Mathilda is the second long work of fiction of Mary Shelley, written between August
1819 and February 1820 and first published posthumously in 1959 It deals with
common Romantic themes of incest and suicide. The narrative deals with a fathers
incestuous love for his daughter.
The act of writing this novella distracted Mary Shelley from her grief after the
deaths of her one-year-old daughter Clara at Venice in September 1818 and her
three-year-old son William in June 1819 in Rome. These losses plunged Mary
Shelley into a depression that distanced her emotionally and sexually from Percy
Shelley and left her, as he put it, on the hearth of pale despair.
It has become possibly Mary Shelleys best-known work after Frankenstein.