Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

The real problem, said Mary, was not women, but how men wanted women to be.

But the paradox of their success is that most modern readers are unaware of the overwhelming obstacles both women had to overcome. Without knowing the history of the era, the difficulties Wollstonecraft and Shelley faced are largely invisible, their bravery incomprehensible. Both women were what Wollstonecraft termed “outlaws.” Not only did they write world-changing books, they broke from the strictures that governed women’s conduct, not once but time and again, profoundly challenging the moral code of the day. Their refusal to bow down, to subside and surrender, to be quiet and subservient, to apologize and hide, makes their lives as memorable as the words they left behind. They asserted their right to determine their own destinies, starting a revolution that has yet to end.

If a female fainted easily, could not abide spiders, feared thunderstorms, ghosts, and highwaymen, ate only tiny portions, collapsed after a brief walk, and wept when she had to add a column of numbers, she was considered the feminine ideal.

Both mother and daughter attempted to free themselves from the stranglehold of polite society, and both struggled to balance their need for love and companionship with their need for independence. They braved the criticism of their peers to write works that took on the most volatile issues of the day. Brave, passionate, and visionary, they broke almost every rule there was to break. Both had children out of wedlock. Both fought against the injustices women faced and both wrote books that revolutionized history.

When husbands, fathers, and brothers are granted absolute power, their morality vanishes.

Who else sat on a wet rock, naked, reading ancient Greek?

Never had the town been rocked by so many outlandish escapades. One of Byron’s servants stabbed a man.

Godwin was also of little practical assistance. He had calculated his living expenses down to the last penny, sometimes having to borrow a few pounds to make ends meet. He had never intended to assume the financial responsibility of a family, declaring that such obligations blighted the freedom of the male intellectual.

The degradation of women that he held up as ideal, she argued, had negative consequences for men, too. When husbands, fathers, and brothers are granted absolute power, their morality vanishes; they become tyrants. If men are allowed to act on their impulses without any checks on their behavior, they will be no better than animals. If women are trained to measure their worth solely by their ability to be attractive to men, then being loved will be the extent of their ambition. For a society to flourish, both men and women must have higher aspirations than these; they must also be governed by reason.

You know I was not born to tread in the beaten track—the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on.

poems. (illustration ill.32) On May 12, the whole party came out onto the terrace to watch Shelley’s schooner-rigged ship skim into the bay, heeling sharply and trailed by a dark foamy wake. “She is a most beautiful boat,” Shelley exclaimed with delight. However, Mary

In December 1776, when Washington’s war-weary troops ground to a halt on the wrong side of the frozen Delaware, the general ordered his officers to read Paine’s words aloud to the exhausted soldiers: These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Both jeremiad and prophecy, Rights of Woman reveals her as a teacher, a hellfire preacher, a satirist, and a utopian dreamer. Some write of what was; others of what is, she said, but I write of what will be.