his labours
The pronoun is pointed, an attempt to shield Mary Shelley from an attack on her as
a female novelist. Attenuating this strategy, Percy Bysshe Shelley himself
undertook all negotiations for the publication of the novel. The
subterfuge worked at least to some extent. Walter Scott, reviewing the novel in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine
identified Shelley as the author. Closer to the local scene, the Quarterly, inimical to Godwin, savaged the novel as the
production of his daughter. Perhaps, this was exactly why the subterfuge
was undertaken in the first place.
