Sorrow, my sweet girl, will bring you to your knees, time and again, but so will beauty, so too love, enough to rise again, to try again, to live as all beings wish to live: free.

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

First thanks for this novel goes to Emma Parry, my wonderfully intuitive agent, who knew I was struggling to let go of Dickens, who’d captured my imagination for so long. It was the two hundredth anniversary of Frankenstein; Mary Shelley was everywhere. “What about Wollstonecraft?” she said. Who did capture my imagination entirely, especially those eleven days between giving birth to her daughter and her own death from puerperal fever. How could one possibly say good-bye? What would she have her daughter know? But until Emma reminded me recently, I’d forgotten that when we had that first conversation, I’d just lost my own beloved mother, quite suddenly (though to a long illness), and that my seventeen-year old daughter, the youngest of my children, was getting ready to leave home. I see my mother in both my daughters (and my son), her natural belief in equality that lived in every fiber of her being, as it did in Wollstonecraft’s. Of course it would be a mother-daughter story; I just didn’t know that when I started. But I think Emma did.

Still, taking on the iconic Mary Wollstonecraft—“the mother of feminism”—felt like an enormous responsibility. I wanted to shape her unruly life into a good story with just enough mess left in it. (We are nothing without our messiness.) Caroline Bleeke, my gifted editor, helped me do that with her gentle but exacting sense and sensibility, making the book better at every turn. I’m also grateful to Amelia Possanza and the whole Flatiron team for the great work they do for writers and their books, especially Sydney Jeon, Jordan Forney, Nancy Trypuc, Marlena Bittner, Keith Hayes, Kerry Nordling, Donna Noetzel, John Morrone, Emily Walters, Malati Chavali, Megan Lynch, and Bob Miller.

I also stand on the shoulders of giants, the great Wollstonecraft biographers: Janet Todd (Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life), Claire Tomalin (The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft), Lyndall Gordon (Vindication), and Charlotte Gordon’s dual biography of mother and daughter, Romantic Outlaws. Each of them made Wollstonecraft come alive for me, in broad strokes and exquisite detail, leaving just enough cracks and clues in her story, and their unique versions of her, to find my own footing. But there’s no giant like Wollstonecraft herself to humble a writer. Her letters, novels, and other prose gave me an intimate glimpse of her intellect, but also her humanity—her humanness—so full of contradiction and complexity, like all of us. To be sure, the best lines in the book are straight from her mouth and pen. I hope the ones that are mine do her justice.