love and fury a novel of mary wollstonecraft

Bee Rowlatt, author of In Search of Mary Love and Fury is like watching newly-colorized archive film burst into life-I knew the story, but I never knew the story like this.” These experiments are the stuff of Silva's book, and her writing is as fearless as its subject. Wollstonecraft's intellectual achievements are colossal in their own right, but for me they cannot be unstitched from the extraordinary and transgressive experiments of her life. Clare Beams, author of The Illness Lesson What an extraordinary and transformative book this is.” Love and Fury thrums with beauty, pain, sorrow, wonder, tragedy, triumph, and life. “Here is a novel set on the border between living and dying, with a heroine so powerful she conquers all territories, including this one-and she conquered me, too. A life that tempered triumph with loss.Ĭonjuring the all too brief moment when the stories of influential mother and daughter overlapped, Love and Fury is a tribute to the power of a woman reclaiming her own narrative and passing that legacy on to her daughter. A life that urgently demanded equality for herself and all women. She describes a life lived against the conventions and restrictions of her time. In that time, Mary Wollstonecraft weaves the tale of her life to bind her frail daughter close and to give herself a reason to fight, even as her own strength wanes. However, after her baby girl, her second daughter, is delivered, both mother and child will fight for survival. When Mary Wollstonecraft’s labour begins on a fine summer’s day everything appears normal, and she anticipates being back at her usual occupations before too long. These are the tenets at the heart of Samantha Silva’s richly rendered imagining of Mary Wollstonecraft’s life the mother of Mary Shelley, and arguably the world's first feminist.Īugust, 1797. 'Now, daughter, I’m to tell you a story to coax you into the world…’

Love and fury a novel of mary wollstonecraft