Maurice =

A small handmade booklet in paper covers surfaced in 1997, among a long-sealed crate of letters and papers in a palazzo in the hills north of Florence. Its title was "Maurice," and a dedication named Laurette as the recipient, from "Mrs Shelley." Researchers confirmed that Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, wrote it. Scholars had long assumed the text was lost after she composed it in 1820. This edition is its first publication.

Mary Shelley wrote the tale two years after Frankenstein, when she was just twenty-two and struggling with severe depression. She had run away with the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley at sixteen, had four children with him, and buried three of them. The story is a gentle moral lesson meant for a young girl, the daughter of a close friend. Even so, it opens with a funeral and centres on a boy who has been orphaned, and a quiet sadness runs beneath its cheerful surface.

Claire Tomalin, known for her biographies of Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley's mother, helped verify the manuscript. Her lengthy introduction considers why the story matters both as literature and as a window into Shelley's state of mind. It also traces the previously obscure histories of the two remarkable families connected to the work.