The narrative takes readers from Revolutionary France to the Scottish Highlands, from Victorian England to the canals of Venice, reading like an engrossing historical novel. Although these two women never really knew each other, their lives were so closely intertwined and eerily similar that it seems impossible to consider one without the other: both became writers both fell in love with brilliant but impossible men and were single mothers who had children out of wedlock both struggled to negotiate their need for love and companionship with their need for independence. Wollstonecraft published the first full articulation of women's rights in 1792, risking her reputation and sometimes her life in pursuit of her radical goals, while her daughter Mary Shelley wrote the masterpiece Frankenstein in 1819, and famously professed her love to the poet Percy Shelley on her mother's grave. Yet liking the same books as someone else does cut down on existential loneliness.Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history. All of my friends with one exception hate Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “My Struggle” series. My partner doesn’t think Jane Austen or Barbara Pym are the be-all-end-all. I used to think books were test cases for friendship.
She was very different from the women she wrote about. The world she paints is a small world of humorous descriptions of people’s eccentricities. I feel the same way about the British novelist Barbara Pym. GORDON: I’m a little embarrassed to say anything by Jane Austen. I’m very close to my mother and my siblings, but there are some hard questions that don’t come up at the dinner table, like at what point would you consider your life not worth living? Reading that book together was like having a conversation without addressing these difficult topics over the corn on the cob.īOOKS: What have been some of your other all-time favorite reads? Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft & Mary Shelley. My mother, who is almost 90, wanted us to read it. This spring we read as a family “Being Mortal” by Atul Gawande, which is a really important book. GORDON: It was on my mom’s stack of books she hadn’t read. I just read a novel that I’d never heard of that I really like called the “The Ha-Ha” by Dave King, which is written from the point of view of a guy with brain damage so he can’t speak. He’s not a North Korea scholar, but I loved that novel so much. That led me to read Adam Johnson’s “The Orphan Master’s Son.” I thought I’d have no interest in North Korea. GORDON: I had that experience with Jonathan Franzen, whom I was ready not to like, then I loved his books. BOOKS: Have you ever been surprised that you liked a book?
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