Escrita entre 1819 y 1820, esta obra, profundamente romántica, no fue publicada hasta 1959. Mathilda es una obra pasional e introspectiva que trata sobre el incesto y el suicidio, y que gira en torno a la identidad y a la subjetividad femeninas, atrapadas en el «círculo mágico» de la feminidad convencional y de la claustrofóbica unidad familiar.

Mary Shelley dota a esta novela de un marcado carácter autobiográfico. La heroína de Mathilda es el resultado del primer deseo mortal de su padre, y el libro se convierte en un mito fundacional aún más autobiográfico que Frankenstein. Sus páginas nos llevan a lo mejor del Romanticismo inglés: en ellas nos encontraremos con la Naturaleza, con relaciones apasionadas y con esa pulsión suicida tan propia de la época.

18 August 2017
... I was an altered creature. Not the wild, raving and most miserable Matilda but a youthful Hermitess dedicated to seclusion and whose bosom she must strive to keep free from all tumult and unholy despair - The fanciful nunlike dress that I had adopted; the knowledge that my very existence was a secret only to myself; the solitude to which I was for ever hereafter destined nursed gentle thoughts in my wounded heart. The breeze that played in my hair revived me, and I watched with quiet eyes the sunbeams that glittered on the waves, and the birds that coursed each other over the waters just brushing them with their plumes. I slept too undisturbed by dreams; and awoke refreshed again to enjoy my tranquil freedom. [pp. 69-70]
This is truly The Dream(TM).

I was promised a scandalous book about incest, and I instead got a Romantic treatise on suicide. So, this is absolutely going on every grad school syllabus on any Romantic era seminar. ( )

"a luxury of grief" ( )

"I was a creature cursed and set apart by nature", 18 December 2016

This review is from: Mary Shelley - Mathilda (Paperback)
Although the dark and turbid mindset of the heroine of this tale gives us an impression of the author's own feelings at this time (her son had recently died), as a work of literature I found this terribly over-the-top and melodramatic.
Matilda's mother dies shortly after her birth, and her distraught father goes abroad. For the next sixteen years the girl grows up in the care of a cold-natured aunt until finally, to her joy, her father returns.
(spoiler alert) After a few deliriously happy months in his company, he suddenly and inexplicably changes, becoming harsh and abrupt. When Matilda demands he tell her why, he at last reveals that he is in love with her. And here the whole thing just became ridiculous to me. Both parties decide they must never again meet; her father goes on to commit suicide. Matilda goes off to live in a cottage on a moor, where she adopts a nun's dress and talks interminably about her longing for death, unable to go back into society as "like another Cain, I had a mark set on my forehead to show mankind that there was a barrier between me and them." (Why? She did nothing wrong.)
As a description of profound, illogical depression, it has some merit, but I have to say that I found Matilda an unpleasantly self-obsessed tragedy queen. ( )