In the 1818 edition Elizabeth is the daughter of Alphonse's deceased sister (see I:1:7).
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 I:7:23). Even more so, they echo Victor's own
description of her in their youth, in the revised 1831 edition (see 1831:I:1:10),
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.