The life and loves of Mary Wollstonecraft

What did Mary Wollstonecraft like and love? This is the question Sylvana Tomaselli, a lecturer at Cambridge University, asks herself at the start of her new book about the writer and philosopher who is often described as ‘the mother of feminism’. After the unveiling of Maggi Hambling’s controversial statue in honour of Wollstonecraft on Newington Green last November, and the vitriolic spats between its detractors and supporters that ensued, a book that refocuses attention on the person at the centre of the storm is a welcome relief.

Wollstonecraft, born in 1759, was determined to live independently by her pen. Joseph Johnson, ‘the father of the book trade’, recognised her talent, paid her a publisher’s retainer usually reserved for men, and she produced novels, pamphlets, conduct books, translations, travelogues and a vast number of reviews before she died of puerperal fever after the birth of her second daughter in 1797, aged just 38. ‘The brevity of that life must never be forgotten,’ says Tomaselli.

Much of Wollstonecraft’s writing is condemnatory and cutting in tone, leaving her open to the suspicion of being a killjoy, out of keeping with a permissive modern world she could not have begun to imagine. Here she is, for example, on card games: ‘Cards are the universal refuge to which the idle and the ignorant resort, to pass life away, and to keep their inactive souls awake by the tumult of hope and fear.’ By beginning with what Wollstonecraft actually liked and loved — accentuating her positive rather than negative reactions — Tomaselli gives us an intimate portrait of the passionate, life-loving woman behind the public moralist.

She loved the theatre. She found herself moved ‘beyond measure’ by King Lear’s line: ‘I think that Lady is my daughter.’