Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon is a dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. Wollstonecraft died ten days after Shelley was born, and this is the first biography to treat their relationship, distant as it was, as a viable force in the lives of both women.
Gordon contends that Wollstonecraft spent much of her writing life thinking about how to make the world better for girls and women. She developed curriculum to teach young women so that they could become full humans and not simply reproductive members of society. Mary Shelley lived in the pages of her mother's writing, never not aware of her importance or of the extraordinary expectations people placed on her intellect and behavior because both of her parents were radical philosophers of one kind or another.
The book's structure follows each woman through the same ages of their lives in alternating chapters, which steeps the reader in the ebb and flow of obstacle and understanding that was such an important part of both women's lives. It is an absolute treasure and enlightening reading.
This is a book that I picked up because of the title, to be honest, and just never put back down. I'd read Joanna Russ's brilliant skewering of patriarchal publishing How to Suppress Women's Writing and was ready to learn and ready to be furious at the silencing of so many women's voices over the last 200 years, much less the millennia that came before.
Both women railed against institutionalized sexism in philosophy and fiction. Both women were keenly aware of their relative (but Not total) uniqueness as women in letters. They thought about each other constantly - equally unknown, almost entirely unknowable. There were many times that I had to put the book down and take a deep breath to plunge back in to the terrible waters of blatant male privilege.
I loved it. Charlotte Gordon did an event at the bookstore when the hardcover was released and it was a pleasure to meet her and chat about the role of love in Wollstonecraft and Shelley's writing lives and frameworks.
Added to the bookshelf: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft. I already had A Vindication of the Rights of Women and still haven't finished it on account of constantly feeling the need to put the thing in the freezer.
#40days40books list
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