Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft is considered by many to be the founder of feminism. Her book, titled “ A Vindication of the Rights of Woman ,” was groundbreaking for challenging the notion that women existed for the sole purpose of pleasing men, and its philosophy is still the heartbeat pulsing through the women’s movement.

The Mary Wollstonecraft statue in Newington Green has been a target of controversy since it was first erected. Some people have criticised it for being an abstract depiction of the female figure, rather than a lifelike representation of Wollstonecraft. Others have criticised it for it including a naked body – claiming the design to be ‘disrespectful to women’ and to Wollstonecraft’s achievements.

For tens of thousands of years, human beings have been using fictional devices to shape their worlds and communicate with one another. Four thousand years ago they began writing down these stories, and a great flourishing of human achievement began. We know it today as literature, a term broad enough to encompass everything from ancient epic poetry to contemporary novels. How did literature develop? What forms has it taken? And what can we learn from engaging with these works today? Hosted by Jacke Wilson, an amateur scholar with a lifelong passion for literature, The History of Literature takes a fresh look at some of the most compelling examples of creative genius the world has ever known.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment, such as Voltaire and Thomas Paine, might not have been brilliant, original thinkers, but they made up for it by their political radicalism and intellectual daring. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) should properly be included amongst their number. Her radicalism led her to reject artificial distinctions of rank, which she believed hampered the potential for human flourishing, and also to favour republicanism over hereditary monarchy as the ideal form of government. However, where she differed from her contemporaries was in her passionate commitment to the rights of women.

This biographical novel is a fictionalized historical account of the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter and the days immediately following. Wollstonecraft was courageous, with a sensibility and mind well ahead of her time, and this well-researched and well-written novel reveals her intelligence and essence. A highly-regarded feminist philosopher in the 1700s, she authored the groundbreaking “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” and succeeded in living an independent life, living by the pen, as they say. She believed all women deserved the same education as men. The story, her story, is populated with her friends, illustrator and educator Fanny Blood, educator Jane Arden, her publisher Joseph Johnson, political philosopher, Thomas Paine, her husband, philosopher William Godwin, the painter and writer Henry Fuseli, to name a few, plus, of course, her daughter, Mary Shelley, the acclaimed author of the horror novel, “Frankenstein.” The book is told with two voices: Mary W, addressing her daughter, who she will not live to raise, narrates the story of her life thus far, and Mrs. B, a compassionate midwife who stays fast by Mary’s side, recounting the present circumstances while she cares for Mary. It’s a stirring, revelatory tale of love and life and feminism, rich with revolutionary ideas and actual revolutionaries.

The sculptor Maggi Hambling has said she was surprised by the criticism of her Mary Wollstonecraft memorial. The naked figure of the 18th Century feminist went on display at Newington Green in Islington, north London, in November 2020. Hambling told BBC Radio 4's Today programme: "What sort of surprised me...

Feminists objected to the naked sculpture of Mary Wollstonecraft because they are in denial that women have bodies, its creator has claimed. Maggi Hambling said she was amused and surprised by the fuss over the statue, which was commissioned as a monument to “the foremother of feminism” and unveiled on Newington Green, north London, last year.

Local author and screenwriter Samantha Silva is having a moment … or two. After dabbling with Hollywood — she’s sold film projects to Paramount, Universal, and New Line Cinema, to name a few — she spread her talents around. Her debut novel published in 2017, “Mr. Dickens and His Carol,” was widely acclaimed, and she is currently adapting it for the Seattle Repertory Theatre stage. “The Big Burn,” a short film she wrote and directed, premiered at the Sun Valley Film Festival in 2018. She’s written short fiction and essays that have appeared in One Story and LitHub. In 2020, she was named an Idaho Commission on the Arts Literary Fellow.

Samantha Silva Gets Some Writing Help from an Unconventional Source. It’s pre-pandemic November. I’m in New York on my birthday, a confluence that hasn’t happened in more than a decade, though I’m often in New York, and have a birthday reliably once a year. A friend gives me the present of a session with her long-time astrologer, John, who doesn’t nail everything all the time, but gets uncomfortably close, like when he predicted she’d have plumbing problems and she went home to a flood. The last time I saw him, I wanted to talk about my writing life. It’d been years of heartbreaking near misses as a screenwriter, I told him. What if I wrote a novel? He stared into the middle distance, where I guess all our birth charts live, and said, “Hmm. If you told me today you were writing a novel, I’d say, well, you could try. But five years from now? That I can see.”