knew, I believe, what she was doing to Shelley. In an effort to purge
her own emotions and to acknowledge her fault, she poured out on the
pages of _Mathilda_ the suffering and the loneliness, the bitterness
and the self-recrimination of the past months.

The biographical elements are clear: Mathilda is certainly Mary
herself; Mathilda's father is Godwin; Woodville is an idealized
Shelley.

Like Mathilda Mary was a woman of strong passions and affections which
she often hid from the world under a placid appearance. Like
Mathilda's, Mary's mother had died a few days after giving her birth.
Like Mathilda she spent part of her girlhood in Scotland. Like
Mathilda she met and loved a poet of "exceeding beauty," and--also
like Mathilda--in that sad year she had treated him ill, having become
"captious and unreasonable" in her sorrow. Mathilda's loneliness,
grief, and remorse can be paralleled in Mary's later journal and in
"The Choice." This story was the outlet for her emotions in 1819.

Woodville, the poet, is virtually perfect, "glorious from his youth,"
like "an angel with winged feet"--all beauty, all goodness, all
gentleness. He is also successful as a poet, his poem written at the
age of twenty-three having been universally acclaimed. Making
allowance for Mary's exaggeration and wishful thinking, we easily
recognize Shelley: Woodville has his poetic ideals, the charm of his
conversation, his high moral qualities, his sense of dedication and
responsibility to those he loved and to all humanity. He is Mary's
earliest portrait of her husband, drawn in a year when she was slowly
returning to him from "the hearth of pale despair."