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| Edited By: Gargi Gupta |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 05, 2017, 02:09 PM IST
Few of us today know of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) beyond the fact that she was Mary Shelley's (of Frankenstein fame) mother and Romantic poet PB Shelley's mother-in-law. Fewer, outside of university literature or feminist studies departments, have read her. No wonder then that few recognise Wollstonecraft as one of the world's first feminists, an early maverick pioneer whose ideas about gender injustice, articulated in fiery tracts such as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters and Vindication of the Rights of Woman, inspired legions of women in later years who fought for equal rights.
To that end, Bee Rowlatt does yeoman (or should that be yeowomen?) service in lifting the veil of oblivion that time has drawn over this immensely fascinating and brave woman — a surprisingly contemporary figure — who lived 200 years ago.
Novels of the time — the works of Jane Austen, for instance, — give a picture of just how bleak life was for women in 18th century England. Marriage was the only avenue; they could get an education but university was barred to them. Legally, they couldn't own property and the only jobs open to them were as prostitutes, domestic helps and governesses or ladies' companions.
Seen against this background, Wollstonecraft was an absolute non-conformist. She left home at 25 to get away from an abusive father, found herself a job as a lady's companion and governess, started a school and finally set herself up as a writer. In her personal life, too, she was no less revolutionary for her times. She had an affair with the painter Henry Fuseli, a married man, and when that didn't work out, she moved to Paris, then at the height of French Revolution chaos, where she had a relationship with an American called George Imlay, with whom she had a daughter. This last was a rather tempestuous one for she tried to commit suicide — twice — when he rejected her.
Rowlatt's In Search of Mary… retraces a three-month journey that Wollstonecraft undertook in 1794 through Scandinavia, on the basis of Letters Written in Sweden, Norway and Denmark published a year before her death. It was Imlay who'd set her off on this journey, more of a wild goose chase really, in search of the ship on which he'd smuggled silver out of France that had gone missing. Perhaps he'd intended it as a ploy to get rid of her, but Wollstonecraft, desperate to keep up the affair, set off, accompanied only by her toddler daughter and a maid.
The premise of Rowlatt's book is a neat one — she even took along with her her son, then about the same age as Wollstonecraft's daughter — but the reality of 21st century travel by aircraft, hired car and comfortable passenger ship, is very different from Wollstonecraft's perilous 18th century one. Where, on the one hand, Wollstonecraft travelled in wobbly boats and strangers' carriages, along roads notoriously filled with highwaymen and bandits, Rowlatt asks her husband if it's okay if she goes, warning him of the laundry and the homework of their three children that he'd have to help with when she was gone. One wonders, what would Wollstonecraft have thought?
In sum, In Search of Mary… is a fan's homage to a seminal feminist icon, and like all such fan fiction, is best read as a palimpsest of how some texts acquire an afterlife. Rowlatt has a nice, conversational style that sometimes runs away with itself. Sample this: "Mary Wollstonecraft campaigns, writes and dies for motherhood. She achieves remarkable motherhood — and then it kills her. She's the mother of all mothers!" Okay, we get it.
