Her Lost Words: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley
While Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley each stand alone for their contributions to feminism and fiction respectively, there’s something about their being mother and daughter that makes each woman’s story just that little bit more captivating. Add the fact that Wollstonecraft died eleven days after giving birth to her daughter, and you have a story crying out for a novelist to take it on. In Her Lost Words, Thornton does so with aplomb.
Mary Wollstonecraft’s views on equality, marriage and independence are formed by the violence she witnessed her father show her mother. She’s free-thinking, clever, and fiercely independent, determined to witness the French Revolution firsthand. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman sets the thinking world on fire, but her unconventional personal life makes for a gripping story. Her daughter Mary will grow up never knowing the famous, exceptional woman who was her mother, and has a tumultuous story of her own when, aged sixteen, she runs off to the continent with a married man.
Alternating between the two women’s storylines, Thornton takes us through their love affairs, their mistakes, and their failings, along with their moments of great creative genius and success. Both women are revealed as warm, loving and, above all, human. Both stories come with the added bonus of who they knew and what they saw: from Mary Wollstonecraft’s close-up and personal experience of the French Revolution to Mary Shelley’s relationship with Percy Shelley and her stepsister’s affair with Lord Byron.
