Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0195062590, Paperback)
Renewed interest in the life and works of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley has in recent years generated new biographical studies, complete editions of her letters and short stories, and fresh critical assessments of Frankenstein and her other fiction. Until now, however, there has been no anthology of Shelley's work. The Mary Shelley Reader is a unique new collection that fills this gap. In addition to the original and complete 1818 version of her masterpiece Frankenstein, the book offers a new text of the novella Mathilda--an extraordinary tale of incest, guilt, and atonement that was not published until 1959 and has been out of print since then. Also included are seven short stories that range from gentle satire to fantastic tales of reanimation, diabolical transformation, and immortality. Eight essays and reviews are reprinted here for the first time since their original publication, and eleven representative letters help bring to life a remarkable literary and historical figure--author, daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley. An illuminating introduction, a chronology, explanatory notes, and a bibliography make The Mary Shelley Reader indispensable for readers of English Romantic literature.
(retirado da Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:15 -0400)
Mathilda: This novella is fantastic, but perhaps I appreciate it for the wrong reasons. It is an overwrought incest story. A sample (admittedly one of the most melodramatic):
" He must know that if I believed that his intention was merely to absent himself from me that instead of opposing him it would be that with which I should myself require-- or if he thought that any lurking feeling, yet he could not think that, should lead me to him it would endeavour to overthrow the only hope he could have of ever seeing me again; a lover, there was madness in the thought, yet he was my lover, would not act thus."
I think the quote above illustrates that while I can't, in sincerity, describe Mathilda as a good book, it is certainly interesting.