A recent auction notice appeared for a sale at Bonham’s auction house in London. One of the items was listed fairly simply as “The newly discovered handwritten manuscript of part of The Invisible Girl, a semi-autobiographical short story by Mary Shelley (1797-1851)” with an auction sale price estimate between 2,000-4,000 pounds. It was being offered with items of other female authors, including a first edition of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone that had been in the possession of Rowling’s literary agent, estimated at 40-60,000 pounds at auction and letters from Margaret Mitchell, author of Gone With the Wind, a collection of what could be argued as the three most commercially successful women writers, or writers of any gender if you count movie box office.

The Mary Shelley manuscript offered consisted of a few pages of writing, densely packed on letter paper. There was no date of the writing on the documents but the appearance of the story in Keepsake was 1833 and said to be written in 1832. And even though Shelley’s Frankenstein shares shelf space and movie marquee history from Universal Pictures with H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man, first serialized in Pearson’s Weekly in 1897, they had little in common, but would be make for perhaps an intriguing pairing.

The Invisible Girl is one of a hand full of Gothic tales that Mary Shelley published in The Keepsake. Magazine in from 1829 to 1834, capitalizing on her notoriety following the re-publishing of Frankenstein under her name. Her writing credit for the story in the Keepsake was not her name, but “By the Author of Frankenstein”. Others stories she wrote around the same period include “Ferdinando Eboli” (1829), “The Evil Eye” (1830), “Transformation” (1831), “The Dream” (1833), and “The Mortal Immortal” (1834).

The story includes several common motifs of the Gothic Terror Tale like those read during that summer by Lake Geneva, featuring an unhappy heroine, overbearing tyrant guardian, and a ghost figure wandering the landscape, like the story originally thought of by John Polidori. And like several other works by Shelley, “The Invisible Girl” employs a framed narrative often referred to in Gothic literature as a “Fragment”, like the Walton letters of Frankenstein, a device rather akin to the “found footage” horror film style of today. It wouldn’t be referred to as a “short story” until sometime later. The frame involved surrounds a portrait of a girl, and the telling of the tale to a visitor.

The Invisible Girl is a pure Gothic Tale that involves a ghost, but is not supernatural, more a mood piece of lost love and longing. It takes place on the coast of Wales, and the title refers to an apparition of a ghost-like figure, than turns out to be a young woman wandering the coast.

It is the story of Rosina, who lives with her guardian, Sir Peter Vernon. She is secretly engaged to his son, Henry. While Henry has traveled away from the estate, Sir Peter discovers the relationship and sends Rosina from the house. He later regrets his harshness and searches for Rosina, but cannot find her. He tells his son that she is dead when he returns home. Henry joins a search to recover her body, but is told by villagers of a ghostly figure of a young woman seen wandering the woods at night, they call the Invisible Girl. Henry ultimate discovers Rosina hiding in the ruin of a castle tower in the woods and realizes she is the roaming apparition. Sir Peter forgives his son for the secret engagement, and the two young lovers are at last married and together.

The story is said to be semi-autobiographical, but perhaps only draws on some of Mary’s life experiences, with rejection by the noble father of a lover, as she had been by Shelley’s father. And the Wales setting may just be a device of a remote romantic setting, or perhaps echo the location of her half-sister’s Fanny’s familiar ground. The ghost of the young woman lost in the landscape may connect to Fanny’s suicide, and Fanny’s confession to Mary that she felt she was the invisible daughter in her family. The story features scenes in a boat tossed on the sea trying to reach shore and nearly lost, which echoes both Shelley’s death in Italy and the near drowning of Mary, Percy and Claire in crossing the channel in 1814 described in the journals and the Secret Memoirs. Unlike the tragedies she might draw on for the story, it ends happily with lovers reunited and reconciled with the father, a happy ending Mary could not quite manage in her own life.

The publishing of the story included a portrait of a girl said to be the subject in the story, Rosina, seen winsomely reading in a parlor with an Italian musical instrument and a parrot. The image was a painting by William Boxall, engraved by J.C. Edwards. Boxhall, who later became director of Britain’s National Galley, early in his career focused on portraiture. He had returned from art study travels in Italy, so the painting may be from that trip and not an original for the story. William Boxall was a friend of William Wordsworth and had painted his portrait in 1831. Wordsworth and Mary Shelley knew one another through her father, so Mary may have called upon Boxall to provide a portrait for her story to be published. Mary may also have a connection to the engraver. J.C. Edwards in the 1820s was noted to be an illustrator of Shakespeare and Mary’s early friends though her father, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Lamb, both made their reputations on the bard’s revival. Who the model in the image of Rosina is, provides some mystery all its own.

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