Word: wollstonecraft
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Biography alone can never explain leaps of imagination, but the facts of Mary Shelley's life do point toward the direction she took. She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, an author and pioneering feminist who died of a retained placenta eleven days after little Mary's birth in 1797. Her father was William Godwin, a novelist and Utopian planner. Despite his free-living principles, Godwin acted outraged as any bourgeois papa when Mary, then 16, ran off with Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. In Percy, the impressionable Mary found a dreamer like her father, but several times larger...
...treated, as it once was, as an appendage to his poetry. He is more apt to be seen as one of the key figures in the history of English radicalism, rendering the upheavals of his time in a framework of cosmic mythology: the friend of Tom Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft, the burning allegorist of revolution in France and America, the poet of liberty. But no exhibition in living memory has offered quite so much access to him as this one. We see the artist, warts and all: the epiphanies but the fustian too. It is an invigorating show and, obviously...
Fuseli's relaxation from blood was lust. The most eminent of his lovers was the pioneer of English feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft-at the very period in the 1790s when she was writing her Vindication of the Rights of Women. He seems to have viewed the woman he married, Sophia Rawlins, as a cruel dominator. The image suited his sexual proclivities. Several hundred of his erotic drawings were burned by his wife after he died, and most of the survivors are about either masochism or hair fetishism or both. But he did produce one of the great sexual images...
...years later she became pregnant by and finally married William Godwin, the brilliant though priggish political philosopher, who was publicly opposed to matrimony. Five months after the wedding, a doctor with unwashed hands attended the birth of her daughter Mary. Wollstonecraft died of septicemia eleven days later. The final indignity was more ironic. When Godwin published his memoirs of Mary, he was honest about her love affairs, suicide attempts and pregnancies but apparently misunderstood the meaning of her life and death. He wrote about her, as Biographer Tomalin observes, "as the female Werther, a romantic and tragic heroine," ignoring...
Perhaps it is too much to suppose that Mary Shelley had her mother in mind when she created the arrogant genius Dr. Frankenstein and subtitled her novel The Modern Prometheus. How much better a tribute than Father Godwin's female Werther: Mary Wollstonecraft, having stolen the fires of social equality for her sex, chained and suffering on the rock of her female biology...