avagant characterization. The reader must be tolerant of its
heroine's overwhelming lamentations. But she is, after all, in the
great tradition of romantic heroines: she compares her own weeping to
that of Boccaccio's Ghismonda over the heart of Guiscardo. If the
reader can accept Mathilda on her own terms, he will find not only
biographical interest in her story but also intrinsic merits: a
feeling for character and situation and phrasing that is often
vigorous and precise.

Footnotes:

[i] They are listed in Nitchie, _Mary Shelley_, Appendix II, pp.
205-208. To them should be added an unfinished and unpublished novel,
_Cecil_, in Lord Abinger's collection.

[ii] On the basis of the Bodleian notebook and some information about
the complete story kindly furnished me by Miss R. Glynn Grylls, I
wrote an article, "Mary Shelley's _Mathilda_, an Unpublished Story and
Its Biographical Significance," which appeared in _Studies in
Philology_, XL (1943), 447-462. When the other manuscripts became
available, I was able to use them for my book, _Mary Shelley_, and to
draw conclusions more certain and well-founded than the conjectures I
had made ten years earlier.

[iii] A note, probably in Richard Garnett's hand, enclosed in a MS box
with the two notebooks in Lord Abinger's collection describes them as
of Italian make with "slanting head bands, inserted through the
covers." Professor Lewis Patton's list of the contents of the
microfilms in the Duke University Library (_Library Notes_, No. 27,
April, 1953) describes them as vellum bound, the back cover of the
_Mathilda_ notebook being missing. Lord Abinger's notebooks are on
Reel 11. The Bodleian notebook is catalogued as MSS. Shelley d. 1, the
Shelley-Rolls fragments as MSS. Shelley adds c. 5.

[iv] See note 83 to _Mathilda_, page 89.

[v] See _Posthumous Works of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights
of Woman_ (4 vols., London, 1798), IV, 97-155.

[vi] See _Maria Gisborne & Edward E. Williams ... Their Journals and
Letters_, ed. by Frederick L. Jones (Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press, [1951]), p. 27.

[vii] See Thomas Medwin, _The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley_, revised,
with introduction and notes by H. Buxton Forman (London, 1913), p.
252.

[viii] _Journal_, pp. 159, 160.

[ix] _Maria Gisborne, etc._, pp. 43-44.

[x] _Letters_, I, 182.

[xi] _Ibid._, I, 224.

[xii] See White, _Shelley_, II, 40-56.

[xiii] See _Letters_, II, 88, and note 23 to _Mathi