Word: tomalin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...LIFE AND DEATH OF MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT by CLAIRE TOMALIN...
...seems fair to conclude from Claire Tomalin's biography that had Mary Wollstonecraft not stoked herself up for Rights of Women, she would probably have ended up as only a historical footnote: radical editor and translator; wife of Philosopher William Godwin; mother of Mary Godwin, future wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley and author of Frankenstein...
...down the economic ladder, she had to pick up her education and her righteous indignation wherever she could find them. Appalled by the strictures of marriage, she attempted to support herself as a governess, then as the head of her own small school. But her temperament, says Biographer Tomalin, "was geared to drama, violent emotion and struggle" without nuance, irony or humor. She was a person who had to dominate people. An early victory was persuading her sister to run away from her loutish husband and baby. Where Wollstonecraft's confused sense of her own sexuality was concerned...
...Terror, she fell in love with a flaky American adventurer named Gilbert Imlay; he left her with an illegitimate daughter. No biographer can be expected to re-create the desperate, ineffectual rage that sometimes leads people to attempt suicide. In this clear and measured biography, Critic Claire Tomalin, the new literary editor of the New Statesman, wisely allows the facts to smolder on their own. In October 1795 Mary Wollstonecraft jumped off Putney Bridge into the Thames; the bargemen who pulled her out saved her for a more humiliating fate...
...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 her intellectual development and failing even to appraise her feminist ideas...