his more than daughter
In the 1818 edition Elizabeth is the daughter of Alphonse's deceased
sister (see 1.1.3). Although in the
1831 edition her parentage is distanced, she retains this same designation
of being "more than daughter." The terms recall the rhetoric in which
she herself, in her dungeon, addressed Justine (see 1.7.8). Even more so, they echo Victor's
own description of her in their youth, in the revised 1831 edition (see 1.1.4), and thus strongly suggest that
there Mary Shelley was attempting to draw together these linguistic echoes
to emphasize the inbred, almost incestuous, closeness of the family. As
elsewhere, the echoes may intimate that the bourgeois domestic affections
are not an unmixed blessing.
