Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft Paperback – Illustrated, May 2, 2006

Ever since I was in college, I have wanted to read about Mary Wollstonecraft, the mother of Mary Shelly, who wrote "Frankenstein". "Vindication" did not disappoint! What an amazing woman! I am sorry I waited 40 years to read about this fascinating woman. Lyndall Gordon does an excellent job of making you see the type of life that women went through in the 18th century. It is truly a good read.

A thoroughly researched account of the life of a remarkable woman, Vindication follows the difficult life and amazing intellectual development of Mary Wollstonecraft, an 18th century writer and thinker. The prolific letter writing of the period provides the author, Lyndall Gordan, with extensive material that provides insight into the private life and thoughts of this early advocate of women's rights. Drawing on additional material from essays and fiction, Gordan shows just how difficult the social system of Britain at the time made the lives of women. She thus helps us to appreciate the triumph of Wollstonecraft in rising above an abusive father and dysfunctional family, freeing herself from society's restrictions and men's patronizing scorn. Despite everything against her, Wollstonecraft became a successful writer who made a significant mark on the thinking of the time. Although often occupied with family and financial problems, Wollsonecraft thought her way to ideas of love, marriage, child-rearing, education, vocation and a woman's place in the world that strike us now, well over two centuries later, as modern and progressive. She not only rose beyond the thinking of the time to reach these conclusions, she also managed, through her writing and her interactions with other radical thinkers, to influence political and social philosophy in Europe and America. Unfortunately, the wealth of material that Gordan provides and a penchant for an academic style of writing sometimes obscures the story. Reference to passages in the writing of later female authors, especially Jane Austen (clearly one of Gordon's favorite authors), seem strained and unnecessary. Gordon, an experienced literary biographer, seems to have decided to value comprehensiveness over readability. Some points, although important, are made over and over. With sharper editing and brighter writing this could have been a brilliant 450 page book instead of a 592-page tome that was sometimes a struggle to get through (but always drew me back).

I could not put this book down. Wollstonecraft was endlessly fascinating, if tragic. A woman out of her time whose value to posterity is not yet fully appreciated.

While I respect Gordon's decision to stick closely to journals and letters in writing her biography of Mary Wollstonecraft, I wondered why she offered so little in the way of the broader political world Mary was a part of it in the late 18th century, especial since she responded to it in her writings. The author offers little in regard to the meetings that were most intriguing, like the dinner parties hosted by her publisher, Joseph Johnson, that included leading revolutionary figures like Thomas Paine and her eventual husband, William Godwin. Gordon does talk about the revolutionary ferment in Britain at the time, but doesn't expand it into a broader discussion on how Mary's writings reflected these concerns, and how she managed to effectively escape censure, unlike Thomas Paine, who found himself being tried for sedition in absentia. What we get is a set of very intriguing stories, such as her long affair with Gilbert Imlay that took her to France and Scandinavia, that wet one's appetite but fails to satisfies one interest in her as a revolutionary figure.Mary Wollstonecraft reached a broad audience with her writings, in particular A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which was in response to the new French government's Rights of Man. She, like other women who were part of the revolution, felt left out when the new government essentially turned its back on the rights of women. Mary avoided house arrest by secretly marrying Gilbert Imlay, an American in Paris. Gordon sets up many of the situations that befell Mary in Paris and her frustrating relationship with Imlay that came for nought after a long voyage to Scandinavia trying to recover his losses in regard to an ill-fated shipping venture. As with her brothers and sisters, Mary felt a strong responsibility to the man she loved, but this feeling was never fully reciprocated.Gordon shows in detail how Mary had to deal with the paternalistic world of the late 18th century, from her good-for-nothing father, to her miserly elder brother, and the varoious relationships of her friends and family. All this is well and good, but Mary was a political writer, and we get so little of her actual thoughts on government, which were the focus of her many writings.After all, Mary was one of the early suffragettes, and her writings form the cornerstone of feminist writings in the 19th century. Gordon alludes to Jane Austin and Virginia Woolf and other writers she felt were influenced by Mary in one way or another. Gordon had a pension for comparing Mary's real life to the fictional lives Austin had created in her novels. Time and time again, we read about what Mary suffered through, lending emotional weight to her writings, but there wasn't any real attempt to probe the intellectual origins of these writings. Mary may have saw herself as a new genus of woman, but her writings didn't come out of an intellectual void, and that is what is missing in this biography.

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.

This had to be one of the most boring and poorly written pieces of historical fiction….and yes, I forced myself to stay with it to the end. Even as a textbook, this novel would be difficult to follow and you could learn much about Mary Wollstonecraft in a shorter, less laborious read! I felt as if this author was taken every reference text that she had researched for this book and tried to cram it back into one novel.

Extremely interesting book about someone I had never heard of before. However, a little too long for me; I think parts of it could have been pared down.

This is a wonderful book. Mary Wollstonecraft should be every child's hero. A life lived with passion and independence and an example of the need to learn and, by so doing, put that knowledge to practice.