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

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Author), Claire Tomalin (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 27, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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

From Publishers Weekly

The discovery last year of a long-lost, hitherto unpublished story by Mary Shelley?author of Frankenstein, feminist and wife of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley?raises expectations. A morality tale for children, Maurice was written in 1820 in Italy, where Shelley had fled with her husband and their two small children. Dedicated to Laurette Tighe, a transplanted 11-year-old Irish girl, it's a slight, quaint, creaky, if pleasant enough story full of convoluted sentences. Maurice is a delicate yet resilient boy who runs away from home to escape the beatings of the cruel sailor whom he thinks is his father. After enjoying a loving foster home with a poor old fisherman and his wife, the undaunted boy by chance meets a rich traveler, a retired architect, who, it turns out, is his real parent. Contemporary concerns such as child abuse, broken homes and runaway kids are all present, yet the story seems stilted and full of sentimental touches. In her 60-page introduction, Tomalin, biographer of Jane Austen and Shelley's mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, offers a fascinating piece of detective work (she went to Italy to meet Tighe's descendants, who had unearthed the manuscript) and shows how this tale of loss and vulnerability mirrors a tangle of tragedies?the deaths of Mary Shelley's three infant children; the suicides of her half-sister and of P.B. Shelley's first wife; the absence of Allegra, daughter of Percy Bysshe's stepsister who was given up to the girl's father, the poet Byron. Tomalin also re-creates the adventures of Laurette's parents, both freethinkers, poets and writers, whose lives saw the Napoleonic Wars and the Romantic movement. The work contains fetching period illustrations, a facsimile of the original manuscript and a witty, tongue-in-cheek poem by Laurette's mother, Margaret King, "Twelve Cogent Reasons for Supposing P.B. Sh-ll-y to be the D-v-l Inc-rn-t-," which is a flattering defense of the radical atheist poet.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 173 pages
• Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf (October 27, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375404732
• ISBN-13: 978-0375404733
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,838,677 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mary Shelley for kids, August 22, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot: A Long-Lost Tale (Hardcover)

This tale is a far cry from Mary's most acclaimed work, Frankenstein. And why not? It was, after all, written for a little girl, and therefore not intended to house any complexities. It is a simple story, broken into three small parts in the fashion of popular adult stories of Shelley's time, and is a tad on the predictable side. It reads almost like a fairytale, with the stolen child reunited with his parents (who happen to be well-off) by pure chance. Despite the story's lack of surprises, I still found it wonderful to settle back into the familiarity of Shelley's writing style with a new text (as will most who have researched her). "The Fisher's Cot" will also appeal to Mary Shelley fans because of the introduction by Claire Tomalin at the very beginning. Tomalin does a good job of setting the scene that the story was written in so that the casual reader will be able to enjoy not only the actual story, but the story behind it as well. Overall, if you're a Shelley fan you definitely should get this book. If you're not, I politely suggest that you review all your options first.

4.0 out of 5 stars Biography and a Story, July 10, 2005

By 

A. G. Plumb "Greg Plumb" (Melbourne, Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot: A Long-Lost Tale (Hardcover)

Mary Shelley was such an interesting person, as indeed many around her were. And yet, for all that, she has been totally dwarfed by her one famous novel - 'Frankenstein' - but even here it is not really Mary Shelley. The novel firstly became famous - not as Mary Shelley's story but as a theatrical adaptation. And since then films have built on and obscured the original genius of 'Frankenstein'.

Surprise, surprise - Mary was a lot better than that. She was a very talented and perceptive writer. There are some recommendations below. 'Maurice' is a beautiful story full of pathos and the regrets of life where it seems impossible to award benefit where it is due without splashing it to where it doesn't belong, or to deliver punishment where it's due without - in the same way - delivering negatives to others who do not deserve it.

The biographical information about Mary Shelley and about 'Maurice' itself is a fascinating story and certainly adds to what is really a very short story - justifying publishing it in a single volume.

Other recommendations:
Mary Shelley - Transformation
Mary Shelley - Matilda
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (if you haven't read it you may be surprised)
William Godwin - Caleb Williams (Godwin was Mary's father)