Mary Shelley

Mathilda Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley is best remembered for her 1818 novel, Frankenstein, the story of a man who brings a monster to life. Although that work was very popular in her time and continues to be read today, the 1959 publication of Mathilda renewed interest in Shelley's work as a writer who explored themes of incest, familial relationships, and psychological trauma in her fiction. Mathilda was never published in Shelley's lifetime, its publication having been suppressed by Shelley's father and publisher, William Godwin, because of the autobiographical nature of the work. Since its discovery and publication by Elizabeth Nitchie in the mid-twentieth century, the work has mostly been studied as a psychological and autobiographical text, continuing to fuel debate regarding Shelley's relationship with her father as well as her husband, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.