Introduction - Page 2

through the beginning of Chapter 10, 116 pages. The concluding portion
occupies the first fifty-four pages of the Bodleian notebook. There is
then a blank page, followed by three and a half pages, scored out, of
what seems to be a variant of the end of Chapter 1 and the beginning
of Chapter 2. A revised and expanded version of the first part of
Mathilda's narrative follows (Chapter 2 and the beginning of Chapter
3), with a break between the account of her girlhood in Scotland and
the brief description of her father after his return. Finally there
are four pages of a new opening, which was used in _Mathilda_. This is
an extremely rough draft: punctuation is largely confined to the dash,
and there are many corrections and alterations. The Shelley-Rolls
fragments, twenty-five sheets or slips of paper, usually represent
additions to or revisions of _The Fields of Fancy_: many of them are
numbered, and some are keyed into the manuscript in Lord Abinger's
notebook. Most of the changes were incorporated in _Mathilda_.

The second Abinger notebook contains the complete and final draft of
_Mathilda_, 226 pages. It is for the most part a fair copy. The text
is punctuated and there are relatively few corrections, most of them,
apparently the result of a final rereading, made to avoid the
repetition of words. A few additions are written in the margins. On
several pages slips of paper containing evident revisions (quite
possibly originally among the Shelley-Rolls fragments) have been
pasted over the corresponding lines of the text. An occasional passage
is scored out and some words and phrases are crossed out to make way
for a revision. Following page 216, four sheets containing the
conclusion of the story are cut out of the notebook. They appear, the
pages numbered 217 to 223, among the Shelley-Rolls fragments. A
revised version, pages 217 to 226, follows the cut.[iv]

The mode of telling the story in the final draft differs radically
from that in the rough draft. In _The Fields of Fancy_ Mathilda's
history is set in a fanciful framework. The author is transported by
the fairy Fantasia to the Elysian Fields, where she listens to the
discourse of Diotima and meets Mathilda. Mathilda tells her story,
which closes with her death. In the final draft this unrealistic and
largely irrelevant framework is discarded: Mathilda, whose death is
approaching, writes out for her friend Woodville the full details of
her tragic history which she had never had the courage to tell him in
person.

The title of the rough draft, _The Fields of Fancy_, and the setting
and framework undoubtedly stem from Mary Wollstonecraft's unfinished
tale, _The Cave of Fancy_, in which one of the souls confined in the
center of the earth