Mary Shelley | Thornfield Hall

Volume 3, February 2026

In this winter issue of The Thornfield Hall Newsletter, I muse on Mary Shelley’s Matilda,a novel posthumously published in 1959; the new Wuthering Heights sensation; and the International Booker Prize longlist.

Mary Shelley’s Radical Novel, Mathilda

Don’t let anyone tell you differently: Mary Shelley’s Matilda is a masterpiece. This brilliant short novel, like Shelley’s Frankenstein, can be read as psychological horror.

It begins with the narrator Matilda’s reunion with her father. She has never met him: after her mother died in childbirth, he deserted her and turned her over to his stern older sister. Now he is entranced by 16-year-old Matilda, who closely resembles her mother. The father and daughter develop an unusually close relationship, and he admits to incestuous love for Matilda.

Their relationship is shattered. Matilda, weeping and tearing her hair like the heroine of a Greek tragedy, rushes to her room. After reading the letter he wrote before leaving, Matilda, fearing he might commit suicide, takes off in a carriage to track him down. The scene resembles the scene in Bleak House, in which Esther and Inspector Bucket try to find Lady Dedlock. I would say that Dickens read Mary Shelley, except Matilda wasn’t published yet.

Matilda is as Gothic as Shelley’s Frankenstein, and shares similar themes. Just as Dr. Frankenstein’s repulsion and abandonment turn his ugly creature into a monster, Matilda’s father’s confession and flight change her from a joyous girl into a miserable, lonely, faded young woman.

Is her father, as he says, “a monster”? Or a “fallen Archangel?” Perhaps he is too forgiving of himself. After his admission of love for Matilda, he says he’s a “worm,” but soon becomes manic. He teeters from hatred to joy.

“Yes, yes, I hate you! You are my bane, my disgust, my poison! Oh, no! … You are none of all these, you are my light, my only one, my life – My daughter, I love you!”

Matilda begins to believe that she is the monster. She moves to a desolate place in the country where she meets a poet (Percy Bysshe Shelley?), who is also grieving a loss. (This friendship is not romantic.) By the way, Shelley took the name Matilda from the guide in Dante’s Purgatorio. Dante’s Matilda is a Persephone figure who acts as Dante’s guide through the Terrestrial Paradise.

Although Mary Shelley sent the manuscript of Matilda to her father, William Godwin, the philosopher, he was scandalized and refused to sent it to a publisher. He had a complicated relationship with his daughter, and was a reluctant father. His wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, died two weeks after giving birth to Mary. Godwin married a second time to find someone to do child care.

Matilda was finally published in 1959.

The Wuthering Heights Hullabaloo

Emily Brontë is my favorite Brontë sister, and I suspect that the new film of Wuthering Heights sells books. There is a new edition of the novel published in Simon & Schuster’s Female Filmmakers Collection, a series of books curated by female filmmakers. Emerald Fennel, the writer and author of the new film of Wuthering Heights, wrote the introduction to this new edition.

It’s Book Award Season Again!

The International Book Prize longlist was announced today. The nominees are:

Shida Bazyar, The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, translated from German by Ruth Martin

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, We Are Green and Trembling, translated from Spanish by Robin Myers

Anjet Daanje, The Remembered Soldier, translated from Dutch by David McKay

Mathias Énard, The Deserters, translated from French by Charlotte Mandell

Ia Genberg, Small Comfort, translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson

Rene Karabash, She Who Remains, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel

Daniel Kehlmann, The Director, translated from German by Ross Benjamin

Ana Paula Maia, On Earth As It Is Beneath, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan

Matteo Melchiorre, The Duke. translated from Italian by Antonella Lettieri

Marie Ndiaye, The Witch, translated from French by Jordan Stump

Shahrnush Parsipur, Women Without Men translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh

Olga Ravn, The Wax Child, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, Taiwan Travelogue, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, is a timely novel. In this horror classic, published in 1818, Shelley describes a hubristic scientist’s abandonment of the life-form he assembles from corpses and electricity. Affectionate and innocent, the new creature is so hideous that Frankenstein himself rejects it. The lonely monster, who terrifies all humans, becomes a murderer to avenge himself.

There are two ways to approach this, first, as a traditional horror novel (it is that), second as a dark commentary on Darwinism, the Prometheus myth, and the dangers of abstractions.

The theme of loneliness overrides all abstraction, though. Frankenstein himself is, ironically, blessed with social skills and not lonely. But Captain Walton, who rescues Frankenstein from a melting iceberg (long story!), is as lonely as Frankenstein’s creature. In fact, Captain Walton has no friends on his ship.

The novel is framed by letters from Captain Walton to his sister. In an early letter he confides. “I bitterly feel the want of a friend. I have no no one near me, gentle yet courageous, possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose tastes are like my own, to approve or amend my plans.”

This letter could be a personals ad, and a perfect dating match for the Creature, who is even lonelier than Walton. The creature does beg Frankenstein to make a mate for him, but Frankenstein refuses, and he has his reasons, but… Was it ethical to refuse and doom him to loneliness?

The creature is at first filled with wonder and longs to make friends, but human beings are terrified of him. He hides in a shack attached to the cottage of a poor genteel family who love music and books . By watching and listening through a crack in the wall, he learns language and the rudiments of history. He is inspired by their stories about the Greeks and Romans, and chivalry and Christianity. He wonders, “Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous, and magnificent, yet so vicious and base?” Alas, when he reveals himself to the family, they scream and run away.

The novel is layered with references to philosophy, Shelley was influenced by Clement of Alexandria, a second-century gnostic. The following quote certainly illuminates her thoughts about the birth of Frankenstein’s Creature.

What liberates is the knowledge of what we were, what we became; where we were, whereinto we have been thrown; whereto we speed, wherefrom we are redeemed; what birth is, and what is rebirth.

Shelley, the daughter of the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the political philosopher William Godwin, was a radical intellectual whose storytelling is interwoven with subtle philosophical observations. Her father, William Godwin, a political philosopher, was eloquent about social-psychological theory. He emphasized the necessity of putting esponsibility before abstractions.

“..Knowledge, and the enlargement of the intellect, are poor, when unmixed with sentiments of benevolence and sympathy… and science and abstraction will soon become cold, unless they derive new attractions from ideas of society.”

This is a great read – I galloped through it – and it raises pertinent questions.