The three main characters in Mathilda are clearly Mary Shelley herself, Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley -- and their relations can easily be reassorted to correspond with their lives. Mathilda is the second long work of fiction of Mary Shelley, written between August 1819 and February 1820.

The act of writing this novella distracted Mary Shelley from her grief after the deaths of her one-year-old daughter Clara at Venice in September 1818 and her three-year-old son William in June 1819 in Rome. These losses plunged Mary Shelley into a depression that distanced her emotionally and sexually from Percy Shelley and he left her, as he put it, "on the hearth of pale despair". An important and little-known tale from the author of Frankenstein.