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.’,