Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft

I actually preferred this over Frances Sherwood's novel about Mary Wollstonecraft. Whether you believe that Wollstonecraft had an affair with the painter Fuseli makes a big difference in how you perceive her. It makes her seem like a perpetual victim who was always making mistakes about men. This discredits Wollstonecraft as a pioneer of feminism. Lyndall Gordon rightly points out that there is no evidence that Wollstonecraft was involved with the married Fuseli and calls it "the Fuseli slander". On the other hand, Gordon does engage in speculation herself. They are mostly educated speculations and there is a good chance of them being true. I thought that the speculation that Wollstonecraft's lover Imlay was a spy had the least credibility because there are other explanations for his behavior that seem more likely to me. I was glad that Lyndall Gordon included such tantalizing bits about Shelley's first wife, Harriet Westbrook and Clare Claremont, the daughter of William Godwin's second wife. The little she has to say about them makes me think that they were extraordinary women and I'd love to know more.

This is a beautifully written biography about a fascinating woman. While she was a serious thinker in advance of her times, her life was of the stuff that would make a good romantic novel. The backdrop is not only England and Ireland, but the French Revolution and includes the machinations of various representatives of the fledgling United States stationed in Europe. No less interesting are the chapters on the women who were her biologic and ideological heirs including her second daughter who married Shelley and wrote Frankenstein.

It was the philosopher Hegel who first saw the enigmatic significnce of the generation of the French Revolution, calling it a birth time. Something new was coming into existence, something more than the failed revolutions that rode the tide. For reasons that almost demand the insights of the philosophy of history, that generation was one of the most innovative in world history, and the case of Mary Wollstonecraft is a perfect example of the sudden appearance of a creative individual steeping into history to break the frozen mould of mechanical culture. Thus, almost two centuries before its time, we see the prophetic birth of feminism and the gestating protest against the place of women in society. This short biography is an excellent snapshot of someone appearing as if from nowhere, not unlike Thomas Paine, to proclaim the new age of women. The portrait of the life of Wollstonecraft, from the early sufferings and explotations in a patriarchal family, to her involvement as an oberver of the French Revolution, concluding with her brief life with Godwin(and this account concludes with some material on her later descendants) is crisply told, and leaves one wondering at the symphony of effects that so suddenly gave birth to modern freedoms. We see that while feminism seems to exist currently in a postmodern context, its primordial onset is deeply braided with the dawn of modernity.

Lyndall Gordon's marvellous, insightful biography presents the reader with a many-layered, intellectualy committed, morally-centered Wollstonecroft who triumphed over the stereotypes of her day -- albeit perhaps not over the prejudices of her early biographers -- by virtue of her originality, passion and resiliance. She depicts Wollstonecroft as a searcher and teacher who sought to define a role for women that included men and was founded on an appreciation of domesticity and motherhood and an abhorrance of violence. This Wollstonecroft experienced the French Revolution, not merely as an intellectual, but as a human being who was repelled by the violence and irrationality of the terror even as she became caught up in her own personal drama of romance, childbirth and rejection. Many writers, including those in her own time, depicted Wollstonecroft as an idealist whose practice fell short of her principles. Gordon illuminates those principles and shows that an appreciation of humanity, emotion and the importance of empathy was always central to Wollstonecroft's thought and that, if she fell short at times, she had the intelligence, determination and insight to recover. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this biography, including the sections describing Wollstonecroft's journey to Norway on behalf of Gilbert Imlay, a central event in Wollstonecroft's life that brought together many of the themes -- courage,devotion, originality, tenacity, the transformation of personal experience into art (her travel book) -- that resonate through Mary Wollstonecroft's life and define her legacy.

Take an avant-garde feminist, teacher, polemicist, child care advisor, grandmother - so to speak - of "Frankenstein", flouter of social convention, twice-failed suicidee, with wit worthy of a snooty Paris salon. Now make her tale as dry as the inventory in an annual audit. Can you do that? Lyndall Gordon can. Gordon shows all, but illuminates little. Her forte is detail with a whiff of sentiment, not the dance of ideas nor subtleties of context. MW clashed with Burke about the revolution in France, but that report passes quickly in favor of repetitious opinions about MW's sisters or students. We hear about MW's personal dread at dark prole forms outside her Paris home, but little about her reaction to the Jacobin silencing of French feminists. We wander on an agonizing search for a silver ship - it rivals Geraldo's opening of Al Capone's vault for its empty ending. Still, Gordon's inventory can please; suggesting enjoyable lines of inquiry for an engaged reader. With the growth of literacy, all of the worthies were publishing. Was MW the star of some 18th century proto-blogosphere? Why did such an independent woman (and fierce mother) throw herself into the Thames because of a man? What commends her to us still? Surely not just her willingness to face scandal openly, Paris Hilton with a tongue that stings. Other women taught or wrote; what energy of desire made MW sui generis? In the end, Gordon's book is accounting, good accounting - hard data to run down intriguing questions that Wollstonecraft's life proffers.