the “fanciful nunlike dress” are appropriate though melodramatic. They appear only in Mathilda. Mathilda refers to her “whimsical nunlike habit” again after she meets Woodville (see page 60) and tells us in a deleted passage that it was “a close nunlike gown of black silk.”
[50] Cf. Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, I, 48: “the wingless, crawling hours.” This phrase (“my part in submitting ... minutes”) and the remainder of the paragraph are an elaboration of the simple phrase in F of F—A, “my part in enduring it—,” with its ambiguous pronoun. The last page of Chapter VIII shows many corrections, even in the MS of Mathilda. It is another passage that Mary seems to have written in some agitation of spirit. Cf. note 26.
[51] In F of F—A there are several false starts before this sentence. The name there is Welford; on the next page it becomes Lovel, which is thereafter used throughout The Fields of Fancy and appears twice, probably inadvertently, in Mathilda, where it is crossed out. In a few of the S-R fr it is Herbert. In Mathilda it is at first Herbert, which is used until after the rewritten conclusion (see note 83) but is corrected throughout to Woodville. On the final pages Woodville alone is used. (It is interesting, though not particularly significant, that one of the minor characters in Lamb’s John Woodvil is named Lovel. Such mellifluous names rolled easily from the pens of all the romantic writers.) This, her first portrait of Shelley in fiction, gave Mary considerable trouble: revisions from the rough drafts are numerous. The passage on Woodville’s endowment by fortune, for example, is much more concise and effective than that in S-R fr. Also Mary curbed somewhat the extravagance of her praise of Woodville, omitting such hyperboles as “When he appeared a new sun seemed to rise on the day & he had all the benignity of the dispensor of light,” and “he seemed to come as the God of the world.”
[52] This passage beginning “his station was too high” is not in F of F—A.
[53] This passage beginning “He was a believer in the divinity of genius” is not in F of F—A. Cf. the discussion of genius in “Giovanni Villani” (Mary Shelley’s essay in The Liberal, No. IV, 1823), including the sentence: “The fixed stars appear to abberate [sic]; but it is we that move, not they.” It is tempting to conclude that this is a quotation or echo of something which Shelley said, perhaps in conversation with Byron. I have not found it in any of his published writings.