Wollstonecraft, as you may or may not know, was an early feminist icon. She wrote what is a brilliant piece called The Vindication of the Rights of Women (published in 1792, yo!) that I always excerpted and made my politics classes read. She also led a challenging life, from an unhappy childhood home to giving birth to a daughter out of wedlock to facing criticisms of her writing simply based on her sex to dying only ten days after childbirth. Her daughter, Mary Shelley, is probably most famous for her writing of the novel Frankenstein and her tumultuous relationship with the poet Percy Bysse Shelley. There were many parallels in their lives, from the "illegitimate" children to the terrible men they fell in love with to the many seasons of their writing careers.
It was an interesting exercise in writing, I thought. Reading about how Wollstonecraft did something scandalous and then in the next chapter reading about how her daughter did something similar was simply fascinating. I felt like it made a pretty strong argument for nature over nurture since Mary Shelley was raised by William Godwin, a relatively conservative man, and it was clear that his nurturing of Shelley was not responsible for her often socially unacceptable behavior.
Also, Gordon's writing style is so readable. Sure, this book clocked in at nearly 550 pages, but the pages just flew past. There are snarky little asides and I really loved how every time she would introduce yet another luminary of the Romantic era, she would give background on them, as if we had never heard of Lord Byron. Ha! Anyway, this gets a big thumbs up from me. 4.5/5 stars
People I Looked Up:
Gunning sisters (page 42) - Maria (1733 - 1760) and Elizabeth Gunning (1734 - 1790), two common-born Irish sisters. Maria married an earl and Elizabeth married a duke and then another duke after she was widowed. They were great beauties and the original influencers and Maria eventually died of lead and mercury poisoning since those elements were used in her beauty regimen.
Erasmus Darwin (page 90, 116) - Grandfather of the famous Charles Darwin, Erasmus wrote a sexualized depiction of flowers in his book-length poem The Loves of the Plants (1791) that was deemed too explicit for single ladies (note: my husband and I spent a good chunk of an evening reading parts of this out loud in faux-sexy voices and laughing a lot). An excerpt:
Her quivering fins and panting gills she hides
But spreads her silver arms upon the tides;
Slow as she sails, her ivory neck she laves,
And shakers her golden tresses o'er the waves.
Charm'd round the Nymph, in circling gambols glide
Four Nereid-forms, or shoot along the tide;
Now all as one they rise with frolic spring,
And beat the wondering air on humid wing;
Now all descending plunge beneath the main,
And lash the foam with undulating train
Joseph Priestley (page 90) - This guy was a big deal. He lived from 1733-1804 and he was a researcher and philosopher. He invented carbonated water and the rubber eraser, identified a dozen key chemical compounds, and wrote about electricity. What a man.
William Cowper (page 90) - English poet (1731-1800) and hymnwriter.
Margaret King (page 351) - This lady was amazing. King (1773-1835) was a writer of female-liberation fiction and health advice. She had been a favored pupil during Wollstonecraft's abbreviated teaching career. She had been forced to marry by her family and had borne eight children to her first husband, a wealthy count named Lord Mountcashell. When she was twenty-nine, she ran away with an Irish fellow named George Tighe and they moved to Italy where they raised two daughters of their own and she started hanging out with Percy and Mary Shelley. While she was with Tighe, she studied medicine at the University of Jena dressed as a man because medical education was forbidden for women. Eventually her first husband died and she married Tighe, but then they separated soon after. What a life.
Mary Bowles, Countess of Strathore and Kinghorne (page 429) - A notable member of the British aristocracy (1749 - 1800) during the Georgian period. She was a wealthy heiress who married an earl and had five children. After he died of tuberculosis, she married Andrew Robinson Stoney under the false belief that he would die shortly thereafter. They had two children together and he was super abusive, confining her to her own house, as well as physically and mentally abusing her. He also did terrible things to the servants. Mary escaped his custody and filed for divorce. She was an early advocate for women's rights in regards to divorce.
Maria Diana "Doddy" Dods (page 540) - Scottish writer of books, stories, and other works who generally wrote under a male pseudonym. She actually lived under a male identity in order to help one of Mary Shelley's friends, Isabella Robinson, deal with an illegitimate pregnancy.
Things I Looked Up:
Newington Green (page 67) - Neighborhood in north London known for being a welcoming space for agitators and dissenters. Wollstonecraft opened a school there.
1816, the year without summer (page 162) - 1816 was a strange year. Climate abnormalities caused temperatures across the globe to decrease dramatically. Food shortages were rampant. Europe saw its coldest summer in thousands of years. Mary Shelley was in Switzerland during this summer and this is when she began writing Frankenstein since it was too gloomy and cold to do regular summer vacation frolicking outside.
Jeremiad (page 173) - A long, mournful complaint or lamentation; a list of woes
Ball of the Victims at Hotel Richelieu (page 282) - After the fall of Robespierre during the French Revolution, surviving relations of people who had been guillotined took to holding ball and dances in their honor. (Note: Weird, but I guess you grieve how you grieve.)
Peterloo (page 346) - A massacre that happened in Manchester in 1819. A union organized a protest in the green square and 60,000 people gathered to demand representation in parliament. Fifteen people died when the cavalry charged the crowd.
Persiflage (page 404) - Light and slightly contemptuous mockery or banter.
Thirteenth fairy (page 485) - In the original Grimm's version of Sleeping Beauty ("Briar Rose"), the king and queen decided to invite all the fairies in their kingdom to a dinner, but they only had twelve golden plates, so they didn't invite the thirteenth fairy (editorial note: because they were idiots). The thirteenth fairy heard about this, crashed the party (like you would), and cursed the child. The author used an allusion to the thirteen fairy as if this is something that is absolutely common knowledge, but I had to really dig to find it. Did you know this reference?
Notable Line:
The criticisms that did nettle her [Wollstonecraft] were the comments directed at her writing style - her work was sprawling, disorganized, and uneven, hostile reviewers said, criticisms that are still repeated today. It took her five years to respond to these critiques, but at last, in 1797, she defended her aesthetic choices, in an essay she called "On Taste." A good piece of writing should be spontaneous and honest, she said. The mind and heart should appear on the page. Writers should not try to seduce their readers with a "mist of words." (page 175-176)
Wollstonecraft and I do not agree on appropriate writing styles.
Item From Wollstonecraft's Life That I Can't Get Over:
Wollstonecraft was broke and this financial insecurity led her to do two translations. She translated Christian Salzmann's Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children from German. "When she disagreed with his theories or felt he was neglecting an important point, she felt no compunction about altering his words" (page 121) and "...she even omitted entire passages, inserting in their place her own treatises on the evils of female fashion and the importance of a good education for girls..." (page 121) This farce had its impact since "her disguise proved so effective that for more than two hundred years her ideas on this subject remained buried in this little-read tome and were only recently unearthed by literary scholars." (page 122) Until this point in the biography, I had deeply admired Wollstonecraft. But this flagrant violation of academic norms was deeply upsetting to me.
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