Note 28 — Chapter IV

In F of F—A Mathilda “took up Ariosto & read the story of Isabella.” Mary’s reason for the change is not clear. Perhaps she thought that the fate of Isabella, a tale of love and lust and death (though not of incest), was too close to what was to be Mathilda’s fate. She may have felt—and rightly—that the allusions to Lelia and to Myrrha were ample foreshadowings. The reasons for the choice of the seventh canto of Book II of the Faerie Queene may lie in the allegorical meaning of Guyon, or Temperance, and the “dread and horror” of his experience.