Amazon.com (ISBN 0375404732, Hardcover)

Mary Shelley's short children's tale, Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot, remained undiscovered for 200 years. It's a charming enough story about a stolen child who is eventually reunited with his parents, but taken on its own merits, Maurice is far more likely to appeal to Shelley scholars than to modern-day children. Fortunately, its publishers recognize this and have sensibly included a fascinating introduction by Claire Tomalin--indeed, the introduction is longer than the story itself. In it, Tomalin describes the circumstances under which the manuscript was rediscovered (in a trunk, in a palazzo, in Tuscany) and its authenticity verified:

We were greeted by Andrea and Cristina Dazzi, and offered coffee. Then the manuscript of Maurice was brought out and laid in front of me on the table: an alarming moment because coffee and manuscripts must not occupy the same space. Once we had separated them, I found Maurice exactly as Cristina Dazzi had described it.

Tomalin then goes on to relate the unhappy life of its author from her impulsive elopement to the continent with the then-married Percy Shelley through the early deaths of three of her children and the unorthodox relationship between herself, her husband, and her sister--who may also have been Percy Shelley's lover. So riveting is the preface to Shelley's short story, in fact, that a more accurate title might have been An Introduction by Claire Tomalin with a Long-Lost Tale by Mary Shelley.

Included in this slim volume are two versions of Maurice; one is "corrected and slightly modernized for ease of reading." The other is a facsimile of the original with Shelley's lineation, pagination, spelling, corrections. Read in the context of the author's own unhappy experience of losing children, her fable of a child regained resonates poignantly. This is one lost tale we're glad was found. --Alix Wilber