Mary Shelley Mathilda audio book free download

Title: Mathilda

Author: Mary shelley

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About Book

Highly personal because the story was, Mary Godwin Wollstonecraft Shelley hoped that it might be revealed, apparently basic cognitive process that the characters and therefore the things were sufficiently disguised.

In May of 1820, she sent it to England by her friends, the Gisborne, with a request that her father would arrange for its publication.

But Mathilda, together with its rough draft entitled The Fields of Fancy, remained unpublished among the Shelley papers.

Although Mary's references to that in her letters and journal aroused some curiosity among students, it also remained unexamined until comparatively recently.

This seeming neglect was due partly to the circumstances attending the distribution of the family papers after the deaths of Sir Percy and Lady Shelley.

One part of them went to the Bodleian Library to become a reserved collection which, by the terms of Lady Shelley's will, was opened to scholars only under definite restrictions.

Another part went to Lady Shelley's niece and, in turn, to her heirs, who for a time did not make the manuscripts available for study. 

A third part went to Sir John Shelley-Rolls, the poet's grand-nephew, who released much important Shelley material, but not all the scattered manuscripts.

In this division, the two notebooks containing the finished draft of Mathilda and a portion of The Fields of Fancy went to Lord Abinger, the notebook containing the remainder of the rough draft to the Bodleian Library, and some loose sheets containing additions and revisions to Sir John Shelley-Rolls.

Happily, all the manuscripts are now accessible to scholars, and it is possible to publish the full text of Mathilda with such additions from The Fields of Fancy as are significant.

The three notebooks are alike in format.[3] One of Lord Abinger's notebooks contains the first part of The Fields of Fancy, Chapter 1 through the beginning of Chapter 10, 116 pages.

The concluding portion occupies the first fifty-four pages of the Bodleian notebook.

There is then a blank page, followed by three and a half pages, scored out, of what seems to be a variant of the end of Chapter 1 and the beginning of Chapter 2.

A revised and expanded version of the first part of Mathilda's narrative follows (Chapter 2 and the beginning of Chapter 3), with a break between the account of her girlhood in Scotland and the brief description of her father after his return.

Finally, there are four pages of a replacement gap, which was used in Mathilda. This is an extremely rough draft: punctuation is largely confined to the dash, and there are many corrections and alterations.

The Shelley-Rolls fragments, twenty-five sheets or slips of paper, usually represent additions to or revisions of The Fields of Fancy: many of them are numbered, and some are keyed into the manuscript in Lord Abinger's notebook. Most of the changes were incorporated in Mathilda.

The second Abinger notebook contains the complete and final draft of Mathilda, 226 pages.
It is, for the foremost half, a fair copy.

The text is punctuated and there are relatively few corrections, most of them, apparently the result of a final rereading, made to avoid the repetition of words.

A few additions are written in the margins. On several pages, slips of paper containing evident revisions (quite possibly originally among the Shelley-Rolls fragments) have been pasted over the corresponding lines of the text. An occasional passage is scored out and some words and phrases are crossed out to make way for a revision.

Following page 216, four sheets containing the conclusion of the story are cut out of the notebook.
They seem the pages numbered 217 to 223, among the Shelley-Rolls fragments.

A revised version, pages 217 to 226, follows the cut.[4]

The mode of telling the story in the final draft differs radically from that in the rough draft.
In The Fields of Fancy Mathilda's history is about in a very fanciful framework.

The author is transported by the fairy opus to Heaven, where she listens to the discourse of Diotima and meets Mathilda.

Mathilda tells her story, which closes along with her death.

In the final draft this unrealistic and largely irrelevant framework is discarded: Mathilda, whose death is approaching, writes out for her friend Woodville the full details of her tragic history which she had never had the courage to tell him in person.

The title of the rough draft, The Fields of Fancy, and the setting and framework undoubtedly stem from Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished tale, The Cave of Fancy, in which one of the souls confined in the center of the earth to purify themselves from the dross of their earthly existence tells to Segesta (who may be compared with Diotima) the story of her ill-fated love for a man whom she hopes to rejoin after her purgation is completed.

[5]] Mary was completely familiar with her mother's works.

This title was, of course, abandoned when the framework was abandoned, and the name of the heroine was substituted.

Though it's value noticing that Madonna selected a reputation with an equivalent initial letter as her own, it was probably taken from Dante.

There are several references in the story to the cantos of the Purgatorio in which Mathilda appears.
Mathilda's father is rarely named, nor is Mathilda's surname given.

The name of the poet went through several changes: Welford, Lovel, Herbert, and finally Woodville.

The proof for geological dating Mathilda within the late summer and fall of 1819 comes part from the manuscript, partly from Mary's journal.

On the pages succeeding the portions of The Fields of Fancy in the Bodleian notebook are some of Shelley's drafts of verse and prose, including parts of Prometheus Unbound and of Epipsychidion, both in Italian, and of the preface to the latter in English, some prose fragments, and extended portions of the Defence of Poetry.

Written from the other end of the book are the Ode to Naples and The Witch of Atlas. Since these all belong to the years 1819, 1820, and 1821, it is probable that Mary finished her rough draft sometime in 1819, and that when she had copied her story, Shelley took over the notebook.

Chapter one of Mathilda in Lord Abinger's notebook is headed, "Florence Nov.

9th. 1819." Since the completion of Mathilda's story takes place in the European nation and European country, the date should be that of the manuscript.

Mary was in Florence at that time.

These dates square measure supported by entries in Mary's journal that indicate that she began writing Mathilda, early in August, while the Shelleys were living in the Villa Valosano, near Leghorn.

On August 4, 1819, after a gap of two months from the time of her little son's death, she resumed her diary.

Almost every day thereafter for a month she recorded, "Write," and by September 4, she was saying, "Copy." On September 12 she wrote, "Finish copying my Tale." The next entry to indicate literary activity is the one word, "write," on November 8.

On the twelfth, Percy Florence was born, and Mary did no more writing until March when she was working on Valperga.

It is probable, therefore, that Mary wrote and copied Mathilda between August 5 and September 12, 1819, that she did some revision on November 8, and finally dated the manuscript November 9.

The subsequent history of the manuscript is recorded in letters and journals.

When the Gisborne went to England on May 2, 1820, they took Mathilda with them; they read it on the journey and recorded their admiration of it in their journal.

[6] They were to show it to Godwin and get his advice about publishing it. Although Medwin heard about the story when he was with the Shelleys in 1820[7] and Mary read it—perhaps from the rough draft—to Edward and Jane Williams in the summer of 1821,[8] this manuscript apparently stayed in Godwin's hands.

He evidently did not share the Gisborne's enthusiasm: his approval was qualified.

He thought highly of certain parts of it, less highly of others; and he regarded the subject as "disgusting and detestable," saying that the story would need a preface to prevent readers "from being tormented by the apprehension … of the fall of the heroine,"—that is, if it was ever published.

[9] There is, however, no record of his having made any attempt to get it into print.

From January eighteen through June a pair of, 1822, Mary repeatedly asked Mrs.

Gisborne to retrieve the manuscript and have it copied for her, and Mrs. Gisborne invariably reported her failure to do so.

The last references to the story square measure once Shelley's death in Associate in Nursing unpublished journal entry and 2 of Mary's letters.

In her journal for Oct twenty-seven, 1822, she told of the solace for her misery she had once found in writing Mathilda.

In one letter to Mrs. Gisborne, she compared the journey of herself and Jane to Pisa and sailor to urge news of Shelley and Williams thereto of Mathilda in search of her father, "driving—(like Matilda), towards the sea to learn if we were to be forever doomed to misery.

"[10] And on May 6, 1823, she wrote, "Matilda foretells even many small circumstances most truly—and the whole of it is a monument of what now is.

"[11] These facts not solely date the manuscript however conjointly show Mary's feeling of private involvement within the story.

In the events of 1818-1819, it is possible to find the basis for this morbid tale and consequently to assess its biographical significance.

On Sept twenty-four, 1818, the Shelleys' daughter, Clara Evernia, barely a year old, died at Venice.

Mary and her children had gone from Bagni di Lucca to Este to join Shelley at Byron's villa. Clara was not well when they started, and she grew worse on the journey.

From Este Shelley and Madonna took her to the metropolis to consult a Dr., a trip which was beset with delays and difficulties.

She died almost as soon as they arrived.

According to Newman Ivey White,[12] Mary, in the unreasoning agony of her grief, blamed Shelley for the child's death and for a time felt toward him an extreme physical antagonism which subsided into apathy and spiritual alienation.

Mary's black moods created her troublesome to measure with, and Shelley himself fell into deep dejection.

He expressed his sense of their estrangement in some of the lyrics of 1818—"all my saddest poems.

" In one fragment of verse, for example, he lamented that Mary had left him "in this dreary world alone."

Thy form is here indeed—a lovely one—But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road, That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode.

Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair, Where For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.