A woman of some importance

The writer William Mayne has said, ‘I don’t know why there are supposed to be only two sexes. I can think of at least eight, even before you get to women.’ Mary Wollstonecraft, though no wit, would have been pleased with this. She saw herself as neither male nor female but ‘a new genus’, one who must always ‘follow her own track’, and be ‘tender’ but intransigent. She could not see herself as of the same species as other girls who seemed to live for marriage — any marriage — to escape the shame of poverty and spinsterhood. She herself had been the child of a terrible marriage; her father a violent drunk and her mother a passive depressive. She burned with zeal to change things.

This painstaking, full and very readable biography with 100 pages of notes and bibliography looks a great block of a book for a life that lasted only 37 years, but Wollstonecraft, or ‘Wt.’, as her second husband, the philosopher William Godwin, called her, lived a sensational life, as peripatetic as her predecessor in feminism, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu 70 years earlier. She was involved in the politics of America, travelled in France, Ireland and Norway and was brought up in England north and south. She wrote on education, morality and the French Revolution and lived for a time in Ireland. After an emotional scandal with the artist Fuseli, a dreadful-sounding man, she took off to Paris to view the Revolution first-hand at exactly the time when most English intellectuals were hurrying home. She saw the king on the way to his execution and the streets running with blood. Her travels to Norway in search of the Bourbon treasure reads like a crazy mystery story. Her time as an Irish governess connects with the last section of the book on her posthumous influence on women.