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.