ABSTRACT
The tensions were undoubtedly fuelled by the conflicts between stepmother and stepdaughter, but what added to the poisonous atmosphere was Mary-Jane's envy of the William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft inheritance that her stepdaughter Mary Shelley possessed. As in the Cinderella fairy story, their envious rivalry was fuelled by the stepmother's hatred of her stepchildren. It seems reasonable to imagine that on her return home Mary found herself unreconciled to either her father or her stepmother and her resolution was to run away with Shelley, who had become her father's admiring friend while she had been away. When later Mary Shelley wrote her novella Mathilda about father and daughter incest, at a moment of extreme loneliness and despair, she seemed to be linking in an uncanny way the Cinderella tale to the other Cinderella tale, Donkey-Skin. In this way Mary Shelley's imaginative life seems to confirm the truth that Cinderella fairy story and Donkey-Skin are different sides of the same coin.
