This paragraph has been greatly improved by the omission of elaborate overstatement; e.g., “to pray for mercy and respite from my fear” (F. of F.—A.) becomes merely “to pray.” ↩
This paragraph about the Steward is added in Mathilda. In F. of F.—A. he is called a servant and his name is Harry. See note 29. ↩
This sentence, not in F. of F.—A., recalls Mathilda’s dream. ↩
This passage is somewhat more dramatic than that in F. of F.—A., putting what is there merely a descriptive statement into quotation marks. ↩
A stalactite grotto on the island of Antiparos in the Aegean Sea. ↩
A good description of Mary’s own behavior in England after Shelley’s death, of the surface placidity which concealed stormy emotion. See Nitchie, Mary Shelley, pp. 8–10. ↩
Job 17:15–16, slightly misquoted. ↩
Not in F. of F.—A. The quotation should read:
Fam. Whisper it, sister! so-and-so!
In a dark hint, soft and slow.
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. ↩
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. ↩
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.” ↩
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 92. ↩
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 92) 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 and he had all the benignity of the dispensor of light,” and “he seemed to come as the God of the world.” ↩
This passage beginning “his station was too high” is not in F. of F.—A. ↩
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 aberrate; 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. ↩
Is this wishful thinking about Shelley’s poetry? It is well known that a year later Mary remonstrated with Shelley about The Witch of Atlas, desiring, as she said in her 1839 note, “that Shelley should increase his popularity. … It was not only that I wished him to acquire popularity as redounding to his fame; but I believed that he would obtain a greater mastery over his own powers, and greater happiness in his mind, if public applause crowned his endeavours. … Even now I believe that I was in the right.” Shelley’s response is in the six introductory stanzas of the poem. ↩
The preceding paragraphs about Elinor and Woodville are the result of considerable revision for the better of F. of F.—A. and S.—R. fr. Mary scored out a paragraph describing Elinor, thus getting rid of several clichés (“fortune had smiled on her,” “a favourite of fortune,” “turning tears of misery to those of joy”); she omitted a clause which offered a weak motivation of Elinor’s
