'Lost and Found' Mary Shelley, Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot: A Tale. Edited with an Introduction by Claire Tomalin. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. ISBN: 0 375 40473 2 (hardback). Price: US$20 (£9.99).

On November 10, 1997, readers of the London Times opened their newspapers to find Mary Shelley leading the day's headlines. A long-lost story had been found in an old box of papers in the home of an old Tuscan family. The manuscript that had resurfaced, Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot, is a children's story that Mary Shelley wrote in 1820 as a present for Laurette Tighe, the daughter of the Shelleys' friend and fellow ex-patriot in Italy, Lady Mountcashell. The Times' response to this event, which included their funding of Claire Tomalin's journey to Italy to inspect the manuscript, not to mention Alfred A. Knopf's response in preparing a beautifully designed hardback edition of the story, is a real testament to the blossoming of Mary Shelley's popularity over the past few years surrounding her bicentennial. Any reader of Mary Shelley's fiction will immediately recognize Maurice as her own. Like Frankenstein, and many of her tales, Shelley frames her narrative in an intriguing way, and spins her tale through the voice of more than one narrator. Cleverly dividing the story into three parts in order to create a children's version of the triple-decker novel, Shelley opens the tale with a countryman's description of a traveller, and explains the traveller's interest in a young boy he sees walking by in a funeral procession. The traveller asks the boy's history, and learns of Maurice's previous life with the elderly fisherman Barnet. In Part 2, the traveller meets Maurice, who is soon to be evicted from Barnet's cottage by the old man's relations. In the third section, the traveller tells his own history, and after describing the circumstances in which an infant son was stolen from him, Maurice puts the pieces of the mystery together and identifies himself as the traveller's long-lost son. The plot is predictable, and traces of the contemporary taste for high sentiment are certainly palpable, but Maurice is nevertheless a fascinating piece of work for a number of reasons. First, it allows us to see Mary Shelley in a new light as the author of a children's book. Shelley's gentle addresses to the reader evoke a narrative voice that was obviously designed for young readers. Her only other known children's story, "Cecil," likewise a tale of a young boy that focuses on his family life and education, is unfinished, and affords much less insight into the degree to which Shelley altered her narrative style in composing for children. Tomalin's edition includes a useful second printing of the text of Maurice, "showing the author's original lineation, pagination, spelling, corrections and emendations," which offers a view of Shelley's manner of composition, and an impression of the state of the actual manuscript. "It is a small work, but touched with the same spirit as the greater ones it stands among," (18) Tomalin writes in her Introduction, comparing Maurice to the "high tide" of Romantic literature that was flourishing in 1820. Most perceptive is her discussion of the story's relationship to Wordsworth's works, in its emphasis on simple scenes of rural life, in its focus on the emotions conjured by the picturesque fisher's cot in which Maurice makes his home, and in Shelley's often exquisitely drawn portraits of aspects of the natural world. Tomalin discusses the fact that the character of Maurice is designed as an exemplar of ideal behavior for a child; strange perhaps when one considers that this very male-oriented tale was composed as a gift for a little girl. She points out that, like the heroines of Mary Wollstonecraft's novels, Maurice is endowed with both humility and a …