The Mary Shelley Deception

My Name is Sue,

HOW DO YOU DO?!

Mary Sue is a negative term used in fanfiction and literary criticism to describe an original character that is often overly idealized or assumed to be a projection of the author. When used by a male author, the character is referred to as a Gary Stu or Marty Stu.

Mathilda, by Mary Shelley. 

The finished draft of a short novel by Mary Shelley. Its adult theme, concerning a father's incestuous love for his daughter and its consequences, meant that the manuscript was suppressed by Shelley's own father, and not published until 1959, more than a hundred years after her death.

To Mary

I. 

How, my dear Mary, -- are you critic-bitten 

(For vipers kill, though dead) by some review, 

That you condemn these verses I have written, 

Because they tell no story, false or true? 

What, though no mice are caught by a young kitten, 

May it not leap and play as grown cats do, 

Till its claws come? Prithee, for this one time, 

Content thee with a visionary rhyme. 

II. 

What hand would crush the silken-wingèd fly, 

The youngest of inconstant April's minions, 

Because it cannot climb the purest sky, 

Where the swan sings, amid the sun's dominions? 

Not thine. Thou knowest 'tis its doom to die, 

When Day shall hide within her twilight pinions

The lucent eyes, and the eternal smile, 

Serene as thine, which lent it life awhile. 

III. 

To thy fair feet a wingèd Vision came, 

Whose date should have been longer than a day, 

And o'er thy head did beat its wings for fame, 

And in thy sight its fading plumes display; 

The watery bow burned in the evening flame, 

But the shower fell, the swift Sun went his way- 

And that is dead.-O, let me not believe 

That anything of mine is fit to live! 

IV. 

Wordsworth informs us he was nineteen years

Considering and retouching Peter Bell; 

Watering his laurels with the killing tears 

Of slow, dull care, so that their roots to Hell 

Might pierce, and their wide branches blot the spheres 

Of Heaven, with dewy leaves and flowers; this well 

May be, for Heaven and Earth conspire to foil 

The over-busy gardener's blundering toil. 

V. 

My Witch indeed is not so sweet a creature 

As Ruth or Lucy, whom his graceful praise 

Clothes for our grandsons-but she matches Peter, 

Though he took nineteen years, and she three days 

In dressing. Light the vest of flowing metre 

She wears; he, proud as dandy with his stays, 

Has hung upon his wiry limbs a dress 

Like King Lear's 'looped and windowed raggedness.' 

VI. 

If you strip Peter, you will see a fellow 

Scorched by Hell's hyperequatorial climate 

Into a kind of a sulphureous yellow: 

A lean mark, hardly fit to fling a rhyme at; 

In shape a Scaramouch, in hue Othello. 

If you unveil my Witch, no priest nor primate 

Can shrive you of that sin, -- if sin there be 

In love, when it becomes idolatry.

by Percy Bysshe Shelley