This biography follows writer and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter, novelist Mary Shelley, in alternating chapters. It is worth the time to savor their vivid journey across Revolutionary France and Victorian England, from the Italian seaports to the highlands of Scotland. I knew only a little about these women before starting this book and was engrossed by their fascinating life stories.
“By linking these two lives, Ms. Gordon’s biography stretches over a fascinating era in history, characterized by great flux in political and cultural thinking and involving some of the main figures in English literary and philosophical history.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Gordon unfolds the two stories in tandem, deftly balancing the gossipy aspects of her subjects’ lives with their serious intellectual concerns.”—The New Yorker