Mathilda

A young woman writes her confession to the one friend she has, explaining what her father said to her after years of silence and what she has done since. Mary Shelley wrote it after the deaths of two of her children, sent it to her own father to place with a publisher, and he kept the manuscript and never returned it. It stayed unpublished for a hundred and forty years. Fifty-seven plates, among them Fuseli's The Nightmare and Goya's graveyard visions, trace the gothic terror of loss and buried guilt that runs through Shelley's suppressed tale.