SOURCE: “Mary Shelley's Mathilda: Melancholy and the Political Economy of Romanticism,” in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 26, No. 2, Summer 1994, pp. 43-68.

In the following essay, Rajan describes Mathilda as a narrative of trauma that lends itself more easily to a psychoanalytic interpretation rather than a formalist reading.

Although Mary Shelley was better known in her lifetime than her husband, her writings other than Frankenstein have been largely forgotten until recently. It is, moreover, a curious fact that the reassessment of her place in the canon (and of the canon in relation to that “place”) is being mobilized by the reissuing of two of her most depressing texts: The Last Man and Mathilda.¹ Part of the fascination of the latter seems to be that it was never published. “Censored” by Godwin, who was asked to secure a publisher for it but found its focus on father-daughter incest “disgusting,”² and...