The use of _sic_ and of square brackets is reserved to indicate evident slips of the pen, obviously incorrect, unclear, or incomplete phrasing and punctuation, and my conjectures in emending them.
I am very grateful to the library of Duke University and to its librarian, Dr.Benjamin E.Powell, not only for permission to transcribe and publish this work by Mary Shelley but also for the many courtesies shown to me when they welcomed me as a visiting scholar in 1956.

To Lord Abinger also my thanks are due for adding his approval of my undertaking, and to the Curators of the Bodleian Library for permiting me to use and to quote from the papers in the reserved Shelley Collection.

Other libraries and individuals helped me while I was editing _Mathilda_: the Enoch Pratt Free Library of Baltimore, whose Literature and Reference Departments went to endless trouble for me; the Julia Rogers Library of Goucher College and its staff; the library of the University of Pennsylvania; Miss R.Glynn Grylls (Lady Mander); Professor Lewis Patton of Duke University; Professor Frederick L.Jones of the University of Pennsylvania; and many other persons who did me favors that seemed to them small but that to me were very great.
I owe much also to previous books by and about the Shelleys.

Those to which I have referred more than once in the introduction and notes are here given with the abbreviated form which I have used: Frederick L.Jones, ed.

_The Letters of Mary W.Shelley_, 2 vols.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1944 (_Letters_) -- -- _Mary Shelley's Journal_.