Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot: A Long-Lost Tale - Hardcover

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375404732 ISBN 13: 9780375404733

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

In the fall of 1997, in a palazzo in the Tuscan hills north of Florence, a small booklet sewn into paper covers turned up in a long-unopened crate of old letters and other documents. It bore the title "Maurice" and an inscription: "For Laurette from her friend
Mrs Shelley." Investigation proved it to be a story written by Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein, a story presumed by scholars to have been irretrievably lost soon after its composition in 1820. It is here published for the
first time.
Written two years after her great gothic novel, Maurice dates from a period when Mary Shelley, still only twenty-two, was deeply sunk in depression. She had eloped with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at sixteen, borne him four children and seen three of them die. Thus, though Maurice is basically a charming moral tale written for a child--the daughter of a close friend--it betrays a vein of melancholy, beginning with a funeral and concerning a boy who has lost his parents. Even the happy ending has a sad twist.
Claire Tomalin--the distinguished biographer of, among others, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft--was personally involved in the authentication
of the rediscovered manuscript. She here contributes a comprehensive and fascinating
introduction that explores the literary and
psychological importance of the story and investigates the hitherto obscure histories of the two extraordinary families whose lives it touched.

About this title

Review:

Mary Shelley's short children's tale, Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot, remained undiscovered for 200 years. It's a charming enough story about a stolen child who is eventually reunited with his parents, but taken on its own merits, Maurice is far more likely to appeal to Shelley scholars than to modern-day children. Fortunately, its publishers recognize this and have sensibly included a fascinating introduction by Claire Tomalin--indeed, the introduction is longer than the story itself. In it, Tomalin describes the circumstances under which the manuscript was rediscovered (in a trunk, in a palazzo, in Tuscany) and its authenticity verified:

We were greeted by Andrea and Cristina Dazzi, and offered coffee. Then the manuscript of Maurice was brought out and laid in front of me on the table: an alarming moment because coffee and manuscripts must not occupy the same space. Once we had separated them, I found Maurice exactly as Cristina Dazzi had described it.

Tomalin then goes on to relate the unhappy life of its author from her impulsive elopement to the continent with the then-married Percy Shelley through the early deaths of three of her children and the unorthodox relationship between herself, her husband, and her sister--who may also have been Percy Shelley's lover. So riveting is the preface to Shelley's short story, in fact, that a more accurate title might have been An Introduction by Claire Tomalin with a Long-Lost Tale by Mary Shelley.

Included in this slim volume are two versions of Maurice; one is "corrected and slightly modernized for ease of reading." The other is a facsimile of the original with Shelley's lineation, pagination, spelling, corrections. Read in the context of the author's own unhappy experience of losing children, her fable of a child regained resonates poignantly. This is one lost tale we're glad was found. --Alix Wilber

About the Author:

Mary Shelley (1797-1851) was the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her most famous work was Frankenstein, published in 1818, but she also wrote a number of other works of fiction and biography after her husband's death by drowning in 1822.

Claire Tomalin is the author of a number of prizewinning biographies, including The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life, The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nellie Ternan and Charles Dickens, Mrs. Jordan's Profession and, most recently, Jane Austen: A Life. She lives in London with her
husband, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.

About this edition

• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0375404732
• ISBN 13: 9780375404733
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 173