Chapter V

, in which Mary’s emotional disturbance in writing about the change in Mathilda’s father (representing both Shelley and Godwin?) shows itself on the pages of the MS. They look more like the rough draft than the fair copy. There are numerous slips of the pen, corrections in phrasing and sentence structure, dashes instead of other marks of punctuation, a large blot of ink on f. 57, one major deletion (see note 32).

[27] In the margin of _F of F--A_ Mary wrote, “Lord B’s Ch’de Harold.” The reference is to stanzas 71 and 72 of Canto IV. Byron compares the rainbow on the cataract first to “Hope upon a death-bed” and finally

Resembling, ’mid the torture of the scene, Love watching Madness with unalterable mien.

[28] In _F of F--A_ Mathilda “took up Ariosto & read the story of Isabella.” Mary’s reason for the change is not clear. Perhaps she thought that the fate of Isabella, a tale of love and lust and death (though not of incest), was too close to what was to be Mathilda’s fate. She may have felt--and rightly--that the allusions to Lelia and to Myrrha were ample foreshadowings. The reasons for the choice of the seventh canto of Book II of the _Faerie Queene_ may lie in the allegorical meaning of Guyon, or Temperance, and the “dread and horror” of his experience.

[29] With this speech, which is not in _F of F--A_, Mary begins to develop the character of the Steward, who later accompanies Mathilda on her search for her father. Although he is to a very great extent the stereptyped faithful servant, he does serve to dramatize the situation both here and in the later scene.

[30] This clause is substituted for a more conventional and less dramatic passage in _F of F--A_: “& besides there appeared more of struggle than remorse in his manner although sometimes I thought I saw glim[p]ses of the latter feeling in his tumultuous starts & gloomy look.”

[31] These paragraphs beginning