1
Mathilda, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mathilda, by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: Mathilda
Author: Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Release Date: March 2, 2005 [EBook #15238]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MATHILDA ***
Produced by David Starner, Cori Samuel and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.
MATHILDA
By MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT SHELLEY
Edited by ELIZABETH NITCHIE
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS CHAPEL HILL
Mathilda is being published in paper as Extra Series #3 of Studies in Philology.
PREFACE
This volume prints for the first time the full text of Mary Shelley's novelette Mathilda together with the opening pages of its rough draft, The Fields of Fancy. They are transcribed from the microfilm of the notebooks belonging to Lord Abinger which is in the library of Duke University.
The text follows Mary Shelley's manuscript exactly except for the omission of mere corrections by the author, most of which are negligible; those that are significant are included and explained in the notes. Footnotes indicated by an asterisk are Mrs. Shelley's own notes. She was in general a fairly good speller, but certain words, especially those in which there was a question of doubling or not doubling a letter, gave