Will I love Romantic Outlaws?

Our ghosts speak to us—especially the ghosts of our dead parents.

I’m captivated by Gordon’s double biography of this mother-daughter pair (in fact, I gobbled it up in a few sittings). Gordon’s telling of Wollstonecraft’s influence on Shelley’s life and thinking—beginning with the story of young Mary learning to read by tracing the words on her mother’s gravestone—is necessary for all of us who are interested in family legacy.

The book is so smart in revealing the lives of these two radical writers, and so soothing in its understanding of gripping storytelling, that I also listened to it as an… show more.

The giants of English biography (Janet Todd, Claire Tomalin, Lyndall Gordon) have written brilliant books about Wollstonecraft, but the one I went back to time and again (most dog-eared, underlined, annotated) was this dual biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. An absolute page-turner, it reads like a novel, bringing this extraordinary mother and daughter to vivid life in alternating chapters that reveal parallels in who they were, what they believed, and how they lived.

Romantic Outlaws is the fascinating double biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, telling the story of two extraordinary women—a mother and daughter who never met—who were centuries ahead of their time, each embracing feminist ideals that in the late 18th century made them social outcasts. They dared to believe that women were equal to men, eschewing the “marriage market that sold women’s love for carriages and pin allowances.” Mary Wollstonecraft was the philosopher and revolutionary writer who first championed equal rights for women. (Also, her Letters Written From Sweden is the first travel memoir to focus on personal impressions… show more.